From the collection of the
San Francisco, California
2007
SURVEY GRAPHIC
INDEX
NEW YORK
VOLUME XXVI
JANUARY 1937— DECEMBER 1937
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
112 EAST 19TH STREET
Index
VOLUME XXVI
January 1937— December 1937
The material in this index is arranged under authors and subjects and
in a few cases under titles. Anonymous articles and paragraphs are
entered under their subjects. The precise wording of titles has not been
retained where abbreviation or paraphrase has seemed more desirable.
Abintcer. Lord, 633
Abyssinia, 392
Acheson, Barclay, 455
A donor's dilemma, 478
Adams, Sam, 294
Addams, Jane, 57
Portrait, 678
Administrative Management Committee
Report, 126
Adult students, 498
AAA, Brookings Institution study of,
343
Agricultural section, 193
Air, control of. 652
Travel by, 724
Airplanes
Railroads and, 728
Alabama, 1 5
Unemployment, 240
Alaska, pioneers, 41
Alcohol, 2(1, 249
Alexander, Frances, Carrot gatherers
from old Mexico (verse), 382
Alexander's Aaron Burr, 294
Alfange's the Supreme Court and the
National Will, 446
Aliens, 315
Allen, T. E., 455
Etchings on the day's work (ills.),
476, 477
America, democratic evolutionary
growth, 669-672
Evolution (ills.), 622, 623
On discovering America, 313
Progress in a midwestern community,
669
Ups and downs, shown in Isotype by
Neurath, 660-662
AF of L, 317
Steel strike and, 516
American Federation of Teachers, 283
American Friends Service Committee,
185, 232
American Hospital Association, 70
American Medical Association, 70
American notes, 402
American System, 679
\Yorkers outside of, 681
Americans, restlessness, 314
Amero, Emilio. mural panels (ills.), 220
Amidon, Beulah, 3, 119, 247, 359, 455,
503, 617
Ambassador of Spain, 86
Blueprinting the machine age, 474
Children wanted. 10
Dr. Wang: Ambassador from China,
509
Employers and the spy business, 263
Listening in on the Supreme Court,
133
Modern as a streamliner, 692
Office hours for Mrs. Herrick, 375
Among ourselves, 5, 183, 248, 408, 500,
503, 551
Amur River, 440
Anaconda Copper Mining Co., 525, 548
Mills (ill.), 524
Sketches of Logan, 528, 529
Andrews, John, 266
Anthracite, Pennsylvania district, 63
Anthropology, 538
Apathy, 575
Apricots, 285
Architecture, 539
Arcy Corp.. steel house (ills.), 380
Arkansas, tenant into owner, 418
Armaments, 221, 286
Arm-itrc'iii:'- We or They, 155
Art. 593
American painting (ills.). 428, 429
Art goes to Main Street ( federal work
projects), 209-211
Chinese artist of today, a, 512
Daugherty's sketches, 699-701
Dixon's paintings, 83-85
Etchings by J. E. Allen, 476-477
Examples from 'Artists Congress show,
332-333
Folk art of the Southern Highlands
(with ills.), 580-581
Gropper, 366, 367
Holmer's murals (ills.), 622, 623
In Main Street, 404
Sculpture at Greenbelt (ills.), 618
Solana paintings (ills.), 18, 19
Southwestern, 448
Sterne's murals (ills.), 633-635
Artists, 207
Artists Congress, 332
Ascoli's Intelligence in Politics, 101
Ascoli and Lehmann's Political and
Economic Democracy, 446
Assessors, 408
Atlanta, Ga., slums and Techwood
(ills.), 80,81
University Homes (ill.), 668
Atlantic City, Holmes Village (ill.), 667
Augsburg, Anita. 58
Austin, D. S. (letter), 551
Australia, 368
Automobile drivers, alcohol and, 20. 21
Automobile strike, 121
Automobile trailers, 46
Automobiles, early history of, 474
Market for, 718
B
Bach, J. S., Jr., 119, 247
Little Hitler, 129
Tafari Makonnen, 267
Bacteria, 732
Bailey, Miss, 676-d
Baker, H. M., on Murphy's labor
policy, 464
Baker, Newton D., 23
Balch, E. G. (letter), 184
Baldwin, Roger, on Murphy's labor
policy, 467
Baldwin, S. E., 361, 362
llalfour, Earl of, 288
Ballou's Spanish Prelude, 443
Baltimore, Sunpapers, 442
Banking, 681
Barne's An Economic History of the
Western World, 594
Barnes and Littlefield's The Supreme
Court Issue and the Constitution,
397
Barton, Bruce, 105
Barzun's Race, 592
Basques, 340
Bates, Sanford, 23
Bath, England, 267
Bathroom unit. 379 (ills.). 380
Beard, C. A., 183, 283, 617
Rise of the democratic idea in the
LTnited States, the, 201
Turn of the century, the. 679
Behrendt's Modern Building, 539
Bellevue Hospital, murals (ills.), 220
Bellevue-Yorkville health demonstration,
493
Benardete and Humphries' And Spain
Sings, 535
Benedict, M. H. E., 503
A Chinese artist of today, 512
Bennett, H. H., 148-149
Bennett, Harry, 688
Rentley, Henry (letter), 552
Bernheim's Big Business. 345
Bethlehem, Pa., steel mill (ill.), 560
Bethlehem Steel, 516, 565, 566
Bicknell's In War's Wake, 226
Big Business, 345
Bigotry, 153
Bilbao, 460, 463
Biographies, 287, 295
Bituminous coal, 326, 328, 329
Bituminous Coal Code, 328
Blackmer, F. M., 359
The West, water and the grazing
laws, 387
Blackshirts (with ill.), 131
Blacksmiths (ills.), 640
Blum, Leon, 494
Blumenschein, E. L., 428
Boas, Franz, 407
Science in Nazi Germany, 415
Boeckel, F. B., 105
Bojer's By Day and by Night, 395
Bond, F. D. (letter), 183
Books, reviews, 42, 99, 154, 224, 287,
342, 394, 442, 490, 535, 590
Borchard and Lage's Neutrality for the
United States, 594
Borgese's Goliath, 590
Bottle making, old and new (ills.), 278,
279
Bowen's William Hogarth, 290
Bradley, R. M., 404 (letter), 408
Brady's The Spirit and Structure of
German Fascism, 603
Brain organization, 649, 653
Brawley's Negro Genius, 295
Brecht, Arnold, 194
Brenner, A. R., 705
Portrait, 620
Brickwedde, F. G., 297
Britain, Capitalist democracy, 507, 508
Cooperatives (with ill.), 137
Dominions, problems, 370
Fascism, 129
Future population (graph), 257
King's love affair, 39
Palestine and, 440, 441
Social pyramid (graph), 256
That glorious Empire, 368
British Constitution, 5, 361
British Health Insurance, 636
How much bureaucracy?, 711
Johnny Bull joins up, 637
Medical card, 710
System in a nutshell, 709
Wage earner's card, 638
Britten, R. H., 373
Bronson Cutting Memorial Lectures, 249
Beard on democracy, 201
Brookings, R. S., 291
Brooklyn, Williamsburg Houses, 664,
667 (ill.)
Brooklyn Bridge (ill.), 593
Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, 437, 439
Brophy's If Women Must Work, 228
Brown, Bill, 29
Brown, J. F., 521
Brown, Pledge, 41
Brown and Roucek's Our Racial and
National Minorities, 592
Brownlow, Louis, 126
Brownlow, W. G., 591
Bryanism, 682
Bryce, Frederick, 551
Wanted: leaders for labor, 577
Buck, Pearl S., 311, 404
on discovering America, 313, 408
Buckner, Fred, 64 (portrait), 67
Budget, 422
Buenos Aires. 97, 98
Burdell, E. S., 249
Bureau of Standards, 297
Hurlin, Paul, 333
Burlingham, C. C., 230
Burns's The Decline of Competition. 599
Burr. Aaron, 294
Burritt, Elihu, 591
Bus travel, 725
Business, 430
American business man: 1937 model,
16
Butler, N. M., 106, 108
Butte, Mont.. 195. 526
Byrnes law, 306
Cabot, R. C, 311, 521, 676-d
Ministers and spiritual maladies, 330
Cabot Fund, 617
California, co-op, 44
Calkins' Spy Overhead, 593
Calkins' They Broke the Prairie, 490
Cambridge, New Towne Court (ill.), 66:
Cameron, W. J., 688
Campbell, Ken, Suffer the little children,
236
Camps, CCC, 321
Wisconsin (ills.), 324
Work camps, 232
Canada, 352, 368, 445
Canby's Seven Years' Harvest, 394
Capitalism, 424, 506, 579, 679
Democracy and, 201
Card game (verse), 441
Cardenas — that is the way he is, 425
Cardozo, B. N., 673
Portrait and quotation, 360
Carlson, A. D., 455
And now, a co-op hospital, 470
Carnegie Endowment, 105, 106. 184
Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp., 187
Carrot gatherers from old Mexico
(verse), 382
Catalonia, children's colonies, 459, 461
(with ills.)
Centralization, 128
Chain gangs, 409
Chamberlain, Austen, 704
Chamberlain, John, on Murphy's labor
policy, 468
ChamueiUin, Neville, 256
Chamberlin's Collectivism, 342
Chapman. John Jay, 591
Charities and The Commons, 676-a
Charity, 478
Chase, Stuart, 548, 615
Working with nature, 624
Chassell's The Relation Between Moral-
ity and Intellect, 158
Chevrolet plant, 215, 216, 217
Chicago
Lathrop Homes and Addams Houses
(ills.), 666
Schools, 282
Child labor, 10
Recent record, 10
Various industries in which children
are employed (ills.), 10. 11, 12. 13
Child Labor Amendment, 10, 12
Opposition, 14
Ratification by states (map), 15
Children, Future of, 341
Oak Park, 111., panels in Irving
School (ills.), 554
Preferences, 404
Spanish refugees, 459
Children's Bureau, foundation and
work. 544
China, Embassy at Washington, 509
Empress Dowager, 512, 515 (portrait)
Japan and, 440
Japan at war in, 533
Chinese Emperors (with portraits),
512-515
Chinese language, 300
Christianity, 330, 331
Chronic sickness, 371, 372
Medical care for, 372
Unemployment and, 373
Chrysler Corp., 263, 265, 266
Strike, 317
Church. i>. P., King's move (verse). 155
Churches, peace ^societies and, 59
Churning (drawing), 198
Cincinnati, Dykstra as city manager,
204
P.R. in, 552
Cities
If the city fails, America fails, 663
Snow removal in, 69
IV
Ind
e x
Westward course of great, shown in
Isotype, 662
City manager, 204
Citizenship, 486
CCC, Can it blaze a new trail?, 321
Statistics and cost, 322
Civilization, 219, 533, 594
Clark, Evans, 80
Cleanliness, 732
Cleghorn, S. N. (letter), 409
Cleghorn's Threescore, 100
Clergymen, case records, 330
Cleveland, Ohio, Cedar Central Apts.
(ill.), 664
Coal industry, saving, 326
Coal-loading machines, 273
Coblentz, S. A., Card game (verse), 441
__ While Spain smolders (verse), 153
Coffee production and destruction, 1933,
symbols, 27
Cohen. "Chowder Head," 263, 265
(portrait)
Colcord, J. C., 407
Tenant into owner, 418
Collective bargaining, 187, 190, 316, 317,
318, 319, 320, 412, 579
Bethlehem Steel and, 516
Collectivism, 342
Colleges, Character developed by foot-
ball, 588
Small, 479
Colorado, Economic instability, 196
Grasshoppers, 4US
Columbus, Ohio, 623
Commentator, The (magazine), 154
CIO, 318, 527, 563, 565
Hillman and, 339
Steel and the C.I. O., 187
Sted strike and, 516
Commons, J. R., on Murphy's labor
policy, 468
Communism, 432
Community chests, 478, 480
Community radio station, 42
Congress, Social security and, 150
Supreme Court and, 88
Conkle, E. P., 41
Connor, R. D. W., 348
Conservation, 227
Constitution, 128. 446, 632, 736
Base-lines in amending, 89
Clark proposal for amending, 90
Constitution at 150, the, 361
Garrison proposal for amending, 91
General welfare clause, 90
Need_s and safeguards, 91
President's romance and, 5
Proposed Amendment, 88, 91
Why amendment is proposed, 89
Consumer cooperation, 50
Consumers' cooperatives, 137
Consumption, production and, 192
Cook, Howard, drawings, 197-200
Cooke, M. L., 119. 145, 148-149
Cooper,. J. M., 220
Cooperative hospital, 470
Cooperative movement, 296
Cooperatives, 50
Educational activities, 141
Measuring the cooperatives, 137
Membership (graphs), 138, 139
Self-help, 433, 434
Copper industry, 195
Corle's People on the Earth, 495
Coronet (magazine), 154
Corporations, 7, 680
Directors, 183
Corwin. E. S., 362
Cota, M. D., 247
Happy ending, 301
Cotton, problem, 240
Cotton pickers (verse), 427
Coulcher, P. N., 260, 261
Coulter's William G. Brownlow, 591
Counts, G. S., 283
Courage, 575
Courts, 632
Cowley's After the Genteel Tradition,
605
Coyle, D. C, 407
Tax for democracy!, 421
Cram's The End of Democracy, 604
Crawford's Your Child Faces War, 535
Cremation, 249
Crime, 522
Prohibition repeal and, 22
Sex crimes, 569
Cromwell and Czerwonky's In Defense
of Capitalism, 394
Cronin's The Citadel, 598
Crowder, Farnsworth, 183
Is the world going mad?, 219
Crowell, E. M., Southwestern art sur-
vives the depression, 448
Crowell, G. N., 407, 500
Cotton pickers (verse), 427
Curti's The Learned Blacksmith. 591
Curtiss* Sky Storming Yankee, 591
Cutting, Bronson. memorial to, 202
Czechoslovakia, 504
D
Dagenhart, Reuben, 12
Daley, W. E., 500
Shorewood, where adults are students,
498
Dallas, Texas, artists, 448
Dalrymple, S. H., on Murphy's labor
policy, 465
Daugherty, James, sketches. 699-701
Davis, J. L., on Murphy's labor policy,
464
Davis, M. M., 55. 247, 676-d
Doctors dissect medical care, 270
Next moves in medical care, 70
Dayton, N. A., 219, 220
Dean, V. M., 98
Dearborn, Mich., 686, 723
Decentralization, housing, 81
De Forest, R. W., 676-a
Portrait, 678
Delano, F. A., 80
Democracy, 100, 101, 343. 446, 505,
604, 702, 704
Basis, 424
British, 40
Corruptions, 682
Machines and, 646
Making democracy work, 126
Masaryk on, 504
Rise of the democratic idea in the
United States. 201
Science and, 643, 714. 716
Tax for democracy!, 421
Dempsey, Jack, 259
Denmark, 101
Depression, 430
Bitter record, 707
Detective agencies, 263, 265
Detroit, 686, 719
Medical Research Institute, 720
Detzer, Dorothy, 105
De Valera, Mr., 369
Devine, E. T., 619, 676-a
Birthday, 243
Portrait, 678
Dewey, John, 15
Dewey, T. E., 247, 259-262 (with
portrait)
Dictatorships, 392, 507, 590
Digests, 154
Dilemmas, 342
Dilliard, Irving, 55
Mr. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court,
93
Dinwoody, Dean, 319
Disease, 706
Divine. Father, 492
Dixon, Maynard, paintings, 83-85
Dobbs. Farrell, 30, 31
Doctors, 270
British, health insurance and, 636
Doctors dissect medical care, 270
Dodge (F. W.) Corp.. 382
Dolls, making (ill.). 275
Donor's dilemma, 478
Doyle's The Etiquette of Race Relations
in the South, 592
Drinking cups, 733
Droughts, 145
Problem, 240
Drugstores, 732, 733
Drunkenness. See Intoxication
Dugdale's Arthur James Balfour. 288
Dummer's Why I "Think So, 293
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 496
Dunlap's Marconi, 294
Dunnigan, E. J., 29
Durlach, T. M. (letter), 184
Dust Bowl, 196
Dust storm, Great Falls, 524
Dyess Colony, 418
Dykstra, C. A., 617
If the city fails. America fails, 663
Scholar in action, 204
E
Eaton's Handicrafts of the Southern
Highlands (with ills.), 580-381
Economic areas, 193
^ State walls and, 192
Economic welfare, 91
Economics, 227, 229
Education, 396, 706
Informative content (H. G. Wells).
555
Visual, 25
Edward VIII, 255
Love affair, 39
Efficiency, 274
Eichelberger, C. M. (letter). 184
Einstein. Albert, on war, 523
Electricity, workers and, 644
Eliot, M. M., 544
Elk City, Okla.. 470, 473 (ill.)
Cooperative hospital, 470, 471 (ill.)
Hlerbe. N. C., school, 350
Ellis, Havelock. .i.iv
The soul of Spain (with portrait). 364
Ellis Island, mural (ill.), 209
Embelli. Elanore, 461
Employers and the spy business, 263
Emporia, progress, 669
Emporia Gazette, 601
England, 536
Coronation background, 255
Present destiny, 256
Reconstruction plans, 258
Spain and, 365
Two Englands, the, 255
Ernst's The Ultimate Power, 343
Erosion, 485
United States (map), 148-149
Error, 344
Espionage, 263, 593
Ethiopia, 267
Ethiopians, 340
Events (magazine), 154
Fair play, 588, 589
Fairfield, near Bath, England, 267
Fairless. Benjamin, 187, 190
Faith, 706
Far East, 440
Farewell to Bohemia, 207
Farm in the spring (ill.), 250
Fascism, 110, 432, 573, 576
Britain, 129
Fascist axes (ill.), 575
Nazi-ism and, 393
Federal art projects, 207
FERA, 673
Rehabilitation colony, 418
Federal Theater, Dramatization of It
Can't Happen Here (with ill.), 211
Uncle Sam takes the stage, 212
Fellowship of Reconciliation, 185
Filene, E. A., 3
American business man: 1937 model,
16
Films, National Archives, 348
Filmus. Tully, 332
Finerty, John, 261
Finley, J. H., 676-a
Fisher body plant, 215, 216, 217
Fishes, intelligence of, 533
Fitch, J. A., 183
Steel and the C.I. O., 187
Flint, Mich., 563, 564
Hoods, 145
Foley, E. J., 82
Food, 534
Surplus of farmers, 647
Football, character and, 588
Footnote to progress, 732
Ford, Edsel, 688, 723
Ford, Henry, 508
At the wheel, 686
Career, 688
Employment policies, 687
Portrait, 687
Workers for (ills.), 683-685
Ford, Paul Leicester, 676-a
Ford Motor Co., 382, 562, 565, 686, 717
Assembly line (ill.), 684
Conveyers (ill.), 685
Foreign Policy Association, 185
Foreign travel, 352
Fort Peck, 525
Foster, W. Z., 187, 188
Frankel, L. K., 676-a
Frankensteen, Richard, 264 (portrait),
265, 688 (with portrait)
Frankfurter, Felix, 95
Frankfurter's The Commerce Clause,
225
Free trade among the states, 192
Freedom. See Liberty
Freeman, Don, 332
Freeman, Mrs. J. W., 617
Freud, Sigmund, on war, 523
Freund's Zero Hour, 221
Frey, J. P., 190
Friedrich's Constitutional Government
and Politics, 592
Friendly, Alfred, 404
Harlem — at home, 606
Transient, 402
Friends Service Committee, 463
Frost, Robert, 392, 393
Fry, Elizabeth. 292
Fuller, Buckminster, 377, 379, 380
Future, 99
Gabrielson, W. A. (with portrait), 585
Gale's Light Woman, 395
Gambling, 285
Gambs, J. S., 408
Hospitals and the unions, 435
Gandhi, Mahatma, 370, 481, 482, 483
(ill.)
Garrett, Caret, on Murphy's labor
policy, 465
Gary, E. H., 516
Gavit, J. P., 5, 617, 676-a
Cluster of grim conundrums, 440
East is East but South is South, 97
Fair play, in football and so on, 588
Farce of the chandelier-players. 221
Human interest story, the biggest, 39
Leaks around the bulkheads. 392
Of brains piscatorial — and others, 533
Over one man's desk, 702
Report of progress — a la Hitler, 152
We can't trust even the fruit, 285
We tearful crocodiles, 340
Woman without a country, a, 486
Gellhorn, Martha, 55
Returning prosperity, 103
General Motors Corp., 263, 306, 317,
563, 565
General welfare, Constitution and, 90
George VI, 255
Germany, 152, 221, 222, 392
Democracy and, 506
Education of the young, 415
Intellectual and scientific decline, 415
Jewish question, 415
Nazi goal, mystic expression (ill.),
414
Nazi science, 415
Scientific societies, control of, 417
Self-destruction, 523
Germs, 732
Gessner's Some of My Best Friends
Are Jews, 156
Gide's Return from the U.S.S.R., 398
Girdler, Tom, 377. 517
Giving, donor's dilemma, 478
Glickman, Maurice, 332
Glover, Edward, 522
Goldenweiser's Anthropology, 538
Goldmark and Brandeis' Democracy in
Denmark, 101
Government, 126, 128
American, 201
Municipal, 204
Participation in public welfare, 478
Role of, 452
Graef, H. H., 436
Grant, Thomas, 709
Grasshoppers, 408
Graves, H. N., 23
Grayson County, Va., 296
Great Falls, Mont., community, 529
Cultural activities, 546
Dust storm and shutdown, 524
Great Plains Committee report, 147
Green, Leon, 319
Green, William, 190
Greenbelt, sculpture (ills.), 618
Greenfield Village, 717
Grey of Fallodon, 288
Grohowski, Leo, 67
Gropper, William, cartoons and paint-
ings, 366, 367
Group piecework, 697
Guffey-Vinson Act, 326
Guggenheim dynasty, 596
Gulf of Mexico coastal plain, industries,
195 (map), 196
Gulick, Luther, 119
Making democracy work, 126
Gulick, S. L., 59
Gunnison's Magic Homes, 379
Guy, Amy, 431, 433
H
Hackett, S. E., 190
Hagedorn's Brookings, 291
Haile Selassie, sketch of his life in
England, with portrait bust (ill.),
267
Hair, 431
Hale, Edward Everett, 676-a
Hallgren's The Tragic Fallacy, 595
Hallowe'en, 611
Hamilton, W. H., 615
The living law, 632
Hamilton and Adair's The Power to
Govern, 446
Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands
(with ills.), 580-581
Hanna, P. S., 551
Six months after the strikes, 562
Hapai, Mrs. Lei, 586, 587
Happy ending, 301
Hare System of voting, 383, 386
Harlem, at home, 606
Harriman, E. H., 693, 694
Harriman, W. A., 729, 730
Portrait, 694
Harris, Charles, 64 (portrait), 67
Harrison and Laine's After Repeal, 43
Hatcher's Central Standard Time, 395
Hatred, 523
American hatred for one another, 3 1 4
Hauser, E. O., 455
Storm over India, 481
Hay, John, 682
Hays. A. G., 63, 67 (portrait in group),
68
Headliners, 408
Health, 732
How healthy are we?. 371
National Health Inventory, 371
Prohibition repeal and, 22
Public welfare and, 676
Heard's The Source of Civilization, 224
Hearst, W. R., Ill
Heidelberg and the Universities of
America, 230
Helium, 340
Henderson's Brothers of Light, 495
Henri's Hitler Over Russia. 99
Henry Hudson Parkway. 335
Herlands. W. B., 247. 259
Herndon's Let Me Live. 293
Herrick, E. M., Office hours for Mrs.
Herrick, 375
Ind
e x
Pin-trait in group, 376
Ht'yniaim, l.ydia, 58
High, Stanley, 247
i:icc vour taxes, 251
Highschool sketches, 699-701
Hill, Charles, 637
Hillman. Siilney, as labor leader (with
portrait). 338-
HindenburK (zeppelin) catastrophe, 340
Hine, L. W., 274
Photo studies of manpower, skills,
275-279
Work portraits (ills.). 639-642
History, 653
Hitler,' 129. 152, 153, 574
Churches and, 393
Little Hitler. 129
Hoare, Sir Samuel, 483
Booking's The Lasting Elements of
Individualism, 540
Hoehler. F. K.. 617
The rise of public welfare, 673
Hogarth (with ills.), 290
lln:;'K-n, Lancelot, 628
Hogben's Mathematics for the Million,
492
Holland, D. F., 372, 374
Holmer, J. F., murals (ills.), 622, 623
Holmes, justice O. W., 486, 735
Holt's Under the Swastika, 152
Homeless men, shelter, 402
Honolulu, Bureau of Crime Prevention,
586
Central Police Stations, 585 (ill.), 587
Junior police (ill.), 584
Law enforcement, 583
Police football team (ill.), 587
Race mixture. 610
Hook, J. M., 49
"Hooking" and "hookers," 266
Hoover. Herbert, business and, 48
Hoover's Dictators and Democracies,
590
Hope, 708
Hopkins, Mark, 103
Horner, Governor, 564
Horrabin's An Atlas of Empire, 222
Hosiery workers (ills.), 641
Hospital for Joint Diseases, 438
Hospitals, 70
Associated Hospital Service, 142
Cooperative, Elk City, 470
Unions and, 435
"Vour hospital bill is paid," 142
Housing, 5
Crux of the trouble, 80
Decentralization, .51
Experts meet, 548
International Conference, 239
Legislation, 238
New stepping stones. 664
Packaged houses, 377
Prefabricated houses, 377
Public demand, 239
PWA projects, 79
Publications on building, 382
Roosevelt and, 115
Three years of public housing, 78
Wagner bills, 82
Howard, Kinsey, 503
Shutdown on the hill, 524
Howe's Denmark, 101
Howe's John Jay Chapman, 591
Huberman's Man's Worldly Goods. 229
Hughes, C. E., 362
Hull, Cordell. 97, 107
Hull's William Penn, 287
Human inventions, 46, 69, 232. 296
Human nature, 1 59
Destructive urge, 520
Human needs, desires versus, 331
Human relations, 695, 697
Humanity, 101
Hutchins' The Higher Learning in
America, 396
Hydrogen, 298
Ickes, H. L., 82
Illinois, strikes, 564
Immigrants, 313
Memorial in Worcester to the settlers
of New England (ill.). 312
Immigration, 355
Imperial Conference, 368
Income tax, 423
India, 369, 370, 600
New constitution, 483
Princes and principalities, 483, 484
Storm over India, 481
Indians. Southwestern, 495
Indies. 724
Individualism. 540
Individualist at prayer (drawing), 409
Industrial control, 599
Industrial relations, 450
Industrial sections, 193
Industrial standards, 451
Industrialism, 201
Industry, 159
Low-stability sections. 195
Security in, 577
Social situation in, 696
Stability of industries, 192
Strikes, observers on each side, 562
Inglewood, Cal. (ill.), 571
Inland Empire, industries (map), 194
Insanity, 219
Intemperance, 20
Handicapper (poster), 23
Inter-American Pea< e Conference, 97
International Woman Suffrage Alliance,
57
Interstate commerce, 90
Intoxication among women, 24
Invention, 714, 716
Forecasting, 474
Thrust of, 643
Irish Free State. 369
Isotypes, 25, 643-647. 660-662
Italy, 221, 392, 393, 589
Press censorship, 392, 393
James. William, 102, 325
janesville, Wis., 214. 215 (ill.)
Swapping a lay-off for a rush (with
ills.), 217
Working of the state unemployment
insurance act, 214
Japan. 589
China against, 511
China and, 440, 533
Old fashioned girl of modern Japan.
the, 34
Organizing of women workers, 38
Sun Goddess, 37
Women's deportment and ethics,
36, 37
Jastrow's The Story of Human Error,
344
Jeffers, W. M., 692. 728
Portrait, 693
Jefferson, Thomas, 362
Jennings, Emerson, 63 (with ill.), 64.
65, 248
Verdict against, 104
Tessup, Doremus. 63, 104, 248
Tessup. P. C, 98
jews, 156
England, 130
Germany and, 415
Jobs, 404
As property, 320
Make jobs or perish, 430
Johnson, A. F., 428
Johnson's Jordanstown, 395
'lolinson's One -Might. 'Icrrent, 287
Johnstown, Pa., 542, 565
Tordan, Virgil, 49
Judges, 632
Justice, Department of murals in build-
ing (ills.), 132, 134
Kaempffert, Waldemar, 615
The thrust of invention, 643
Kansas City. Ford plant, 687
Karlson's The World Around Us. 157
Kataev's Peace Is Where the Tempests
Blow. 395
Kay, H. H., 3
Balance-sheet of repeal, 20
Kellett's The Story of Dictatorship, 590
Kelley, Florciuc, portrait, 678
Kellogg, Arthur, portrait, 621
Kellogg, Charlotte, Mother and son
(verse), 249
Kellogg, F. I... 3
"Two hundred were chosen," 41
Kellogg, Paul, 615
Degree of Doctor of Letters, 548
On Norman Thomas, 5
Portrait, 621
Team play, 619
Kellogg-Briand Pact, last page (ill.), 58
Kennedy's Together and Apart, 395
Kent, Rockwell, drawings, 56
Kerr, Clark, 119
Measuring the cooperatives, 137
Kerr, F. M., 525
Keun's A Foreigner Looks at the TYA,
398
King's move (verse), 155
Kingsbury's Newspapers and the News,
442
Kipling's Something of Myself, 289
Kirk, F. C, 333
Kitchen planning, 380
Klamath region. 624
Knots, tying (ills.), 275
Kohn's Western Civilization in the Near
East, 158
Kratz, J. A., 447
Kreighbaum. Hillier, 247, 311
At the Children's Bureau, 544
At the National Archives, 348
At the Soil Conservation Service. 485
At the Vocational Rehabilitation
Service, 447
Servants of the people, ?97
Kuhl, "Red," 265 (portrait). 266
Labor, 404
Adjustment agencies, 122
Cases before the Supreme Court, 133,
134, 136
Compulsion, danger of, 450
Governmental attitudes toward, 518
Hillman as leader, 338
Labor, management and the public.
388
Leaders wanted, 577
Mediation board, 122, 124
Murphy's policy, 464
Shaping of a labor policy, 41 1
X-ray of the situation (ill.) 578
Labor espionage, employers and the spy
business, 263
Labor movement, sit-down strikes in
relation to, 316
Labor Relations Act, 121, 134, 136, 248,
375
Labor Relations Board, 121, 248, 516,
543
Disputes and, 390, 391
La Follette hearings. 263
Laidlaw, L. B., These men might sing
(verse), 144
Laing, G. A., 157
Lai's The Vanishing Empire, 600
Landis, J. M., 319
Langdon-Davies' A Short History of
the Future, 99
Langdon-Davies' Behind the Spanish
Barricades, 443
Language, symbolic, 25
Language education, 28
La Prade, Malcolm, 724
Larson, C. T., 359
Packaged houses, 377
Lasker, L. D., 55, 617
New stepping stones for American
homes, 664
Notes on housing, 238
Three years of public housing, 78
Laski, H. J., 503, 551
Liberty in an insecure world, 505, 573
Laski's The Rise of Liberalism, 101
Lasswell, Harold, 520
Law, enforcement, 583
Living law, 632
Prevailing opinion and, 736
I^awrence, David, on Murphy's labor
policy, 469
Lawrence, Mrs. Pethick, 57
Lay-offs with pay, 214
Leacli, A. li., poruait, 678
Leach. R. W., 215
Leadership, 128, 226. 575
Wanted: leaders for labor, 577
League Against War and Fascism,
109, 110
League of Nations, 98, 341, 393, 533,
704
Council chamber ceiling (ills.), 59
Lee. Doris, painting, 250
Lee's The Daily Newspaper in America,
442
Leet, Glen, 119
Social security and Congress, 150
Leiserson, W. M., 119, 376
What can we do about strikes?, 121
Leisure. 695
The new leisure and the okl need, 698
Lendrum, F. V., 720
LeTourneau, R. G., 378
Letteer, Lyle, 265
Letters and life, 705
Levinson, Edward, 551
Six months after the strikes, 565
Lewi's The Gods Arrive, 395
I-ewis, J. L., 187, 188, 318, 320. 527,
562. 578, 686, 718
Drawing by H. A. Knight, 186
Steel strike and, 516
Lewis, Sinclair, 211
Lewis. T. M., 66 (portrait), 68
Lewis' A History of American Political
Thought, 604
Libby, Frederick, 105
Liberalism. 101
Liberty, 102, 704
Decline in, 505
Liberty in an insecure world, 573
Life (magazine), 154
Life and letters, 42. 99, 154. 224. 287.
342, 394. 442. 490, 535, 590
Lifting machines, 273
Lindeman. E. C., 183
Farewell to Bohemia, 207
l.ippmann. Waiter, 626
Lippmann's The Supreme Court, 397
Lkiuor, 20
Control, 43
Litchfield, P. W.. 49
Littell, Robert, 311
Ellerbe learns by doing, 350
Llewellyn, K. N., 55
Proposed Amendment, 88
Lodge, H. C. (elder), 704
I-ogan, James, sketches. 528. 529
Lonberg-Holm, K., 380
London. 258
Working Men's Colleee. 698
Look (magazine). 154, 551
I.orentz, Pare, 629
Louisiana, economic instability, 196
Luzerne County, Pa., 63
Courtroom group (ill.), 67
M
McCaleb's History of the Brotherhood
of Railroad Trainmen, 537
McCook, P. J., 259, 261
Macfarland, C. S., letter to Hitler, 393
McHale, Tom, 66
Machine age, blueprinting the, 474
Machines, 273, 643
Democracy and, 646
Mack, J. W., portrait, 678
McKenna, Justice. 735
MacKenzie's Planned Society, 600
McNeill-Moss, The Siege of Alcazar,
535
McReynolds, Justice, 388
Madariaga's Anarchy of Hierarchy. 342
Madrid, refugee children from, 458
(ill.), 459, 460. 462
Magazines, new, 154
Magnusson, Leifur, 311
Textiles: A self-diagnosis, 346
Maitland, F. W., 361
Makonnen, Tafari, 267
Malaga, refugees from, 458 (ill.), 460
(with ill.)
Malnutrition, 534
Man, 533, 538, 540
Common man comes to power, 671
Destructive urge, 520
Early, 702
New animal (ill.), 651
Management, 126
Marconi, Guglielmo, 294
Marriage, laboratory tests for, 400
Marshall, John, 363
Martin, Homer, 687, 719
Portrait, 688
Masaryk, Alice, 487
Masaryk, T. G., note with portrait bust
(ill.), 504
Mass production, houses, 377
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
222
Dean of humanities, 249
Massie, Mrs. T. H., 583
Masters' Across Spoon River, 294
Matanuska resettlement project, 41
Mathematics, 492
Mathewson, S. B., 359, 404
Labor, management and the public,
388
On Murphy's labor policy, 468
Maurois' The Miracle of England, 536
Maverick, Maury, on Murphy's labor
policy, 464
Maverick's A Maverick American, 591
May, E. S., 157
Mayo, Elton, 617
What every village knows, 695
Mead's Cooperation and Competition
Among Primitive Peoples, 538
Meade's An Introduction to Economic
Analysis and Policy, 227
Mears, Helen, 3
The old fashioned girl of modern
Japan, 34
Mechanics (ills.), 639, 642
Medical care, cooperative, f.Vf City, 470
Doctors dissect medical care, 270
Next moves in medical care, 70
Medicine, 270, 598
Mencken, H. L., on Murphy s labor
policy, 465
Menninger, K. A., 503
Combating man's destructive urge,
520
Mental hygiene, 521
Mental illness, 374
Is the world going mad?, 219
Merriam. C. E., 126
Merriam's The Role of Politics in
Social Changes, 155
Mexico, 352, 425, 540
Agrarian problem, 426
Carrot gatherers (verse), 382
Michigan, Labor bill, 464
Strikes, 562
Michigan Labor Relations Act, 411
Microphone, how to talk through, 296
Midmonthly Survey, condensed state-
ment, 175
Midweek Pictorial, 154
Midwest, progress. 669
Mignone, A. F., 404
Laboratory tests for marriage, 400
Military training. 222
Millard, W. J.. 384
Miller, F. S.. 247
Mrs. Parrish and the Justices, 303
Miller's I Found No Peace, 231
Miller's Sam Adams. 294
Miller's The Blessings of Liberty. 102
Millis' Viewed Without Alarm, 222
Mills's Prices in Recession and
Recovery, 398
Mims, H. S., Spain in flames, 443
Mind. 652
Unified, 653
Ming Tuu Chung. 512. 514 (portrait)
Minimum wage, 303, 304
VI
Ministers and spiritual maladies, 330 Novels, 395
Minneapolis, 399 Nutrition, 534
Hallowe'en, 611 Nye report, 109
Local 544, 29, 32
Municipal profile, 29 O
Truck drivers receiving orders (ill.),
32
Truck drivers' union, headquarters
(ill.), 31
Welfare Board, 32
Miracles, 705
Mississippi River, 629
Mississippi Valley, annual flow of rivers
and possible program (maps), 146
Missouri River, 527
Mitchell, Broadus, on Murphy's labor
policy, 469
Mitla. 44
Mobile houses, 379, 380, 381 (ills.)
Modern Hospital (magazine), 436, 437
Modley, Rudolf, 500
Pictographs of the United States,
488, 489
Money, 681
Monotony of work, 696
Monroe, Mich., 517-519
-Montana Power Co., 525
Morals. 158
Morgan, A. E., 55, 626
Benchmarks in the Tennessee Valley,
73
Morgan, Harcourt, 628
Mortimer, Wyndham, 719
Mo.es, Robert, 311, 478
Who will pay the piper?, 334
Mosley, Sir Oswald (with portrait), 129
Mother and son (verse), 249
Motherwell, Hiram, 183
Uncle Sam takes the stage, 212
Mott and Casey's Interpretations of
Journalism, 442
Moulton, H. G., 225
Mulliner, H. H., 286
Murcia, 461
Murphy, Frank, 407, 455, 564
Comments on his labor policy, 464
Shaping of a labor policy, 411
Murphy, G. M., 297
Murray, H. M., panels, 554
Murray, Philip, 188
Portrait in group, 191
Mussolini, 129, 152, 574
Jews, and, 393
Spain and Hitler and, 392
N
National Archives, 348
NIRA, 317
National Park Service, 323
National Parks, 352
National Peace Conference, 106, 107,
108
NRA, 10
Codes and children, 10, 13
National Resources Committee
Study of technical change, 474
Nationalists, 651
Naturalization, 486
Nazis, 152
Germany's aspiration (ill.), 414
Nazism, 603
Fascism and, 393
Near East, 158
Negroes, 295
Virginia boy (drawing), 199
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 370, 481, 482 (with
portrait)
Nelson's Rhythm for Rain, 495
Neubeiger and Kami s Integrity, 490
Neurath, Otto, 3
Isotypes, 643-647, 660-662
Visual education. 25
Neutrality, 222, 594
Peace by, 108
New Deal. London book on. 344
New England, economic sections, 194,
195 (map)
New England Council, 48
New Hampshire, fine forests, 625
New York (city), C'harter reform, back-
ground, 383
Citizens (names) who work for better
government, 384, 385
Hospital strikes, 435
Municipal Art Committee's exhibition,
428, 429
Parks, playgrounds, and parkways,
334
Politics, letters on. 551
Proportional representation, 383
Restaurant rackets, 259
Women's City Club, 384
New Zealand, 368
Sex offenses, 571
Newlon, J. H., 283
Newspapers. Books on, 442
Xewton's Light. Like the Sun, 249
Noel-Baker's The Private Manufacture
of Armaments, 286
Xorris, G. W., 626
Life of, 490
Xorth Carolina, Ellerhe school, 350
Northwest Organizer, The (newspaper),
33
Index
Occupational groups (graph), 9
O'Connor's The Guggenheims, 596
Ohio, strikes, 565
Oil, war and, 285
Old age, 129
Americans aged 65 and over (graph),
8
Benefits. 150
Older persons and youth, percentages
of increase (graph), 9
Omaha, 692
Organization of Medical Care, 270
Orr, D. W. and I. W., 615
What 19,000 doctors could tell us, 636
Ortega y Gasset's Invertebrate Spain.
443
Outlawry of War, 185
Overstreet's A Declaration of Inter-
dependence, 224
Owatonna, Mich., 404
Pacific Northwest, industries (map), 194
Pacifism, 62, 487
Packaged houses, 377
Page's Living Courageously, 228
Palestine, Britain and, 440, 441
Jewish-Arab conflict in, 440
Present and future (map), 441
Pamphlets, 160
Parker, R. R., 732
Parker Pen Co., 215, 216, 217
Parker's The Incredible Messiah, 492
Parkins and Whitaker's Our Natural
Resources, 227
Parks, New York City. 334
Parliament, 361
I'arran, Thomas, 404, 408
Parrish, Elsie and the Justices, 303
Parsnips, 285
Parsons' Mitla — Town of the Sculs, 44
Paul's The Life and Death of a Spanish
Town, 535
Peace movement, 57, 486
Binding thread, 1 1 1
Epochs and evolution, 60
Europe and America, reading ot
(cartoons), 62
leaders in organization, (.2
Leftist tendency, 109
letters of criticism on Mis-,
Thompson's article, 184
Middle classes and, 60
National Peace Conference. 106, 107.
108
Neutrality and. 108
Organized bodies in, 61
Range, 59
What it is not, 111
Who wants peace?, 57
Youth and, 61
Peacemakers, 650
Pearson and Allen's The Nine OM Men,
156
Peiping, 440
Penn, William, 287
Pennsylvania, unemployment, 240
Perrott. G. St. J., 371, 372
Perry's The Thought and Character of
William James. 102
Phelps, H. B., drawings, 280-284,
530-532
Philadelphia, ashmen's strike (ill.), 389
Philanthropy, 478
Photo-History (quarterly), 548
Physicians. 270
See also Doctors
Physics, 157
Pickett, C. E.. 455
Succor knows no sides, 463
Pictographs, United States. 488, 489
Pictorial Statistics. 273
Pictures, teaching by, 28
Pierce Foundation. 379
Pinkerton, R. A., 263, 265 (portrait)
Pittsburgh. 197
Industrial District (map), 193
I'ittshurgh Survey, 617, 676-a
Planning, 600
Playgrounds, 478
Poetry, modern books — Scott, Laidlaw,
Converse. Henderson, Brewer, 345
Police, Honolulu, 583 (ill.), 584
Political parties. 507
Political thought, 604
Politics. 592
Poison. Mont., 525
Poor, H. V.. 132
Poor man's court, 296
Pope Pius XI's Encyclical. 15S
Poverty, sickness and, 373
Power, increase, 649
Industrial plants. 645
Issue ami the T\ .\. '}
Making a bargain, 76
Pod. 77
Private companies in the past, 73
Pratt, H. S., portrait, 678
Prices, 398
Private ownership, 576
Utilities and, 77
Production, 241
Consumption and, 192
Profit system. 680
An open letter on, 430
Progress, footnote to, 732
Prohibition repeal. Balance-sheet of, 20
Health and, 22
Property, 679
Protection of, 680
Property right to a job, 320
P.R.
City government and, 551
Drawings showing its value, 384, 385
How it works: a campaign story, 386
New Yorkers and, 383
Prosperity, 103, 672
Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of
International Disputes, 704
Psychiatry, value in control of war.
crime, sickness, suicide, 520
Psychology of, workers, 695
Public debt, 597
Public health, 12
Public Health Service, 371
Public housing. See Housing
Public Opinion Quarterly, 155
Public ownership, utilities and, 76
Public schools, 280, 479
See also Schools
Public welfare, federal budgets and, 676
Personnel, 675
Planning, 674
Rise of, 673
Relief and, 673
I'uMic welfare departments, 165
PWA, housing projects, 79
Puigdollars, Eladia, 460, 462
Pullman porters, 503
Pvmishment, 522
Purdue University, housing research,
378 (with ills.), 382
Quakers, 185. 486
In Spain, 249
R
Race
Books on race relations, 592
Mixture in Honolulu, 610
Rackets, unions and, 259
Radio, 705
Community station, 42
Railroad trainmen, 537
Railroads, airplanes and, 728
Forgotten man of, 729
Labor disputes, mediation. 122. 124
Workers (with ills.), 689-691, 693,
694
Railway Labor Act. 124. 125
Supreme Court and, 134
Rainfall, regions of low (map), 147
Ranches and ranchers, 387
Ratcliff. J. D., 551
Repair vs. relief in West Virginia, 582
Ratcliffc, S. K., 247, 359
That glorious Empire. 368
Two Englands, The, 255
Real estate values, 408
Recovery, 225
Recovery Problem in the United States,
The. 225
Recreation, 707
Red Cross, 463
Regional director, 375
Regional planning, 624
Rehabilitation, West Virginia, 5<V
Reich. J. I", 183
Pick-and-shovel holiday, 232
Reid. Paul. 110
Relief, public welfare and. 673
West Virginia, repair vs., 582
Remington Rand strikes, 305
Repeal. See Prohibition repeal
Republic Steel, 517, 567, 568
Respectability, 679
Responsibility, public or private?,
478, 479
Restaurant rackets, 259
Reuther. Walter, 688, 719
Review, the (painting), 410
Rhode Island, 15
Richardson, S. W., 583
Richey, O. E., 429
Richmond, Ya., Citizens' Service
Exchange, 430
Facing of unemployment, 430
Training for industry, 432
Richmond's Personality, 159
Riis, R. W., Footnote to progress, 732
Rios, Fernando de los, 86
Portrait, 87
Ritter, C. W., 582
River, The (film), lines and photo-
graphs from, 629-631
River Rouge plant, 686, 687. 717
Robinson's The Human Comedy, 153,
224
Rochdale society, 137, 138, 139
Roche, Tosephine, 371
Roethlis:berger, F. J., 697
Rogers, H. O., 311
Saving the coal industry, 326
Roosevelt, F. D.. 153, 508, 624
Bonneville Dam and, 626
Chicago speech, 589
Errand boys wanted, 183
Housing and, 1 15
Labor and, 519
Supreme Court and : Observations of
a citizen, 93
Roosevelt, Theodore, 670
Root, Elihu, 363
Rorem, C. R., 70
Ross, D. G.. 264 (portrait), 266
Ross. Mary, 359
How healthy are we?, 371
Rost, Tom, Jr., sketches, 324
Rowland, Howard, 46, 311
Can the CCC blaze a new trail?, 321
Rowntree, B. S., 404
Russia, 398
Girl guides, 234
Sackett, E. B., 247
The schools we keep, 280
Salmon in the Klamath. 624
Salomon, Alice, Exile (with portrait),
500
San Francisco, paintings of the strike
of 1934, 83-85
Savage, J. W., 5S2
Sawyer, M. H. (letter), 249
Sayre, H. D., 305
Sayre, J. X. (le;:;T), 185
Scandinavia, motoring map. 162
Schieffelin, W. J.. 359, 404
P. R. and Xew Yurkers (with por-
trait). 383, 551
Schnabel. T. C,.. 270. 272
Schools, Minimum of knowledge, 555
Schools we keep, the, 280
Schorling and McClnskv's Education
and Social Trends, 157
Schwartz, Leon. 6.x
Schwimmer, Rosika, 1S4
(letter). 486
Effort to honor, 487
Science, democracy and, 643, 714, 716
In Nazi Germany. 415
Scribner's (magazine), 154
Scudder, V. D. (letter), 404
Scudder's On Tourney, 291
Seabury. Samuel. 384. 385
Seager. H. S.. portrait. 678
Sectional economic research, 192
Self-government, 573
Hawaiian Islands, 583
Self-help cooperatives, 433. 434
Sender's Seven Red Sundays, 443
Sert, J. M., peace mural, 59
Servants of the people, 297, 447, 485.
544
Seven Ages of Man (drawings by Rock-
well Kent), 56
Sewing meeting, 695
Sex. insanity and crime, 570
Psychiatry in dealing with offenses,
572
Society and sex offenders. 569
Seybold. Geneva, 183
Dykstra of Cincinnati. 204
Shadid, M. A., 470, 472 (portrait)
Shafer, Carol and B. C., 183
Lay-offs with pay, 204
Sharecropper, individual head (draw-
ing), 197
Sharecropping, 420
Shaviro, Nathan. .! 1 1
Labor leader: Hillman of the CIO,
338
Shaw, Chief Tustice, 634
Shaw, S. Adele, note and portrait, 617
Shepard's Pedlar's Progress, 287
Sherrill, C. O., 204
Shields, I). I.. 566
Shipping strike, Eastern seamen and the
West (ill.). 389
Shorewood. Wis., 498
Shotwell, T. T. 106
Shull. S. E., (portrait). 65
Shy Guy, 530
Sickness, bills (granh), 71
Poverty and, 373
See also Chronic sickness
Siegfried's C'anada. 445
Silone's Bread and Wine. 493
Simpson's. The Ejido, 540
Sinclair's Co-op. 44
Sit-down strikes, 389, 390, 391, 562
Slums, 78
Replaced by new housing (ill.), 665
Smeltermen. Great Falls, 526
Smith, T. H.. 264 (portrait), 265
Smith, J. Russell, 407
Make jobs or perish, 430
Smith, Dr. May. 696
Snow removal. 69
Social insecurity, cartoon, 14
Social insurance, 7
Social legislation, hazards, 736
Ind
e x
vn
Social order, new, 575, 576
Social security, beginning', 7
Congress and, 150
State plans of public assistance
(map), 674
Social Security Act of 1935, 8, 71, ISO
Maximum limits of aid, 167
Social self -consciousness. 706
Social studies, books, 157
Social Work School, Boston, sketch, 530
Socialism, 229, 430
India, 482
Soda fountains, 732
Soil Conservation Service, 148-149, 485
Sokolsky, G. E., on Murphy's labor
policy, 466
Solana, T. Ci.. paintings of traditional
Spain "(ill.), 18, 19
Somers, Frances, 551
Civilizing Hallowe'en, 611
Sorenson, C. E., 687
Sorokin's Social and Cultural
Dynamics, 444
Soul diseases. 331
Soule's The Future of Liberty, 102
South, handicrafts of the Highlands
(with ills.), 580-581
South Africa, 368
Southard, Ernest, 521
Southwest, Indians of, 495
Soviet Union, 345
Spain. 97, 98
Ambassador of, 86
Books on, 443
Children of the Spanish War, 459
Cooperative movement, 393
Hitler and Mussolini and, 392
Refugee children and colonies (with
ills.). 458, 463
rSolana's paintings of customs (ills.),
18, 19
Soul of Spain, the, 364
Succor knows no sides, 463
United States aid for, 500
While Spain smolders (verse), 153
Spaniards, character, 365
Spies, labor, 263
Spinach, 404
Spirit of '37 (ill.), 6
Spiritual maladies, ministers and, 330
Sportsmanship, 588, 589
Spring, Farm in (ill.), 250
Springer, Gertrude, 676-d
Springfield, Mass., 197
Stage. See Federal Theater; Theater
Standards, 297
Stark, Louis, 311
Sit-down, 316
State-ism, 192
States, free trade among, 192
State walls and economic areas, 192
Steel industry, drawings by Sternberg,
560, 561
Essence of the steel strike (of 1937),
516
Steel and the C.I.O., 187
Worker (portrait), 639
Steel workers, 191
Steel Workers Organizing Committee,
187, 188, 191
Sternberg, Harry, drawings, 560, 561
Sterne, Maurice, 632
Memorial in Worcester, 312
Murals, 633, 635
Stevens, Louise, 551
An angry city that did mare than
talk, 583
Stevens, T. W., 617
Westward under Vega (verse), 654
Stewart, Le Conte, 429
Stewart, Sir Malcolm, 258
Stewart, Tucker, and Stetson's The Na-
tional Debt and Government Credit,
597
Stirling, Yates, 583
Stockholm, cooperative department store
(ill.), 141
Stoke's Leon Blum, 494
Stone and Fisher's The Rising Tide of
Armament, 22 1
Stout, W. B., 380
Strachey's The Theory and Practice of
Socialism, 229
Strike breaking, 263, 266
Strikes, 389
Hospitals, 435
Lockouts and, 450
Mid-west steel, essence. 516, 543
Pickets and sit-downers (ills.), 120
Sit-down, 316
Six months after, 562
What can we do about strikes?, 121
Strong, A. L., 455
Children of the Spanish War, 459
Strong's Spain in Arms 1937, 443
Strong's The Rise of American Democ-
racy, 100
Suffer the little children, 236
Suicide, 520
Summer courses abroad, 300
Sun Goddess, 37
Sunpapers of Baltimore, 442
Supreme Court, 225, 343, 362, 446, 632,
679, 680, 735
Age and vacancies, 94
Books on, 397
Congress and, 88
Justices (ill. and notes), 92
Justices, personal, 136
Kirby cartoon on, 95
Labor cases, 133, 134, 136
Labor Relations Act, 388
Listening in on the Supreme Court,
133
Pearson and Allen's book, 156
Personnel, 92, 93
Presidents' attitudes toward, 95
Roosevelt and : Observations of a
citizen, 93
Writers' on, 96
Survey, The, appreciations, 172
Making facts count, 676-d
Origin, 676-a
Pages from scrapbook, 676-a
Pulse of the times, 677
Red Letter issues (ills.), 676-bc
Team play, 619
Survey Associates, Anniversary Dinner
and Anniversary Graphic, an-
nouncement, 553
Annual statement, 171, 173
Membership and contributions, 177
Officers and account, 176
25th Anniversary, 619
Survey Graphic, condensed statement,
175
Outstanding articles, 174
Sutherland, George, 475
Sweden, 162
Twentieth Century Fund's Facing the
Tax Problem, 251
Twenty-first Amendment, 20
u
Unamuno, 365
Unemployed, sketch, 103
Unemployment, 522
Coal industry, 328
Hazards, 240
Unemployment compensation, 240
Unemployment insurance. Janesville,
Wis* working of the state law, 214
Variations, 151
Union Pacific, boosters, 730
Human accomplishment, 730
Modern as a streamliner, 692
Workers, 689 (ill.), 693, 694, 726
Unionism, Steel and, 187
Unions, 43, 388
Hospitals and, 435
Militant union, 29
Unions and the rackets, 259
United Automobile Workers, 718
Ford and, 686, 718, 720
United States, capitalistic democracy,
508
Pictographs of merchant marine,
changing class composition, the
world and in 1935, cotton planta-
tions, 488, 489
U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Filene
and, 16
U. S. Forest Service, 323
U. S. Steel Corp, 187, 191
Urbanization, 663
Urey, H. C, 297
Utilities, 74
Leadership, 74
Private ownership, 77
Public ownership, 76
Taboos, 706
Tafari Makonnen. 267
Tai Mahal (ill.), 593
Tang Tai Tuo,_512, 513 (portrait)
Tannenbaum, Frank, 407
Cardenas — that is the way he is, 425
Tax Policy (publication), 46
Taxes, 218
Face your taxes, 251
Real estate, 408
Sources of U. S. tax revenue (diag.),
253
Tax for democracy!, 421
Undivided profits tax, 424
Taylor, Graham, portrait, 678
Taylor, M. C, 188
Taylor Act, 387
Teachers. Constitution and, 281
Teachers' oaths, 281
Teachers' organizations, 283, 284
Tear gas, companies selling, 306
Technical change, study of, 474
Technological change, 273, 474
Techwood (ill.), 81
Telephones, 707
Tenant-farming, 420
TVA, 145, 398
Power issue and, 71
Seven-star constellation. 624. 625
(map)
Textbooks, 282
Textile factory, mule spinners, 696
Textiles, 346
Theology, 331
These men might sing (-verse), 144
Thomas, E. D., on Murphy's labor
policy, 467
Thomas, Lenore, 618
Thomas, Norman, 5
On Murphy's labor policy, 469
Thomas' Primitive Behavior. 538
Thompson, C. A., 98
Thompson, Dorothy. 55, 184
Reply to letters of criticism, 185
Who wants peace?, 57
Thought, 652
Through neighbors' doorways. 39. 97.
152, 221, 285, 340. 392. 4-10, 486,
533. 588. 702
Tokyo, dormitory of a textile mill (ill.).
35
Tourist Third, 725
Town'send, M. C.. on Murphy's labor
policy. 467
Toynbee Hall, 637
Trade unions. See Unions
Trailers, 46, 379, 380, 381 (ills I
Transients, 402
Conditions of life. 168
Traveler's notebook, 112. 162. 234. 300,
352, 607. 724
Trevelyan's drey of Fallorlon, 288
Trotzky's The Revolution Betrayed, 345
Tuberculosis. 374
Tucker. Allen, painting (ill.). 410
Twentieth Century Fund, 251
Committee on Taxation. 252
Vacations, mental, 404
Valencia, 459
Valentine, Mary, 66, 68
Valentine, W. A., 65, 66 (portrait), 68
Roadster explosion (ill.), 64
Van Kirk, W. W. (letter), 184
Van Loon, H. W., drawings for Wells'
article, 648, 651, 652
Van Loon's The Arts, 593
Vaquero (drawing), 200
Vega, 654
Venereal disease, 408
Versailles Peace Treaty, 649, 650
Last page (ill.), 58
Victorian period, 695
Vigilantism, 541, 543
Vincent. M. D., on Murphy's labor
policy. 466
Visual dictionary and grammar, 27
Visual economics, 27
Visual education, 25
Visual history. 26
Visualization in practice, 27
Vocational Rehabilitation Service, 447
W
Wagner housing bills, 82
Wald, L. D., 676-d
Tributes paid to (with portrait), 223
Waldman. Louis, 261
Walker, C. R., 3
Militant trade union. A, 29
Walker's American City, 399
Wall builders, 392
Walsh, J. R., 719
Wang. C. T. : Ambassador from China,
509
War, 221, 226, 285, 487, 535, 702, 707
Far East, 533
Menace, 98
Moral equivalent, 325
Omens of disaster, 703
Preparing for the next, 523
Review (ill.). 410
Sport and, 588, 589
Suicidal nature of, 522
United States and, 595
Ward, C. W., 429
Ward, Lynd, 333
Ware, C. E., 157
Waring, J. M. S.. 193
Watson, Frank. 382
Weather, towns and. 69
Weckler, Herman. 264 (portrait)
Weintraub. David. 247, 645
Technological change. 273
Weisbord's The Conquest of Power, 492
Wells, H. G., 551. 615. 695
Earth, air and mind, 649
Informative content of education, the.
555
Wells, Nicholas. 503
Shy Guy, 530
Werfel's Twilight of a World, 395
West, the, water and the grazing laws,
387
West Virginia, repair vs. relief, 582
Western New York-Lake Erie, heavy
industry (map), 195
Westward under Vega (verse), 654
Weybright, Victor, 119, 247
It happened in Wilkes-Barre, 63
Unions and the rackets, 259
Valleys, the, and the plains, 145
Wheat, man labor in production, 646
Wheels where cellars were 46
Whipple, K. W., 119
"Your hospital bill is paid," 142
Whipple, Leon, 247, 617
Arches over time, 224
Axis of our future, 590
Dynamo as artist, 42
Escape from dilemmas, 342
Eyes and ears over the world, 442
In defense of both sides, 394
Miracles, 705
Parade of biography, 287
Principle, the sovereignty of, 490
Prophets of war, 99
Volume 1, Number 1, 154
War is people, 535
Whitaker's And Fear Came, 231
White, M. C, 57, 184
White, W. A., 617
How far have we come?. 669
White's Forty Years on Main Street,
601
Whitehead, T. N., 696
Whitehead's Leadership in a Free
Society, 226
Whitlock, Brand, Letters and Journal,
291
Whitney, A. F., 537
Whitney, Jessamine, 373
Whitney's Elizabeth Fry, 292
Whittlesey, W. L., 359
The Constitution at 150, 361
Wile, I. S., 551
Society and sex offenders, 569
Wilkes-Barre, 63, 248
It happened in Wilkes-Barre, 63
Willcox, W. O., 628
Willcox' Can Industry Govern Itself?,
159
Williams, Frankwood, 520--521
Williams, Gerald, 67
Williams, Pierce, 183, 503
Essence of the steel strike, 516
State walls and economic areas, 192
Williams, Whiting, 404
Williams, The Soviets, 398
Williamsburg Houses, 664. 667 (ill.)
Willson, Corwin, 379
Winant, J. G., 3
Social security begins, 7
Wind, regions of high velocity (map),
147
Winslow and Zimand's Health Under
the "El," 493
Winston, Ellen, 220
Wisconsin, unemployment insurance,
214
Wolman's Ebb and Flow in Trade
Unionism, 43
Woman's Peace Party, 57
Women, intoxication, 24
Wood, E. E. (letter), 5
Wood, General Leonard, 703
Woodcarving (ills), 276
Woolf's, The Years, 395
Worcester, Mass., memorial to settlers
(ill.), 312
Work, 695
Work camps, 232
Workers, electricity and, 644
Psychology of, 695
Why men work together, 697
Working women. 228
WPA, Industrial changes, study of, 274
Symphony orchestra (ill.), 209
World, brain organization for the mod-
ern, 649, .653
Fright in the thirties, 650
Unbalanced world of 1937 (drawing).
648
World Peaceways, 185
WQXR, 42
Wright, G. F., 584
Writers, 605
Yang Ling-fu, poems and paintings.
512-515
Young. Art, 45
Youngstown. Ohio. 565
Youth, highschool sketches, by lames
Daugherty. 699-701
Perversion of. 703
Ximmern and Others' Neutrality and
Collective Security, 226
JANUARY 1937
fa
3O cents
O
This Light Can Save
5OOO Lives A Year
And it can save the suffering caused by more than 80,000 unnecessary accidents;
it can prevent an annual economic loss of more than $180,000,000 — death, injury,
waste that are the result of preventable night accidents. This fearful toll can be
stopped by the adequate lighting of the primary highways of the nation.
Already the golden-orange, danger-dissipating light of sodium lamps is lifting the
terror that lurks on dark roads. As these lamps illuminate more and more miles of
highway, they will save thousands of Americans otherwise doomed to meet injury or
death in night accidents. Sodium lamps are among the latest of the many aids to
safety to which the General Electric Research Laboratory, in Schenectady, has made
important contributions.
But research in light is only one of the many fields in which G-E scientists are helping
you. The new manufacturing methods which they have developed have reduced the
price you pay for necessities. The new products they have provided have stimulated
industry, have created new employment, have raised the living standard of the nation.
G-E research has saved the public from ten to one hundred dollars for
every dollar it has earned for General Electric
GENERAL B ELECTRIC
This Plea Should Be Written in Blood —
. . . the blood of tens of thousands who die unnecessary deaths . . . the blood of
not only citizen-soldiers who die on the field of battle, but also of women and
children who die of bombs, bullets and disease in the streets of Madrid.
The tremendous burden
placed upon the medical
resources of the Spanish
government has made out-
side medical aid impera-
tive. Thousands of fatal-
ities and cases of perma-
nent disability have re-
sulted from lack of essen-
tial medical equipment and
personnel. In response to
an urgent appeal from the
Spanish Government Red
Cross, the Medical Bu-
reau of the American
Friends of Spanish Dem-
MADRID CABLES
"REMIT 2,000,000 UNITS IN-
SULIN, TWELVE BLOOD-TRANS-
FUSION EQUIPMENTS. 2,000
VIALS DIPHTHERIA ANTITOXIN,
2,000 VIALS TETANUS ANTI-
TOCIN, 2,000 VIALS GANGRENE
ANTITOXIN, 20 DISINFECTING
OVENS, 20 PORTABLE OVENS,
ASSORTED SURGICAL INSTRU-
MENTS, 50 AUTOMOBILE AM-
BULANCES STOP EXTREMELY
URGENT NOW PLEASE."
Send funds immediately to:
Medical Bureau
AMERICAN FRIENDS OF
SPANISH DEMOCRACY
20 Vesey Street
New York, N. Y.
The Medical Bureau is
assembling an American
Ambulance Corps for
Spain. Seventy-five doc-
tors and nurses have al-
ready volunteered. Only
four ambulances have
been bought to date. More
must be purchased, and
shipments must reach Ma-
drid by January. Tragic-
ally enough, your imme-
diate contribution does inj
deed mean a matter of life
or death. Madrid pleads:
"America - - send your
contributions NOW" to the Medical
ocracy is collecting medical supplies,
and the funds with which to purchase Bureau, American Friends of Spanish
them here for immediate shipment. Democracy, 20 Vesey Street, N. Y. C.
DOCTORS
COMMITTEE
Dr. Thomas Addis
Dr. George Baehr
Dr. E. M. Bluestone
Dr. Ernst P. Boas
Dr. Walter B. Cannon
Dr. Anton J. Carlson
Dr. Haven Emerson
Dr. Frederic A. Gibbs
Dr. Samuel A. Levine
Dr. Leopold Lichtwitz
Dr. William H. Park
Dr. John P. Peters
Dr. Bela Schick
Dr. Henry E. Sigerist
GENERAL
Bishop Robert L. Paddock (chairman)
John Dewey (vice-chairman)
Harry Elmer Barnes
Stephen Vincent Benet
Mrs. Francis Biddle
Bruce Bliven
Mrs. W. Russell Bowie
Eleanor Copenhaver
Malcolm Cowley
Edward T. Devine
Paul Douglas
Stephen P. Duggan
Sherwood Eddy
COMMITTEE
Frank P. Graham
Hubert C. Herring
Paul Kellogg
Mary Van Kleek
Robert Morss Lovett
Bishop Francis J. McConnell
Lewis Mumford
William Allen Nielson
Harry A. Overstreet
William Pickens
George Soule
Lillian D. Wald
Stephen S. Wise
MEDICAL BUREAU, AMERICAN FRIENDS OF SPANISH DEMOCRACY
20 Vesey Street, New York, N. Y.
I am enclosing $ to help purchase medical supplies and equipment
for Spanish Democracy.
Address
Name .
City. . . .
State.
SG-12
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JANUARY 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 1
T Q~J ~J SURVEY GRAPHIC welcomes
^/ J / the New Year with some
newness of its own, in page size, cover
scheme, the layout of the pages. The edi-
tors hope these changes will reinforce their
"Happy New Year" to readers by making Cover Design PICTORIAL STATISTICS, INC.
the magazine more attractive to the eye. .
Among Ourselves ; 5
THE range of the Social Security Board's
activities under the Act, as well as the ^ SPint of 37 FRONTISPIECE
goals of the Security Act itself, are reviewed e • i e • n • T
(page 7) by John G. Winant, chairman of S°cial Secunty BeSmS JOHN G' WINANT 7
the board. Mr. Winant writes just after Children Wanted . .BEULAH AMIDON 10
the social insurance principle has won its
first round in the U. S. Supreme Court with American Business Man: 1937 Model EDWARD A. FILENE 16
the favorable decision on the New York
State Unemployment Insurance Law; and Traditional Spain PAINTINGS BY JOSE GUTIERREZ SOLANA 18
after the Security Act itself has won its first
brush in the courts, in a Boston case in Balance-Sheet of Repeal H. H. KAY 20
which Federal Judge George C. Sweeney
upheld the right of Congress to levy a tax Visual Education OTTO NEURATH 25
on employers under the unemployment in- ,,. .. TIT
surance title of the Act. Mr. Winant, for- Minneapolis— III .. 29
merly state senator and governor of New D , •„ c \t-\-* T J TT • in
Hampshire and assistant director of the P°rtrait of a Mllltant Trade Umon ' ' ' .CHARLES R. WALKER 29
International Labour Office, was named first The old Fashioned Girl of Modern Japan . . . HELEN MEARS 34
chairman or the Social Security Board when
it was organized in October 1935. A Re- Through Neighbors' Doorways. . 39
publican, he resigned in the late summer
to rally to the Act, when it was under fire The Biggest Human Interest Story JOHN PALMER GAVIT 39
in the political campaign; subsequently re-
suming the chairmanship at the urgent Two Hundred Were Chosen FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG 41
request of the President.
Letters and Life 42
EXCEPT for newsboys and bootblacks,
you don't often see child workers now- Dynamo as Artist LEON WHIPPLE 42
adays, but employment figures show that
child labor is increasing. Beulah Amidon, Human Inventions: 46
industrial editor, brines us abreast of the 1Iri . *,,< ,-, << ,TT .,
juvenile employment tide (page 10), and Wheels Where Cellars Were' •
© Survey Associate], Inc.
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
Publication Office:
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To which all communications should be sent
SURVEY GRAPHIC— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
THE SURVEY— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, associate editors; RUTH A. LERRIGO,
HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, assistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., LEON WHIPPLE, JOANNA C.
COLCORD, RUSSELL H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOL-
PER, R. L. DUFFUS, contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MARY R. ANDERSON, advertis-
ing manager.
of the quarter-century fight to legislate
schoolboys and girls out of industry and
trade. That fight now reaches its climax,
with half the states having ratified the
federal amendment, and twelve more to go
as the legislatures meet this year.
THE American business man, 1937
model, is described by Edward A.
Filene, who is himself an advance model
of the merchant. His article (page 16) is
important as "Filene speaking," and also
as the record of the veritable Greek chorus
of individual agreement following his re-
cent challenge to the obstructionism of busi-
ness organizations.
TALLYING up the general consequences
of three years of repeal (page 20) the
author, a Washington newspaper man who
uses the pseudonym H. H. Kay, wants it
understood that his job is a journalist's
"trial balance." A large comprehensive
study of the social effects of repeal remains
to be made, including specific health and
employment problems, many of them not
yet measurable in their entirety.
OTTO NEURATH, inventor of the sta-
tistical little man, needs no introduc-
tion to Survey Graphic readers, who were
the first Americans to make his acquaintance.
On page 25 Dr. Neurath tells how stand-
ardized symbols constitute a basic new
language, complete with dictionary and
grammar, for conveying profound or simple
information to profound or simple minds.
MINNEAPOLIS (the labor and liveli-
hood— and social tensions — of which
have been depicted in two articles by
Charles R. Walker in October and Novem-
ber Survey Graphic) is typical of most
American cities. But in no other city of
the United States has one labor union dom-
inated the life of a community as has
bellicose Local 544, which Mr. Walker ex-
plores in his final article on page 29.
A MACHINE AGE application of the
/~\_ most ancient socio-economic pattern
in the world is revealed in the word pic-
ture of the Japanese woman worker (page
34) by Helen Mears, who recently spent
seven months in Japan. Her material about
Miss Nippon was gathered by personal
visits to the textile mills, talks to govern-
ment and management officials, and con-
tact with Japan's few labor organizers. Her
statistics are taken from the 35th Financial
and Economic Annual of Japan, and from
Social Aspects of Industrial Development
A Happy New Year
for
MHAT'S a real letter— written by
a real Kathryn— to her brother.
You can read her happiness in
every line. She's mighty glad
to have the telephone back.
And so are a great many
other men and women these
days. About 850,000 new tele-
phones have been installed in
the past year.
That means more than just
having a telephone within
reach. It means keeping the
family circle unbroken— con-
tacts with people — gaiety, sol-
ace, friendship. It means
greater comfort, security; quick
aid in emergency.
Whether it be the grand
house on the hill or the cottage
in the valley, there's more
happiness for everybody when
there's a telephone in the home.
The Bell System employs more men and women than any other business organization in
the United States. The total is now close to 300,000. Good business for the
telephone company is a sign of good business throughout the country.
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
I
in Japan, by Fernand Maurette, assistant
director of the International Labor Office,
published in 1934.
AS the captions and the king depart,
.iJL John Palmer Gavit, associate editor
for world affairs, devotes his department,
Through Neighbors' Doorways, inevitably
to Britain. (Page 39)
TO HER comments on Matanuska — in-
spired by the play, Two Hundred Were
Chosen — Florence Loeb Kellogg, associate
editor, brings a fresh memory of Alaska,
visited only several months ago in the
course of a geographical summer holiday.
(Page 41)
ROLLING their own homes, so to
speak, the trailer population has be-
gun to interest sociologists, local govern-
ment officials, safety councils, health and
education authorities. The paragraphs on
page 46 were collected by the editors of
Survey Graphic, nuggets from the latest
Americana diggings.
AMONG OURSELVES
Constitutional Crisis
FROM an editorial in the Omaha Morn-
ing World-Herald we glean the follow-
ing paragraphs:
"There are a good many admirers of the
flexibility of the British Constitution as
compared with the rigidity of ours. But
ours, at least, has this advantage, that under
no conceivable combination of circumstances
could the romance of a President create a
crisis in the government. If there were any
possible conception of our Constitution as
so intimately touching a private life, the
procedure would be somewhat as follows:
"Upon the President's romance becoming
known, an objector would ask for an in-
junction in one of the inferior courts of the
United States, asserting it to be unconsti-
tutional for a President to marry an alien
divorcee. The injunction would be granted
and the case would be appealed a couple of
times until it reached the Supreme Court.
By a 5-to-4 decision the court might hand
down a decision affirming the unconstitu-
tionality of such a marriage because the
Constitution limits the powers of the Presi-
dent to those expressly granted him and
there is no express delegation of power to
contract such a marriage. The dissenting
minority would also present an opinion to
the effect that while this power is not
specifically granted, it is, nevertheless, per-
missible under the common welfare clause
and necessary to make good the abolition
of the horse and buggy in favor of the gaso-
line motor.
"By which time the President would have
firmly refused the third cup of coffee and
would celebrate the inauguration of his
successor by marrying the girl the next day.
And the country would spend the next
twenty years debating the advisability of an
amendment specifically empowering the
President to marry whomsoever he might
please."
A New Year's Wish
Resolution passed by the board of directors of the National Fed-
eration of Settlements, December 6, 1936, on the Constitution and
its amendment
T T AT F the states in the union have now
•^ ••• adopted the Federal Child Labor
Amendment. When twelve more states say
yes, the "ayes" will have it. The amend-
ment will become part and parcel of the
Constitution of the United States, and at
last the protection of children from prema-
ture work will be grounded in the bedrock
of American government.
We urge every settlement in every state
that has thus far failed to join in this en-
lightened advance, to make the passage of
the amendment their first order of business
for 1937.
There is no phase of child labor with
which the settlements of the country have
not come in close touch; news vending, fac-
tory work, the beet fields, the mines. We
know they are all bad for children. We want
the New Year to see these old abuses ended.
That boys and girls of tender years have
been kept at wage earning during the de-
pression, when grown men and women have
been unable to find employment, has been
one of the most poignant anomalies of the
hard times. The National Child Labor
Committee reports the spread of child labor
in certain sections and in certain industries.
All this has dramatized the existence of
that so-called twilight zone in American
sovereignty and citizenship where state
action falls short of accomplishing so simple
and reasonable a thing as the cherishing of
childhood; where federal action has been
thrown out by decisions of the United
States Supreme Court.
The hard times have brought home other
vulnerable points in our economic life
where the same governmental incompetence
seems to exist. This has been true in the
case of minimum wage laws, where the
verdict of the high court has been that not
even a state can act within its own borders.
It remains to be seen whether measures to
provide security against unemployment and
old age will be sustained; or to protect the
right of wage earners to bargain collectively
as to the terms of their work.
Out of our experience in the workaday
neighborhoods of the United States we
know that such protection is needed. This
was true when the settlements had their
beginnings fifty years ago. It has been in-
creasingly true, as our cities have grown
and more and more people have been drawn
into industrial employment. We know first
hand the consequences not only of child la-
bor, but of overwork, of underpay, of the
hazards of accidents, sickness, unemploy-
ment and old age, of the suppression of the
right of workers to organize. We favor con-
structive laws that will make government a
safeguard against evils, a force for health
and well being, for social security and for
raising the standards of life and labor.
Conscious of the years that have dragged
by in the case of the child labor amend-
ment, some constitutional lawyers hold out
the hope that Congress can free itself to
legislate along these lines through its power
to regulate the jurisdiction of our federal
courts. We welcome the exploration of this
and other practical means to deal with the
situation. But they may fail, and as the
sound, long run method, we favor a con-
stitutional amendment to make assurance
doubly sure that the bottom has not
dropped out of our American scheme of
government in dealing with social and eco-
nomic needs.
The Constitution of the United States
itself underscores the general welfare as a
goal of government. Some of our ablest
jurists on the Supreme bench have in min-
ority opinions broken with the negative
decisions of the majority. These things
encourage us to feel that what we know to
be good sense may yet become good law.
Housing and Relief
To THE EDITOR: Replying to my Hands
of Esau, the Committee for Economic Re-
covery protest my rating "contrary to fact"
their statement that in England "the most
recent legislation adopts the rental subsidy
plan." In support, they cite five sections
from the 1935 and 1936 British Housing
Acts. By looking up the references the
reader will find the British national hous-
ing subsidy to be just what I said it was —
a fixed annual grant for a pre-determined
number of years, the highest rate being for
re-housing on expensive sites.
The committee repeats that public hous-
ing is charity and insists that those be
served first who need it most. No one de-
nies that destitute families must have shel-
ter in addition to food and clothing, but
honesty requires that the bill be charged to
relief and not to housing. The committee
advised blank checks for relief agencies to
fill in and taxpayers to pay and calls the re-
sult public housing. You can drown a cat in
molasses as thoroughly as in anything else.
I agree with the committee in one re-
spect: "It is high time we eliminate sub-
terfuge and bunk from this whole problem
of housing." EDITH ELMER WOOD
An Heirloom from the Future
TO a recent dinner in honor of Norman
Thomas, Survey Graphic's neighbor
around the corner from Gramercy Park,
Paul Kellogg, as spokesman for the editors,
sent a message here in part reprinted: "I
like to think of Norman Thomas as a
friend and as the creative force he is in
these times of change. . . . We may agree
with him here, break with him there, but
inescapably we think of him as a dynamic
force in our times. Yet always the friend
and his likable parts showing through. A
socialized friendship it has become, if you
will, warming and personifying his leader-
ship for the many; but also, to those who
are especially fortunate, what we like to
look at as one of our choicest private pos-
sessions— an heirloom of living spirit com-
ing down to us from the future."
Triangle
THE SPIRIT OF '37
SURVEY GRAPHIC
JANUARY 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 1
Social Security Begins
by JOHN G. WINANT
Facing ahead, Chairman Winant takes stock of Social Secur-
ity; what will be held to; what will be changed; what will be
built upon to make security a reality in America
PAUL REVERE, master-engraver of Boston, with a few
journeymen working in his shop, was an important
employer in the Massachusetts of his day. The change
which has taken place in industry in the interim is sym-
bolized by the Revere Brass and Copper Company,
whose nucleus was Paul Revere's little handicraft shop
in Boston, and which now employs several hundred
persons in a highly mechanized establishment.
In Revere's day the hazards of old age were mostly
physical, the results of sickness or accident, failing eye-
sight or hearing — all natural impairments of the human
machine. The farmer generally worked to an advanced
age, and the urban laborer worked as long as his hand
and eye kept their sureness. There was no machine to
set the pace for him and no age deadline to put him
aside while he was in the prime of this productiveness.
There was no need for social insurance in those early
days of the Republic. Security depended on the indi-
vidual's own efforts. Unemployment, as we know it now,
was non-existent. Poverty was a very relative term and
was generally born of shiftlessness. Land was cheap and
plentiful. The worker owned his own tools and in a
young and fast-growing society there was nearly always
a market for his services and the product of his handi-
craft. He was generally his own boss and an employer
with a half dozen employes was in "big business." Thus,
in those days the common man was master of his own
fate to a degree unknown in this present generation. He
could expect none of the extras that make up our present
high standard of living; on the other hand, he could
expect, when he was old, to have a roof over his head,
clothing, a shed full of firewood, and a cupboard full of
plain but substantial food. And as long as he needed
work, it was to be had. To such a man "social insurance"
would have been as strange a concept as television.
That period in our history is over. The technician has
brought about a veritable economic revolution which
has altered fundamentally the status of the average
American. Most of our population are wage earners,
living in urban areas, working for corporations whose
owners are strangers to them. Some of these corporations
have more employes than New York or Boston had in-
habitants in 1800. The resources of some of them are
greater than the combined wealth of the nation at its
beginning. The worker is no longer a free agent, who
can provide for his own security by his own initiative.
He counts for little against the gigantic and impersonal
forces that surround him, the fierce play of industrial
competition, the might and speed of machines that
dwarf his single manpower into insignificance, the lack
of balance between industry's capacity to produce and
the public's capacity to consume. No matter what dili-
gence and foresight and thrift he may show, the chances
are against his being able to accumulate a competence
adequate for his old age. Three quarters of those who
live to be sixty-five today are dependent on others for
the necessities of life. To live he must be employed. Yet
employment is a precarious thing. It may be lost through
no fault of his own, but because of some temporary mal-
adjustment in the business cycle. His working life is
liable to be hedged about by insecurity and his future
clouded with uncertainty and fear. For him social insur-
ance is a real and pressing necessity.
Many social-minded persons have long recognized the
need for protection against the incidences of an economic
system that unwittingly takes so heavy a toll of human
welfare. Enlightened employers have attempted to safe-
guard their employes against these incidences by means
of company pension plans. But the problem has outgrown
the ability of private industry to cope with it. Meanwhile,
others — a steadily decreasing number — have believed
that unemployment and insecurity were natural visita-
tions, like war and plague. They have preferred to mud-
dle along in their individualistic way, leaving the casual-
ties of the system to care for themselves as best they
might.
The depression which began with the stock market
crash in 1929 brought the problem to the consciousness
of the American people. It had become clear that the task
belonged to government. It could no longer be left to
private organizations and local interests. It was a national
job and demanded action by the national government in
cooperation with the states and local governments. Out
of that realization grew the Social Security Act of 1935.
My observations while working for the International
Labour Organization have convinced me of the value of
drawing on world experience in social insurance legisla-
tion. After all, we borrow the achievements of other peo-
ple in science and the arts, as they borrow ours. There is
a common pool of useful knowledge that is the heritage
of all mankind. No longer can a nation live in a water-
tight compartment of isolation, and each should be free
to tap this common fund of world experience for the
benefit of its people. It is the narrowest nationalism that
would refuse to avail itself of the lessons of other peoples
merely because they were foreigners.
Europe was the pioneer in legislation of this kind. The
field for the exercise of individual initiative and oppor-
tunities for self-advancement was less than in this coun-
try, and the citizen was more circumscribed in his work-
ing life by tradition and custom. The movement for
public insurance against the major hazards of life first
took statutory form in Germany in the eighties of the
past century. All the other countries of Europe have fol-
lowed suit in varying degrees. So have several Latin-
American nations. The types of social insurance provided
and the cost and extent of coverage differ considerably.
But all have accepted the principle of the responsibility
of the state for assuring some measure of security to their
citizens. In most countries social insurance has become
an established part of the national life and no one longer
questions its justification. The distress that comes from
prolonged unemployment and indigent old age knows
no frontiers, and there is much in the experience of Eu-
rope from which we can profit.
Our Social Security Act
WE HAVE NO APOLOGIES to make for the Social Security
Act. Yet we who have to do with the administration of
the law are as aware of its imperfections as the most
searching critic on the outside. No one assumes that this
Act is the final word in social insurance. For, since so-
ciety is a growing organism, there can never be any
finality in the treatment of its problems. What the pres-
ent law does represent is a sincere effort to reconcile the
divergent views of a large number of thoughtful and
public spirited men and women who cared enough to do
something about present insecurity. Though all agreed
on the basic principle of social insurance, there were nat-
ural differences of opinion as to the means and technique
to be used in attaining the ends on which there was
common agreement. The framers of the law were also
compelled to take account of certain fundamental cleav-
8
ages in American political and social philosophies. This
involved an attempt to strike a working balance between
the proper claims of the federal government and of the
states. Some of the devices used for this purpose may
appear awkward and unduly complex to the layman,
but in such cases the dilemma offered to Congress was
not of a kind that could be met by a simple solution.
Where such issues arose, every effort was made to give
the states the maximum of control consistent with effi-
ciency of operation and a constitutional division of pow-
ers. Where there were doubts as to the wisdom of
delegating certain responsibilities to the states, it was felt
that public consciousness within the states would rise to
the occasion and meet the responsibility. It was recog-
nized that the state governments are closer to the imme-
diate problems envisaged by the law than is Washington,
so that as much localization of authority as possible and
practical was developed within state jurisdiction. It was
also felt that the stimulus of public opinion would tend
to level upward the differences between the more ad-
vanced states and those which still lagged in social
legislation. Differentials giving advantage to states that
disregard human welfare were wiped out in the
categories covered under the Act.
In the allocation of responsibility as between the fed-
eral government and the states the provision for old age
benefits was reserved to the central authority. No sound
actuarial base, with a compensating tax area, could be
devised on state lines. Also, given the migratory charac-
ter of American labor any other solution would have
been impracticable. The individual's employment and
earnings record, on the basis of which his retirement
benefits are eventually computed, must follow him wher-
ever he goes, regardless of state lines.
On the other hand, unemployment compensation pre-
sented a different problem. Whereas the old age benefit
phase of the law involves the individual's whole working
life, the unemployment compensation provision is only
concerned with the interruptions to his normal employ-
ment. While these gaps in his working life may vary
greatly in duration, and consequently in the distress
which they entail, they are at worst temporary. As such,
they are liable to be attended with much less interstate
8,000.000
7,000.000
0 6,000,000
5,000,000
4,000,000
• 3,OOO,OOO
g 2,000.000
1,000,000 „
I860 1870 I860 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940
Number of Americans aged sixty-five and over, 1860 to 1936
SURVEY GRAPHIC
movement of workers than the individual's long time
employment history covered by the old age benefit section
of the law. Thus, the man who is jobless ordinarily re-
mains in the state where he had been employed until his
chances of finding reemployment therein appear exhaust-
ed. This fact tends to simplify the problem of placing
responsibility for care of the unemployed. Also, since the
rate of unemployment is liable to vary considerably from
state to state, those states with a low ratio of unemploy-
ment might well object to being penalized on behalf of
other states whose industries showed less stability. There
is still much room for controversy in the field of unem-
ployment compensation, and the arrangement whereby
each state is permitted to frame its own law making
experimentation possible. Out of these forty-eight labora-
tories of legislation there should eventually come much
experience of common value to all the states. This should
tend to reduce the diversity in treating a problem whose
human incidences are, after all, the same.
In the so-called welfare phases of the Social Security
Act, the burden of responsibility is again placed on the
states. Using an old device of American legislation, the
1 6- 1 %
100
ALL OTHER OCCUPATIONS
1920
1930
Occupational groups of gainfully occupied over sixteen,
1870-1930
federal government contributes to the support of the state
programs with grants-in-aid, while at the same time it
sets certain standards of accomplishment as conditions for
the allocation of federal funds. These features of the law
include old age assistance for the support of those who
cannot qualify under the old age benefit section of the
Act, aid to mothers of dependent children, aid to the
blind, and the provisions for the assistance of other han-
dicapped groups. Thus, when the total reckoning is made,
it must be recognized that the Social Security Act has
shown every consideration for the local interests and leg-
islative autonomy of the states, even though in certain
instances more effective and uniform treatment of the
particular problem might have been obtained by larger
exercise of federal authority.
The Act makes specific provision for the possibility of
future amendments. A legislative program of such mag-
nitude cannot be expected to have attained initial perfec-
tion. Time and experience will expose the defects that
must inevitably develop in its operation. It will be better
30
1890-1900 1900-1910 1910-1920 1920-1930
Percentages of increase over ten-year periods, in number of
older persons (sixty and over) and youths (nineteen and under)
if such changes as may be made in the law in the future
should come as the result of impartial observation of its
working, rather than that they be dictated by untried
theory or the pressure of interested minorities.
We are now setting up the organization necessary for
servicing the beneficiaries of the Act. Most of that organi-
zation will necessarily be required to staff our field offices,
which will be located in all large population centers for
the greater convenience of those affected by the operation
of the law. It will be some time before the field force
required to administer a program of this magnitude
functions with the smoothness and effectiveness that we
would desire. Meanwhile we hope the public will bear
with us and understand that our only concern is to give
it service that will be efficient, prompt and considerate.
One of our largest tasks is to inform the public as to its
privileges and obligations under the law. In this effort
we must depend, not only on our own Informational Ser-
vice, but on the cooperation of the press and the radio,
which has been given so generously throughout the
enumeration period. Above all, we hope the employers
of the country will enter into partnership with us in this
vast job of informing their employes of the details of the
program. We cannot reach each man and woman indi-
vidually. We can expect only to acquaint the millions of
eligible workers with the terms of the Act, if we utilize
wisely every available medium of public education.
WE FEEL UNDER no compulsion to defend the basic
philosophy of the Social Security Act. We feel we have a
right to believe that the vast majority of the American
people have already accepted the principle of social in-
surance as an obligation of government. We believe that
our future problem will be one of extending the cover-
age of the Act and of improving the technique of its
operation. If any achievement of the present administra-
tion deserved immunity as a campaign issue, it was the
Social Security Act. This law was not a partisan measure.
It was passed by an overwhelming majority of both
parties in Congress. The roll call showed no line-up of
Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other. It
had the support of both. It is rather the product of a
people's government, honestly endeavoring to mitigate
some of the most grievous faults of our national life.
JANUARY 1937
Photographs: courtesy, National Child Labor Committee
Children Wanted
Small boys worked all night in the glass factories in 1911
by BEULAH AMIDON
"Man is the only animal that lives on its young," was the bitter comment of
an educator who saw children taken out of school to go to work. Here is the
record of increasing child labor since the NRA codes ended — and the hope
of child protection if twelve states ratify the federal amendment in 1937
BACK IN 1932, Helen's father, who worked in a cotton
garment factory, was laid off "because of hard times."
Helen, aged thirteen, the eldest of five children, stopped
school and got a job in the factory. Her wage was $2.50
for a fifty-hour week. She tried to keep up her school
work at night. After the NRA underwear code went
into effect, the factory hands under sixteen years of age
were let out, Helen's father was taken on again, and
Helen went back to school. But the code did not last
long. It ceased to function when the U. S. Supreme
Court declared the Recovery Act unconstitutional.
Within a few months the factory laid off many of its
adult workers, Helen's father among them. Helen, now
fifteen years old and a high school sophomore, again put
aside her books to become a wage earner. When Helen
was interviewed in the course of a survey in April 1936,
she was working a fifty-two-hour week for $4.15, just
under 8 cents an hour. A younger brother and sister
were also working. Her father was still unemployed.
"I don't expect I'll ever get back to school," she said.
Helen, and the thousands of children like her who
were swept back into manufacturing and trade after the
Schechter decision, will probably be front page news in
the months ahead. Nineteen state legislatures are meet-
ing this year. Twenty-four states have ratified the child
labor amendment; if twelve more act — and act favorably
— the amendment will be a part of the Constitution, con-
ferring upon Congress the power, which the Supreme
Court has ruled it now lacks, to safeguard young workers.
The NRA code period was the first time in this coun-
try that child labor figures went down while employ-
ment figures rose. That is, the child labor curve failed
to follow the general employment trend. But since the
spring of 1935 (the end of the codes) child labor has
sharply increased. The U. S. Children's Bureau has
comparable data for the first five months of 1936 and
the same months in 1935, when the codes were still
effective. These figures cover ten states, the District of
10
Also, twenty-five years ago these breaker boys
worked for a Pennsylvania coal company
Columbia and ninety-eight cities in other states.
(In none of these have there been changes in child
labor regulations — local or state — between the two
periods.) They show an increase of more than
150 percent in the number of fourteen and fifteen-
year-olds taking out their first working papers. In
the last seven months of 1935, after the codes were
outlawed, 55 percent more children left school for
jobs than during the entire twelve months of 1934.
In New York City, the number of children, four-
teen and fifteen years of age who got employment
certificates in the first five months of 1936 was 200.1
percent higher than in the corresponding months
of 1935, a jump from 1485 to 4462. Such figures
are meaningless unless you see behind them the
long procession of girls and boys who, like Helen,
stopped school to take the low paid, dead end jobs
available to untrained young workers.
What used to be called the "sweated industries,"
typically operated in small units with limited cap-
ital, are chiefly responsible for the current increase
in child labor. In sections of such industries as the
needle trades, the paper box industry, canning,
laundry, and so on, labor standards have always been
precarious. With a relatively large proportion of sub-
standard employers and "shoe string" enterprises, they
produced the most flagrant examples of exploitation in
the trough of the depression. [See Survey Graphic,
February 1933, page 75.] In these same areas labor stand-
ards have sagged since the codes ceased to support them.
There are geographical as well as industrial areas
where labor standards have been notoriously low, and
where children have never had the protection of ade-
quately enforced compulsory education laws. Thus a
recent survey by the National Child Labor Committee
brought out a grim story of exploitation from the "piney
woods" of South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi
and Louisiana. The study covered not only the woods
where trees are tapped for turpentine or cut for lumber,
but also local plants making crates, barrels and wooden
baskets. Child labor is the rule in turpentine camps.
Boys, and a few girls, ten to fourteen years old, work as
"chippers," scarring the trees, and setting pans to catch
the gum, and as "dippers," collecting the gum. Wages
seldom run as high as 8 cents an hour — 3 to 5 cents is
much more usual. A twelve-hour day is the rule. Many
of these children are illiterate, few, if any, have gone
beyond the primary grades. School is a luxury for all of
them. Youngsters who spend their early years as "chip-
pers" or "dippers" are usually hired with their fathers in
getting out timber when they are thirteen or fourteen
years old. The work is heavy. In hauling, a man and
two boys can earn about $2.50 a day— less than 20 cents
an hour for all three. The rates are about the same for
work on poles and piling— topping and trimming felled
trees, and removing the bark, often handling forty to
seventy-foot logs.
In basket, crate, barrel and veneer factories, a boy at
twelve may be a machine helper, and an operator at
fourteen. The working day is supposesd to be ten hours
long, but in a rush reason in a one industry town,
"sun-up to sun-down" is usually the rule. For a child,
75 cents a day is "top." The usual wage is 50 to 60 cents
in an industry where the piece rate is set to hold down a
speedy, experienced man to $2 a day. Starting with
strawberry crates in February and continuing with
spinach and bean hampers, tomato crates, corn and
banana carriers and potato barrels these factories run
eight to eleven months a year. Stapling, wire stitching
and cutting machines are their chief equipment. Fre-
quently the machines are not properly guarded. At their
best, they are not fit for the small hands, limited strength
and childish irresponsibility of young workers. There
are no accident figures. Until last year, South Carolina
and Florida did not have workmen's compensation laws,
and there is none yet in Mississippi. But children in
these plants are in constant danger as are the young
workers in the sawmills in the same area. Here belt and
saw guards are generally considered "too expensive," and
maiming is all too fre-
quent among the boys
hired as "regular hands,"
as well as among the
youngsters who some-
times help on clean-up
jobs.
The use of children as
cheap labor is an ugly
chapter in the machine
age story. Early in the
nineteenth century, girls
and boys seven, eight
and nine years old went
as full time workers into
the dusty cotton mills.
In 1820, according to the
Digest of Manufactures
of that year, children
made up 43 percent of
the labor force in Massa-
chusetts, 47 percent in
Connecticut, 55 percent
in Rhode Island. It was
not the health hazard
but the question of
.'£.
And in 1910 this Vermont girl was
a full time employe in a cotton mill
i •
Today, turpentine, a "remote"
industry, employs children
schooling, which finally
turned public attention
to the working children.
One state after another
passed compulsory edu-
cation laws. Then came
regulation of hours.
Massachusetts led the
way in 1842 with a ten-
hour day for children
under twelve years of
age, and Connecticut
went a step further with
a ten-hour day for chil-
dren under fourteen.
Laws setting a mini-
mum age for employ-
ment came later, because
it meant limiting this
cheap labor supply.
Under Quaker leadership, Pennsylvania passed the first
minimum age law in 1848, barring children from fac-
tories until they were twelve years old, and raising the
age to thirteen the next year. In 1853, Rhode Island set
twelve years as the minimum for factory work; three
years later, Connecticut prohibited the employment of
children under nine. It was not until 1866 that Massa-
chusetts set a minimum age for child workers. Its law
decreed that children under ten must not work in fac-
tories or mills.
But child labor increased as industry developed. The
1900 census showed more than a million and a quarter
young wage earners helping turn the wheels of American
industry and trade. In 1904 the National Child Labor
Committee was formed to lead an organized campaign
for laws to protect children in the various states. Pro-
gress was slow. But though little was accomplished at
the start in the way of protective legislation, an important
task of public education was begun. Comfortable people
were made aware of the plight of the grimy "breaker
boys" in the coal mines, hundreds of seven and eight-
year-olds among them; of youngsters in the heat of the
glass factories, the dampness of the hemp mills and the
canneries; of the boys and girls crippled for life by the
machines they tended; of children getting up before
dawn to go to the cotton mills — long lines of little figures
in dim village streets,
them bowed
moving, al-
many of
and slow
ready old.
As a result of local
and national effort, state
legislation had spread
by the time we went
into the War, but its
unevenness and the
great areas left un-
touched led to the drive
for federal action.
The first federal child
labor law was passed in
1916. It prohibited the
shipment in interstate
commerce of goods pro-
These
work
girls, aged ten and
n the Colorado beet
duced in mines and quarries in which children under
sixteen years of age were employed; or in mills, can-
neries, workshops in which children under fourteen were
employed, or in which children aged fourteen to sixteen
worked more than eight hours a day or six days a week
or between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. The law went into effect
September 1, 1917. Less than a year later it was declared
unconstitutional by a five-to-four decision of the U. S.
Supreme Court, on the ground that it transcended "the
authority delegated to Congress over commerce," and
interfered with states' rights. Justice Holmes, dissenting,
held that "the act does not meddle with anything belong-
ing to the states," and added that "if there is any matter
upon which civilized countries have agreed ... it is the
evil of premature and excessive child labor."
A year later another attempt was made by Congress to
regulate child labor, this time under a law levying a tax
on the profits of all mines and manufacturing establish-
ments failing to maintain the minimum standards set up
in the 1916 measure. The Supreme Court, by an eight-
to-one decision, held that the act was invalid.
The Amendment is Proposed
Six YEARS after the first of these child labor decisions,
a Scripps-Howard reporter interviewed Reuben Dagen-
hart of Charlotte, N. C., the boy whose "constitutional
right to work" overthrew the law which sought to cut
his hours of labor as a fourteen-year-old, from twelve to
eight a day. "What benefit did you get out of the suit
which you won in the United States Supreme Court?"
the reporter asked.
"You mean the suit the Fidelity Manufacturing Com-
pany [his employer] won? I don't see that I got any
benefit. I guess I'd been a lot better off if they hadn't
won it. Look at me! A hundred and five pounds, a
grown man and no education. I may be mistaken, but
I think the years I've put in the cotton mills stunted my
growth. They kept me from getting any schooling. I
had to stop school after the third grade and now I need
the education I didn't get. . . . But I know one thing, I
ain't going to let them put my kid sister in the mill."
Before the law of 1917 was declared unconstitutional it
had done much to protect the health and the right to
education of thousands of children who were not safe-
guarded by state laws. None of the many agencies which
had supported the federal measures was willing to accept
defeat and let the children pay the price. The only pos-
sibility seemed the long, slow process of constitutional
amendment. The proposed amendment reads:
SECTION 1. The Congress shall have the power to limit, reg-
ulate and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years
of age.
SECTION 2. The power of the several states is unimpaired by
this article except that the operation of state laws shall be
suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation
enacted by the Congress.
With the endorsement of all political parties, this meas-
ure was passed by Congress in 1924, with heavy majori-
ties in both houses. Prior to 1933, only six of the neces-
sary thirty-six states had ratified. The successful cam-
paign of opposition was led, according to its own admis-
sion, by the National Association of Manufacturers.
With the onset of the depression, there was mounting
dismay over the breakdown of labor standards, the
twelve
fields
return of the sweatshop, the increasing numbers of chil-
dren at work while millions of men and women were
unable to get jobs. The situation was pictured in a
widely reprinted cartoon from Judge, showing a small
boy going off with his dinner pail, while his unemployed
parents look after him with humiliation and grief. The
caption read, "He got his father's job." There was a
wave of interest in the federal child labor amendment
and in 1933, fourteen states ratified, including the indus-
trial strongholds of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and
New Jersey.
Under the Recovery Act Codes
OF THE 552 approved NRA codes, only fourteen had
exceptions permitting the employment of children under
sixteen in industry or trade. (The fourteen exceptions
covered a group of retail trades where children could
work three hours a day outside school hours; motion
pictures; radio and broadcasting; newspaper and peri-
odical publishing.) The child labor provisions had the
backing of public opinion and were well enforced. They
took at least 100,000 children out of industry. When
the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry
made a survey of the cotton garment industry in 1934, it
found "only two children under sixteen years ... at
work out of 12,000 employes; and this in an industry
where one worker in every twenty-five was under six-
teen in 1932." Pennsylvania's experience was typical of
what happened in every industrial area. During the
last four months of 1933, not a single child in Alabama
took out working papers for industrial employment;
the same thing was true of twenty-seven cities reporting
to the U. S. Children's Bureau, including Fall River and
New Bedford, Mass., both important textile towns; Jersey
City, Camden and Hoboken, N. J.; Buffalo, N. Y.; and
Allentown, Pa., where, a few months earlier the strike of
hundreds of "baby-shirtmakers" had drawn attention to
the boys and girls working long hours at sweatshop
wages in jobs opened by "letting out" adult employes.
The common acceptance of the child labor prohibition
by employers and the general public continued to influ-
ence employment policies, even after the legal barrier
was removed. Many industries assumed responsibility
for holding certain gains made in the code period. For
example, Massachusetts textile manufacturers entered
into an agreement last spring under which no mill will
take workers under sixteen years of age. As a result of
this agreement, the press reported, 1600 children were
laid off, and their places filled by older workers.
So far, code standards in regard to child labor seem to
have been quite generally maintained in the southern
textile industry, though without formal action by the
owners. This is probably due in part to nation-wide
criticism of the former child labor policies of southern
textile employers, and in part to the fear of more strin-
gent legislation. But it is significant that so far every
attempt to secure ratification of the amendment by a
southern legislature has met well organized and success-
ful opposition. This opposition sometimes reaches into
other states. For example, when the amendment was
before the Nebraska legislature, in 1935, the legislators
received printed material mailed in Charlotte, N. C.,
warning them according to The Norfolk (Neb.) News,
that Congress, if given the power, would probably make
In the "street trades"
five-year-olds often work
it a crime for mother to
send Johnny out to the
shed for a basket of
cobs. But in spite of
the NRA experience and
the honest desire of
many employers to
maintain code stand-
ards, the lack of uni-
form child labor provi-
sions over the country
means that the just
employer is called on to
meet the competition of
the employer willing to
exploit the young and
inexperienced.
Since 1933, there have
been few changes in
state legislation. In some
instances, compulsory
education laws have
been tightened in re-
quirements and in ad-
ministration. Four important industrial states — New
York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island —
have been added to the three states which had previously
passed laws setting a sixteen-year minimum for work
during school hours. But the inadequacy of state reg-
ulation of child labor is shown by such facts as these:
nine states, through exemptions in their laws, still permit
children under fourteen to work in industry during
school hours; seven states permit children between four-
teen and sixteen years of age to work nine to eleven
hours a day; ten states allow children in this age group
to work until 8 p.m. or later; thirty-two states have prac-
tically no regulation of the employment in hazardous
occupations of sixteen and seventeen-year-old girls and
boys.
Since 1933, also, only four state legislatures have rati-
fied the child labor amendment. Well organized oppo-
sition has developed in state after state and succeeded,
as it did, for example, in New York last winter, in block-
ing a vote on ratification. In other states, powerful lob-
bies worked to roll up an unfavorable vote.
It is interesting to analyze the sources of opposition to
this constitutional amendment permitting Congress to
enact legislation protecting young workers. Some oppo-
nents sincerely be-
lieve that it is an
invasion of states'
rights, or that it
deals with matters
outside the proper
sphere of govern-
ment. But, as
Mayor La Guardia
of New York said
at a child labor
hearing in the 1935
legislature, "It is
not the constitu-
tionality of the
amendment which
Typical of today's youthful sweat-
shop workers, a 1930 dress operator
is chiefly opposed; it is the economics of the amend-
ment." The most determined opponents of ratification
are those who profit from child labor, and those who,
like the utility groups, fear a precedent for federal con-
trol. Their methods are often skillful and unscrupulous.
They misrepresent the scope and purpose of the pro-
posed amendment and of the type of legislation it would
make possible. Thus, many Catholic groups have been
led to believe that the child labor amendment means fed-
eral regulation of education and the possible abolition of
parochial schools. And in spite of the fact that Cardinal
Gibbons was one of the organizers of the National Child
Labor Committee, that today there is an active Catholic
Citizens Committee for Ratification, headed by Frank P.
Walsh and including distinguished priests, lawyers, edu-
cators and labor and civic leaders in its membership, the
Catholic attitude has been the decisive factor in some
states in preventing ratification.
Opposition to the Amendment
A NATIONAL COMMITTEE for the Protection of Child,
Family, School and Church, was organized in 1934, its
executive committee interlocking with the discredited
Sentinels of the Republic. It helped broadcast propa-
ganda to the effect that the child labor amendment
meant interference with the family and with tasks as-
signed by parents to their children around the house or
on the farm.
But back of this campaign of misrepresentation play-
ing on old loyalties and fears, creating doubt and mis-
understanding, are employers who find child labor prof-
itable. They are the newspaper and magazine publishers,
contractors who give out industrial homework, and fac-
tory owners, notably in the needle trades.
Among the most determined opponents of the child
labor amendment are the newspaper publishers. The
newspapers have always enjoyed a cheap circulation sys-
Batchelor in the N. Y. News
The kiddie kar will have to get out of the way
Cassel in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Social Insecurity
tem, based on child labor. The publishers successfully
resisted amendments to their code strengthening the pro-
visions regulating child labor in the sale and delivery of
papers. These additions to the code would have set a
fourteen-year minimum for newsboys, an eighteen-year
minimum for girls, with an exemption in favor of boys
of twelve already employed. They would have forbidden
work before 6 a.m. and late in the evening for boys under
sixteen; and required badges issued by a public agency
under the U. S. Department of Labor for children in the
newspaper trade. At a code hearing circulation man-
agers testified that boys were "no good" for newspaper
distribution after the age of fourteen because they "be-
came interested in girls." Under questioning, that was
repeatedly broken down into an admission that the older
boys were not attracted by the low rates of pay.
Though the publishers of newspapers and magazines
claimed that experience as a "little merchant" is health-
ful and educational, considerable evidence was offered to
show that this form of child labor, like so many others,
is to the advantage of the employer rather than of the
young employe. The National Child Labor Committee
presented grim testimony at the code hearing on accidents
to newsboys. Since most publishers carefully give their
young agents the status of "independent merchants" not
employes, the children are seldom covered by state work-
men's compensation laws. Or, as the Central States' Cir-
culation Managers Association recently put it, "the inde-
pendent merchant pays for his injuries and injuries to
others through his own negligence."
The letter sent by Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing
Sing Prison to the code hearing is still eloquent:
It has often been said that some of our finest citizens
have made their start in life through selling newspapers. In
my opinion, these same men had sufficient character, even
in their boyhood, to withstand the hard knocks, the tempta-
tions and the bad associations that are a definite part of the
life of a newsboy, especially in the metropolitan districts and
the larger cities. These citizens would have risen to their
eminence had they begun their climb up the ladder from the
workshop of any other industry. Recently I had a census
SURVEY GRAPHIC
taken here in Sing Sing to determine the number of inmates
who had sold newspapers in their youth. The examination
showed that of the 2300 men, over 69 percent had done so.
When the codes were knocked out, the publishers,
with a few such notable exceptions as the Scripps-
Howard papers, J. David Stern of the Philadelphia
Record and New York Post, Jonathan Daniels of the
Raleigh (N. C.) News and Observer, and the late Mar-
len Pew of Editor and Publisher, concentrated their
attention on blocking the child labor amendment.
At the beginning of the 1934 legislative sessions, a
newspaper publisher warned a friend of the child labor
amendment, "Now you're going to see a fight. What
we've done before was just a drop in the bucket." So
far, the anti-ratification campaign to "stop the amend-
ment" has been successful. Last year, five legislatures
considered ratification and all five rejected it.
A national poll by the American Institute of Public
Opinion in May 1936, returned a six-to-four vote in favor
of the regulation of child labor by Congress. In this
poll, the child labor amendment carried every state ex-
cept South Dakota, Kansas and Maryland. All ten of
the largest cities in the country favored it. Even the
southern states, presumably the stronghold of states'
rights and of child labor, returned decisive majorities for
the amendment. The four reasons most frequently cited
by those voting "yes" were: "Children under eighteen
should all be in school, not out working. There's plenty
of time for that later." "It will help solve unemployment
by providing more jobs for older people who need work
most." "We must protect our children. They can't
stand shop work. It ruins their health." "Child labor is
a national problem and Congress is most capable of
handling it."
ALABAMA AND RHODE ISLAND are the only states in the
union which have taken no action on the child labor
amendment. The rest of the states which have not rati-
fied have rejected the amendment. They all have the
right to reconsider, as a number of the states now in the
"ratified" column have already done.
Helen who works in the underwear factory is now
seventeen years old. Even if the amendment were rati-
fied this winter, as it may be if favorable public opinion
is sufficiently articulate, she and thousands of her young
fellow workers are above the age limit of any legislation
likely to result; and no legislation, however enlightened
its standards, could give back to them their lost school
years.
But the amendment would make possible a federal
child labor law which could release other thousands of
younger workers from mills and factories, from turpen-
tine camps and sugar beet fields, from messenger service
and paper routes, from restaurants and stores. It could
not restore the young victims of industrial accident, but
it could prevent the sacrifice of life and limb which
results each working day from letting inexperienced
youth try to handle complex or improperly guarded
machinery in factories, lumber mills, meat markets,
garages, mines, quarries. It could remove children from
a crowded labor market, and open up employment op-
portunities for their unemployed elders. It could save
wage standards from the threat of the cheap labor of the
young and inexperienced.
John Dewey, philosopher and educator, has said,
"What the wisest and best parent wants for his own
child, that must the community want for all its chil-
dren." To write into the Constitution the child labor
amendment would be a step toward that civilized goal.
CHI Ratified
•i Not yet ratified
U.S. Children's Bureau
Ratification by twelve more states will make the amendment part of the Constitution
JANUARY 1937
15
American Business Man: 1937 Model
by EDWARD A. FILENE
Mr. Filene discovers that he is not a lone insurgent. All over the country he
finds the 1937 business man (in contrast to most of his business organiza-
tions) willing to meet the new times with ideas shaped by research and con-
sumer demand
THE MINDS OF AMERICAN BUSINESS MEN are changing,
and changing rapidly. To understand the nature of the
change which is taking place, however, we must not
assume that it began with the recent election, nor with
the New Deal, not even with the depression which had
made some kind of new deal necessary. The thought
of American business began to move noticeably even
before the World War.
None the less, at the present time, if one wants to dis-
cover the real mind of American business men, the very
last place to look for information is to the resolutions
and pronouncements of our business organizations. To
charge that an organization does not reflect the senti-
ment of its members may seem to many irrational. If
we study the facts, however, we must see that the minds
of people regularly change some time before the change
is recognized officially.
What is known as the Modernist movement in our
churches, for example, seemed to blaze out suddenly in
1920 or 1921. It took some years, however, for the great
body of church members in America to discover that
they had become modernist in their viewpoint, and that
this was so many years before they ever realized that
it was out of harmony with their traditional views. The
modernist leaders, whose arguments at first had seemed
so shocking, were simply articulating this inevitable new
attitude. In the interim, however, before the rank and
file discovered how greatly their views had changed, the
official pronouncements of the churches were generally
fundamentalist.
Long before 1933, American business had ceased to
be ruggedly individualistic, but relatively few business
men had become aware of the fact. Organized business,
indeed, has not yet reflected this to any great extent.
Since the last election, however, a noticeable change has
quietly come over the resolutions and pronouncements
of many business organizations.
We can not understand this change if we think of
Roosevelt as preaching a business gospel all at variance
with the views of business men. It has been at variance,
rather, with the formulated creed of business men; and
in times of rapid social transition there is always a con-
siderable discrepancy between our real views and our
formulated creed.
It is true that organized business has clung desperately
in times of rapid social transition there is always a con-
ing. For when people fully accept a certain belief, they
are likely to take it in their stride as a position which
requires no particular defense. It is when they feel
themselves slipping that they cling most desperately
and defend most vehemently. The National Association
16
of Manufacturers, for instance, met a year or so ago and
formulated a platform "unalterably opposed" to almost
everything which its membership had begun to be-
lieve. Business had taken on a social character; and no
manufacturer who did not act to some degree upon
that fact could now hope to get anywhere at all. To
read that platform, however, one might conclude that
our business leaders accepted no social responsibility but
were determined to act in the future as if nothing what-
ever had taken place since the doctrine of unrestricted
individualism had first been formulated.
So if we want to know what is really going on in the
minds of business men, we will not take such a plat-
form very seriously. When an adolescent youth first be-
comes aware of his adolescence, and feels himself being
driven from his familiar course by strange new drives
within him, he is likely to formulate a platform too.
But it won't be a platform of adolescence. It won't be
a platform of what to do about these strange new
drives. In all probability it will say: "Resolved, that I am
off women for life." Students of human evolution,
however, will not take such a pronouncement too seri-
ously, nor will they conclude that it expresses the real
mind of the platform maker.
LESS THAN A YEAR AGO, I discontinued my connection
with the United States Chamber of Commerce, and,
being one of its founders, I thought it not only fair but
necessary to make public my reasons for doing so.
Whereupon, I received hundreds of letters from thought-
ful business men all over the nation, some criticizing
but the great majority commending my course. Many
of the latter were still retaining their membership in
the Chamber and referred especially to my "courage"
in taking the stand I did. But courage was the wrong
word entirely. There was nothing courageous about
it. The Chamber was committing itself, in resolution
after resolution, to what seemed to me to be an anti-
business course; and if I were right in this conclusion,
my withdrawal could not possibly injure my standing in
the business community. Had I been seeking acclaim, in
fact — and by that I mean acclaim from business men —
I could scarcely have adopted a more strategic course.
The personal note ran through these letters from busi-
ness men, distinguishing their individual positions.
"Personally," wrote the president of a leading trade
association, "I am greatly in sympathy with your point
of view. The most important task for industrialists is
to build up the purchasing power of the masses at large."
"I personally agree with your views," wrote another,
"and feel that the indictment is fully justified." "There
SURVEY GRAPHIC
is so much that matches my personal views," ran a
third, "that I feel impelled to write." Still another: "Un-
til business men as a group do substitute fact-finding
research for opinion, and until they do consent to study
their general problems as well as their individual prob-
lems, they will never get anywhere as far as the develop-
ment of public opinion is concerned." And from an
important committee secretary: "I am glad that some-
one has the courage to speak his piece. . . . All of us
are more inclined to follow the line of least resistance
than to take a determined stand in opposition."
Here on the letterhead of one of many member cham-
bers was this: "You are entirely right. . . . We have
witnessed unfair reflections upon the Chamber of Com-
merce name here and all because of what the na-
tional organization has displayed." A large manufacturer
wrote: "I have long felt that the great weakness of
most associations of this character is exactly as stated,
and until they recognize the need of facing honesdy the
problems with which industry is confronted, and en-
deavor to find an honest and fair solution, those prob-
lems will continue to exist." And another: "The writer,
for the past several years has maintained unexpressed
views you have expressed. It is my opinion that the busi-
ness men of the country as represented by the United
States Chamber of Commerce and through its agencies
should ascertain unbiased facts in relation to business
and industry and make recommendations to its mem-
bers, the Congress and the administration, from time
to time, of necessary measures for maintaining unin-
terrupted and solvent business, the maintenance of liv-
ing wages and the reduction of unemployment, to the
end that the federal government may be relieved as
early as practicable of the necessity of large scale work-
creating programs and relief."
IF I MAY BE PERMITTED to draw another example from
the recent political campaign: I had a similar experi-
ence when, in a nation-wide radio hook-up, I criticized
our newspapers for what seemed to me to be an almost
comic inconsistency — their news columns proclaiming
the return of prosperity under the New Deal administra-
tion, and their editorials and special articles trying to
prove that no such thing could happen. There would
have been temerity in it, for a business man to do such
a thing, if the times had not been changing and the
minds of business men, even in the publishing busi-
ness, had not been changing with them, regardless of
how they might be committed for the time being to a
formula which had become so at variance with the
known facts. As it was, the newspapers not only gave
my talk the widest publicity, but I was again deluged
with letters of appreciation, mostly from newspaper
men.
To go back a bit, it had become a commonplace even
before the War, for business men to declare that "Busi-
ness is Service." This doesn't mean that business began
forthwith to organize primarily for the service of the
whole public. Many of those who repeated this noble
phrase may have been hypocritical chisellers hiding
their deviltry behind a false front. But there was truth
in the statement. Business, obviously, had become some-
thing which it had not always been. No horse trader,
in my boyhood, had had the effrontery to declare that
horse trading generally was service; for no one, in those
days, could get away with it. In those days, it was
uniformly understood that buyers should beware. In
the course of time, however, business developed to a
point where it had to quit trying to get the best of its
customers if it were to retain those customers. It hadn't
become unselfish. It hadn't become idealistic. But from
that day to this, business could reasonably look for last-
ing success only as it discovered more and better ways
of giving more useful service to a larger and larger
public.
THE MINDS of American business men, therefore, groped
for such ways, even while organized business was largely
concentrating upon the problem of defending business
against the demands of a public which wanted helpful
service. Business men, for instance, launched plans for
industrial democracy, while business organizations were
defending business autocracy. Business men, also,
adopted safety devices in their own factories, and ex-
perimented with benefits for injuries received in the
course of employment, whether the workman might be
legally guilty of contributory negligence or not. Those
business organizations which continued to oppose work-
men's compensation laws fell behind those which
responded to this forward move which has now been
adopted generally.
Eventually, a business man experimented with the
idea of raising wages, not out of the goodness of his heart
but because it occurred to him that wages were buying
power; and that, with mass production supplanting
other forms of production, the masses must be able to
buy more things. The experiment worked, and this busi-
ness man soon became America's biggest and most suc-
cessful business man. While this was going on, how-
ever, the most unpopular man in all America as far
as our business organizations were concerned was this
man — Henry Ford.
Then came the War. Business was patriotic. Business
was energetic and resourceful. But business was not
organized for any such service to the whole nation as it
had now become necessary for the nation to have. One
of our leading business men, therefore, was appointed
as a sort of business dictator, to organize American
business on what seemed to be an utterly non-business
principle — the principle of maximum service to the na-
tion at war. Bernard M. Baruch demonstrated genius
on this job, and he had the hearty cooperation of the
best minds in business. Regular business organizations
could do little meanwhile, except to mark time until the
War was won. Then they clamored unanimously for
an immediate return to their former system — or lack of
it — under which the whole nation could not be served.
Business men by the thousands, however, did remem-
ber the War; and the marvelous results, both military
and economic, which had followed this coordination of
American industry to achieve a certain, unanimously
desired end; and they groped in their minds for some
economic plan by which the whole people, in times of
peace, might equally be served. Most of them, doubt-
less, did not realize that business generally could not be
organized for service without the sacrifice of some of
its traditional formulas. But their minds were changing.
They were superimposing (Continued on page 48)
JANUARY 1937
17
ffg •-• 4 . f- ',-
0 ^ D
^p1
MARINERS
Courtesy Carnegie Institute, .Pittsburgh
TRADITIONAL SPAIN
Paintings by
JOSE GUTIERREZ SOLANA
THE WOMEN BULLFIGHTERS
PROCESSION
Solatia, born in Madrid in 1886, is one of the great artists of modern Spain.
Less well known to us than the purely pictorial work of Sorolla and the
Zubiaurres, his paintings now contribute to our understanding of the Spanish
mind. He dwells upon those lingering traces of medievalism in their customs.
In sombre tones he paints strange religious ceremonies, grotesque fantasies
in which skeletons predominate, and the sinister pomp of the bullfight arena
Balance-Sheet of Repeal
by H. H. KAY
Has repeal helped recovery? Has crime increased? Is al-
coholism rampant? Are more women and youths drinking?
Has intoxication been a factor in the rising tide of auto-
mobile traffic deaths?
FOR MONTHS BEFORE Utah's legislature completed action
on the Twenty-first Amendment and thereby legalized
liquor on December 5, 1933, Americans witnessed a prop-
aganda battle which has seldom — if ever — been equalled.
It was a battle of doleful predictions by dry supporters
and glowing expectations by enthusiastic repealists.
Now three full years of repeal have elapsed. In their
light, we may scrutinize what was said four years ago
and what actually has happened. I have used government
statistics whenever possible because they are the nearest
approach to impartial sources of information, uncon-
taminated by either prohibitionists or repealists. An effort
has been made to filter out subjective opinions and to
let the statistics speak for themselves. To this end, the
most general figures available were used when any choice
was possible, the presumption being that the wider the
area involved the more typical they would be. I have
tried to vault over the wishful thinking of both pro-
fessional wets and drys and have attempted to present
the facts without the coloring of propaganda.
But before we attempt to get at the facts, let us look
at the repeal map. Of the forty-eight states, only one —
Alabama — has remained bone dry. Four others — Kan-
sas*, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee — permit the
legal sale of beer. Georgia legalized both beer and local
light wines. Although North Carolina has a state dry
law, eighteen counties and two cities are exempt and may
set up their own liquor stores. The remaining forty-one
states and the District of Columbia permit the sale of
hard liquor.
Eleven states sell alcoholic beverages only for consump-
tion off the premises — the so-called "package sales."
Others don't care whether the liquor is drunk at home
or at bars. North Dakota, which joined the hard liquor
list on December 3, 1936, as a result of approval of a
wet proposal by approximately 20,000 votes in the No-
vember election, permits sale either by the drink or by
the bottle. The state even allows clubs with memberships
of at least two hundred to install their own private bars.
Fifteen states operate liquor monopolies.
Ten states, mostly in the Midwest and West, and the
District of Columbia are wet and their citizens have no
rights for local option. The other thirty-one states where
hard liquor may be sold give communities in which dry
sentiment is strong the privilege of deciding what they
want in local elections. Arizona, California, Indiana,
Wyoming and the District of Columbia permit what
might be called the maximum wetness — sale either by
the drink or by the bottle for home consumption — and
yet make no allowance for any community's dry senti-
ment.
Incidentally, it is noteworthy that the so-called "wet"
states of Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York
and Pennsylvania all permit local option elections. More
than 150 communities in these five states repudiated re-
peal by voting dry in the November balloting.
Now let us turn from the methods of state liquor con-
trol to examine the number of places where liquor is
sold. According to the 1935 census of business by the
Department of Commerce, there were 97,852 drinking
places and 12,063 beer and liquor stores that legally sold
alcoholic beverages by the package. That meant a total
of 109,915 places where liquor was the principal item of
sale in 1935 as compared, for instance, with 55,132 candy
and confectionery stores, 66,183 garages and 196,649 fill-
ing stations. Restaurants and department stores where
liquor sales were only an incidental item of business
were not included in the figure of 109,915.
These retail establishments sold $1,049,067,000 worth
of liquor during 1935. This compared with sales of
$491,722,000 in retail shoe stores, $1,260,464,000 in retail
furniture stores and $1,961,780,000 at filling stations.
* The Kansas constitution prohibits sale of intoxicating liquors but the
state supreme court has ruled that 3.2 percent beer must be shown to be
"intoxicating in fact" before beer vendors may be prosecuted. Open sale
of beer followed this ruling despite the state law.
20
- M mn.m.l'<r miiiniu lUim'llljiJ. .H--mgB^>pplulUIU LUl
speed. Slow down when approaching crossroads and street
intersections.
INTOXICATION—
Of 3,340 drivers involved in fatal accidents in 1934, 62 were
intoxicated.
Drunken drivers are one of the most dangerous hazards on the
highways.
Alcohol retards the reaction time of a motorist from 1/T to
2/5 of a second. This slight fraction may cause a death or
serious injury.
Avoid the possibility of accidents by abstaining from drinking
while driving.
Sobriety is a first law of safe driving.
Conviction for driving while intoxicated results in the revo-
cation of the driving license, the suspension of the registration,
and the necessity for furnishing financial responsibility for a
period of 3 years thereafter.
Don't Mix Alcohol and Gasoline
Every New York automobile driver receives this warning
SURVEY GRAPHIC
It would seem to be an easy matter to find comparative
consumption statistics for pre-prohibition days and re-
peal. Unfortunately, however, the picture is blurred be-
cause tax figures are not quite comparative. Here is the
nearest approach with certain obvious errors:
Beer: The U. S. Tariff Commission estimated that the
greatest per capita consumption of pre-prohibition days
was 21.03 gallons in 1913. This figure, however, was pro-
rated over the entire country whereas some communities
had bone dry laws. The National Conference of State
Liquor Administrators found that in twenty-eight states
the 1935 beer consumption ranged from .25 to 20.11 gal-
lons per person with the average of twenty-four states
approximately 12 gallons. In 1934, the same states re-
ported consumption at 9 gallons an individual.
Wine: The Tariff Commission estimated maximum
wine consumption at .69 of a gallon in 1911 while the
liquor administrators said that in twenty-two states the
consumption per capita ranged from .012 to 3.63 gallons
in 1935 or an average of .4 of a gallon. In 1934, the per
capita consumption of wine was .36 of a gallon.
Distilled spirits: The Tariff Commission calculated
consumption at 1.64 gallons in 1917 while the liquor ad-
ministrators found that in twenty-eight states the range
in 1935 was from .35 to 3.03 gallons with the average .79
of a gallon if the District of Columbia, which had the
largest rate, was excluded. In 1934, the figure was .58
of a gallon in sixteen states.
DONT
TRU/T
VOUR
LIFE TO
Generally, one might guess that present day consump-
tion per capita is approximately 60 percent in all classi-
fications compared with the maximum pre-prohibition
figures.
LOUDEST OF THE ATTRACTIONS that the repealists shouted
when the Twenty-first Amendment was being consid-
ered was the plea that it would help recovery. What has
repeal done?
Latest Department of Commerce statistics show that
265,878 workers were employed at wages of $281,834,000
during 1935. How many of these persons replaced others
in the illicit bootleg industry of the late prohibition years
is not known. Unfortunately for comparative studies,
bootleggers did not file employment data with the gov-
ernment.
These 1935 figures, which do not include those of
waiters or other part time liquor and beer dispensers
who serve occasional drinks, show the following break-
down :
Location Workers Wages
DRINKING PLACES 151,009 $108,350,000
BEER AND LIQUOR STORES 16,325 17,534,000
(Package sales)
WHOLESALERS 37,776 58,051,000
MANUFACTURERS 60,768 97,899,000
Thus repeal brought into legal existence an industry
which employs approximately as many persons as live
in Akron, Ohio; Birmingham, Ala.; or Provi-
dence, R.I. The annual wages of these work-
ers is slightly more than that paid to all the
employes of restaurants, cafeterias and lunch-
rooms throughout the nation.
Another often repeated argument of the re-
pealists was that the federal treasury would
find a new source for revenue in repeal. What
are the facts?
Federal taxes on alcoholic beverages of all
kinds now bring approximately half a billion
dollars into the till annually. Treasury statis-
tics show the following for the repeal period:
Fiscal year
1934
1935
1936
Alcoholic
beverage taxes
$258,911,332.62
411,021,772.35
505,464,037.10
Customs duties on
liquors imported
$24,022,973
40,942,988
38,000,624
38,500,000
and the State Liquor Authority publicizes the effects of alcohol on man
1937 (estimated) 589.200.000.00
A total of approximately $2 billion or half
the estimated annual relief expenditures of
the federal government will have been col-
lected by next July 1 because of prohibition's
repeal.
Some may say that this is not a clear profit
because the government has to spend large
sums in clerical and enforcement work but
the 1937 budget of the Treasury Department's
alcohol tax unit amounts to $12,332,300 com-
pared with expenditures of $13,808,394 by the
Bureau of Prohibition during the 1930 fiscal
year, typical of an "expensive" pre-repeal year.
State treasuries, too, received additional rev-
enues. A treasury department survey figured
that revenue from liquor taxes, license fees
and profits of state liquor monopolies paid
JANUARY 1937
21
inio state treasuries amounted to $9,780,000 in 1933, $90,-
145,000 in 1934 and $166,602,000 in 1935— a total of more
than a quarter of a billion dollars during two years.
Use of these state revenues varies according to each
state's provisions. Some were spent for schools and old
age pensions as in Texas and Arkansas; for relief as in
Arizona, Montana and New Mexico; for reduction of
the general real estate taxes as in Iowa and Wisconsin;
or for the state's general funds as in California, Maine
and New York.
Workers and treasury officials have not been the only
groups to which the rehabilitation of the liquor industry
proved a boon. Farmers sold 48,150,000 bushels of grain
to distillers during the 1936 fiscal year.
PROHIBITIONISTS IN THEIR BATTLE against the Twenty-
first Amendment contended that repeal would have an
unfavorable effect on the health of Americans. Do sta-
tistics support this argument?
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is cited as
authority for the statement that deaths of its industrial
policyholders from alcoholism declined 13 percent in
1935 to become the lowest of any year since 1921. On the
other hand, the Northwestern National Life Insurance
Company at Minneapolis is quoted in a report that 32
percent more insurance applicants were rejected in 1935
because of excessive use of liquor than in 1932.
Deathrates from alcoholism compiled by the Census
Bureau represent only a slightly more satisfying answer.
There was a sharp downward trend in the rate per
100,000 estimated population in the registration area dur-
ing 1918 and 1919 when wartime prohibition was in
force in the United States. From 1920 until 1927 and
1928 there was a steady rise in the rate to 3.5 in 1930
and finally a decline again during the fading era of
prohibition to 2.5 in 1932, rising to 2.8 in 1934.
Statistics for the last three years available — half prohi-
bition and half repeal — are the lowest for any three-year
period on record during the initial burst of prohibition
from 1919 to 1922. During the days when John Barley-
corn was at large, the alcoholism deathrate approximated
5 per 100,000 estimated population. Even the most fer-
vent believer in freedom to drink could not unfeelingly
condone or even excuse the 3655 deaths recorded from
alcoholism in 1934, but the trends cited above seem to
indicate that neither prohibition nor repeal have solved
the difficulties. The answer may be through education
toward moderation.
Cirrhosis of the liver, another cause of death which
frequently is linked with over-drinking, showed an
equally inconclusive trend. Deathrates compiled by the
Census Bureau show that the rate for this cause declined
steadily from 1911 to 1920 and then the figure fluctuated
within a ratio of one per 200,000 estimated population
from that year until 1934, the latest figure available.
Ix THE WAKE OF PROHIBITION came the bootlegger. Soon
these underworld elements were organized into gangs
under the direction of such men as Al Capone who saw
an opportunity to pile up million-dollar fortunes. The
bootlegger, the speakeasy and the racketeer, all were
silent but sinister signs of the repudiation of prohibition
while it still remained on the law books.
Today the major gangs appear to have been smashed.
Whether this is due to the work of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation operating under new grants of power,
to an aroused public opinion or to repeal itself can not
be demonstrated by figures. Regardless of the cause,
the fact is undisputed, I believe, that criminals are far
less powerful than they were four years ago. Their
golden fountain of income from illicit drink has gone
dry. When they tried to turn to kidnaping as the next
most lucrative substitute and then, in desperation, to
bank robbing, they clashed with the government's armed
special agents. They were beaten by a new militam
agency for law enforcement which had lacked the power
to make arrests in most cases before 1933. Practically all
of the once familiar names of the prohibition era gang-
sters have become buried in dimming memories. These
one-time big shots of crime land have been killed either
by rivals or by law enforcement officers, sent to prison
or retired unobtrusively to a more legitimate business.
Prohibition supporters, knowing that gangsters had
grown powerful and wealthy from the speakeasy and
the beer-running trade, did not hesitate to predict a rise
of crime if the voters invalidated the Eighteenth Amend-
ment. What has happened in this field?
All classifications of major crimes, except rape, showed
decreases or indecisive irregularities during the past six
years, according to Uniform Crime Reports based on all
offenses known to police in sixty-nine cities over 100,000
population which are tabulated by the Department of
Justice. The most recent publication covers the first nine
months of the six years from 1931 to 1936, permitting the
inclusion of the 1936 figures and excluding the transition
quarter at the end of 1933 when repeal first became
effective.*
These sixty-nine cities have a population just under
twenty million or approximately one sixth of the nation's
citizenry. Such a large section of the country certainly
FIVE-YEAR CRIME RECORD*
Year
Criminal
Homicide
Rape
Robbery
Aggravated
Assault
Burglary —
Breaking or
Engineering
Larceny-
Theft
Auto
Theft
1931
2184
914
14,716
7779
51,784
113,352
64,738
1932
1984
947
14,011
7044
56,831
116,845
54,793
1933
2144
985
13,564
8725
58,018
122,926
52,013
1934
1760
970
11,184
7934
54,894
120,629
48,336
1935
1598
1219
9546
7520
52,153
123,321
41,995
1936
1566
1169
8325
7991
44,992
112,602
34,859
22
SURVEY GRAPHIC
presents more significant trends than
compilations of reports from smaller
communities hand-picked for propa-
ganda purposes.
IN ADDITION to collecting data on the
number of known arrests, the De-
partment of Justice also receives hun-
dreds of thousands of fingerprint
records. These are filed at the
Washington headquarters of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation so
that the nation's law enforcers may
have a handy check on a man's pre-
vious record. Statistics based on these
fingerprint records show a steady in-
crease in the percentage of arrests for
drunken driving and for drunken-
ness during the past five years. Ar-
rests for violations of the liquor laws
have decreased materially. This de-
crease was offset by the increase in
driving while intoxicated, alone,
while arrests for drunkenness sky-
rocketed from only 3.6 percent of all
arrests in 1932 to 15.4 percent in 1936.
Statistics for the first nine months of the past five years
showing the percentage of total fingerprints follow:
Disorderly
conduct, etc.
10.3
11.6
11.4
12.1
I \1IMIILA\CI
tiandicapper
in fife's race
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
Driving while
intoxicated
Violation oj
liquor laws
Drunkenness
1.5
5.5
3.6
1.6
2.5
17.0
2.5
2.5
7.9
2.6
2.7
10.0
4.0
2.1
15.4
In current discussions of what repeal has or has not
done, one frequently hears the statement that repeal did
not lower the number of liquor law violators in federal
penitentiaries. What are the facts?
The statement is correct — as far as it goes. It does not
point out, however, that while the number of liquor law
violators in penitentiaries remained fairly constant, the
number of persons serving jail sentences dropped from
26,576 during the fiscal year 1932-33 to 7579 during
1935-36. That represents a decrease of more than two
thirds from the prohibition year figure.
As Sanford Bates, director of the Bureau of Prisons,
writes in his 1935 annual report:
The relief which we expected to come from the repeal of
prohibition has not materialized. During the year 1932.
when the enforcement of the liquor law under the Depart-
ment of Justice was at its height, nearly 50 percent of those
committed to federal institutions were sent there for liquor
law violations. As appears from the subjoined table, this
proportion was reduced by 1934, to about 28 percent. But
for 1935 the proportion is 42 percent, and is approaching
the level of prohibition days.
It will be apparent from an inspection of the tables in
the statistical section of our report that the total number
of persons committed for liquor law violations is not as
large as formerly. Since 1932, the number taken on proba-
tion in federal courts has fallen off nearly 7000, and the
jail population has been reduced considerably. These facts,
coupled with the fact that penitentiary commitments for
JANUARY 1937
1932-33
1934-35
1935-36
3337
4615
5137
26,576
7396
7579
49
25
38
13,863
5202
8595
43,825
17,238
21349
A poster in the N. Y. State Liquor Authority's educational campaign
liquor are substantially the same as they were during pro-
hibition days, indicate an increasing severity of treatment
of liquor violators by the federal courts. In addition to a
slight increase in crime of all kinds this unexpected failure
to reduce the number of liquor violators, taken together
with a slightly diminished number of paroles, accounts for
the sharp increase in our federal institution population.
The number of liquor violators who were convicted
and sentenced to imprisonment or placed on probation
during 1932-33, a typical late prohibition but not the
peak year, and the past two fiscal years follows:
Disposition
SENT TO FEDERAL INSTITUTIONS (')
SENT TO JAILS
SENT TO OTHER INSTITUTIONS
PLACED ON PROBATION
TOTAL
Famed "rum row" off the Atlantic Coast has van-
ished. Writing to the Secretary of the Treasury last
September on law enforcement, Harold N. Graves,
assistant to the Secretary, wrote:
The number of stills seized in operations against illicit
production of liquor remained virtually stationary. [1935 —
15,712; 1936—15,727] However, the quantity of mash re-
ported in connection with still seizure showed a notable
decline and the number of convictions showed a gratifying
increase.
As indicated by the sensational increase in the number
of arrests from driving while intoxicated mentioned
above, the drunken driver of repeal has almost sur-
planted the gangster of prohibition as a social problem.
Members of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's
Christian Temperance Union are not alone in pointing
out the evils of mixing alcohol and gasoline. Newton D.
Baker, who was a member of the Wickersham Commis-
sion that pointed out numerous objections to the "noble
experiment," said during a recent interview at Nashville
1 Includes federal penitentiaries, reformatories and camps.
23
that drunken drivers may force the return of prohibi-
tion upon the American people if they continue the
slaughter of the citizenry.
Massachusetts, one of our most progressive states in
regard to supervision over motor vehicles and accidents,
shows deaths from automobile accidents in which either
motorist or pedestrian was intoxicated at a record high
figure for the fourteen years for which comparable sta-
tistics are available.
The Governor's Committee on Public Safety in Florida
inspected causes of the 597 traffic deaths during 1935 and
found that drunken driving ranked third.
The Arkansas State Police Department regards
drunken drivers as its greatest traffic menace. The
Arkansas State Rangers report that nearly one fourth
of those killed in traffic, died as the result of accidents in
which one or both drivers were drunk.
The Connecticut State Department of Motor Vehicles
made a survey of drunken driving which showed an
actual increase of 33.9 percent during the first half of
1936 as compared with the same period of 1935. In a
summary published by the state were these general com-
ments on the subject of drunken driving:
Intoxicated operators in fatal accidents are as numerous
in the country as in the city.
Intoxicated operators are increasing in the early morning
hours.
Of those killed in 1936 by intoxicated operators, only one
was an intoxicated operator.
Intoxicated women drivers are on the increase — one in
1935 and four in 1936.
Some students of this problem point out that the
dangers of intoxication in driving are magnified as
speedier and speedier automobiles are sold. The drunken
driver at twenty-five miles an hour, while bad enough,
is only a fraction of the danger that he is when he
steps on the gas and shoots his car along the highway
at breakneck speed.
Even the strictest bone dry laws do not safeguard a
community from drunken drivers, it seems. Alabama,
the only state in which a beverage stronger than beer
of one half of one percent is illegal, reported 263 cases
of public drunkenness and 668 persons arrested for driv-
ing while under the influence of intoxicating liquors
during the nine months of 1936.
MORE AND MORE women are being arrested, not only
for driving while intoxicated but for drunkenness as
well. This increase generally has been constant with the
rise in the number of men arrested.
None would question that liquor for women is much
more accessible with a cocktail bar just around the
corner than in the speakeasy days when a person usually
knew only a few limited "spots" at which entry was
easy and then women generally needed escorts. Almost
without exception in the wet metropolitan areas, order-
ing a drink today is less of a ritual than during prohibi-
tion. Although some might question it, I believe one
may logically deduce that the 2808 women arrested dur-
ing the first nine months of 1936 for drunkenness first
learned to imbibe at some speakeasy. The conclusion that
streams inevitably from the arrest figures, it seems to
me, is that repeal has not brought back the moderation
in drinking that was claimed for it by repealists.
Likewise on the campus, repeal has not solved the
problem of how to keep the alumni orderly and reason-
ably sober when they return for football games. President
Harold W. Dodds of Princeton University was sup-
ported widely by college officials throughout the country
when he said: "For the most painful exhibition of bad
manners, one must turn to intercollegiate football games
and the flask-toters and alcoholic partisans who attend
them." Yet when Princeton appealed to all ticket pur-
chasers for the Princeton-Navy game last fall to abstain
from liquor, the students, the alumni and the general
public cooperated. After that game, ground keepers at
the stadium picked up a scant half dozen discarded
liquor bottles as contrasted with two truckloads gathered
up after one 1935 game. The weather, it is true, was
warmer but certainly not two truckloads warmer.
The situation even among undergraduates is not new.
A special survey by the U.S. Office of Education in 1932
showed that drinking was a "serious problem" in 63
of 428 institutions questioned. This was approximately
15 percent of the total. No comparative study of current
conditions is available.
REGARDLESS OF PAST DIFFERENCES of opinion, both wets
and drys agree today on the need for education in safe and
sane drinking. One of the best discussions of the entire
question of drinking liquor is a pamphlet published by
New York's State Liquor Authority. It quotes exten-
sively from scientific sources on how over-indulgence
may damage the body and slow down the nervous re-
actions, a vital factor if one is going to push the throttle
down to the floor board.
With the sole exception of Wyoming, all states require
by law that school pupils be taught about the effects of
excessive use of alcohol and narcotics.
Even the WCTU and Anti-Saloon League are shift-
ing the emphasis in their prohibition appeals from the
emotional to the more scientific. Temperance officials
with whom I have talked frankly admit in private that
prohibition was enacted before a large group of the gen-
eral public was educated to it. They do not propose to
make the same mistake twice.
Under the decidedly educational effects of prohibition
which put their predecessors out of business, present day
distillers and brewers are toeing the line far more than
manufacturers in pre-prohibition days. During the past
six months, the Federal Alcohol Administration has sent
out more than 400 letters pointing out what they con-
sidered to be objectionable points in advertising. Al-
though the FAA frankly admitted that it had no power
to force its views on liquor vendors in these cases, all
but two agreed to change their copy.
AFTER THREE YEARS, it is evident that repeal is
neither a panacea nor a Pandora's box for the problems
of prohibition. On the credit side, repeal has aided re-
covery by putting more than 250,000 men back to legal
work and adding half a billion dollar-s annually to fed-
eral revenues; and it did not bring the predicted increase
in crime generally. On the debit side, repeal has increased
the hazards from drunken driving and has sent more
women — as well as men — to jail as drunks than ever
before. Moderate drinking, it would appear, will not
result from legislation but rather from education.
24
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A NEW LANGUAGE
Visual Education
by OTTO NEURATH
WHEN WILL THE MIDDLE AGES BE AT AN END? As soon as
all men can participate in a common culture and the
canyon between educated and uneducated people has
disappeared. Life in that future day will be more fully
lived and understood. Perhaps everyone will work as a
specialist in his special field, but at the same time he
will — he must — vividly take part in the common life,
sharing understanding of and responsibility for the main
problems of his world.
Our generation is opening the way for this new life
of tomorrow through many activities in many direc-
tions. Part of this preparation is the improvement in our
cultural communication, which is already beginning to
re-shape our whole scheme of education. Education is a
broad area, with many fields, forests, deserts and
swamps. If we are going to increase its harvests, we
must deal with its waste places, clear away the confu-
sion, boredom, narrowness, prejudice, useless tradition
which hinder the process of
humanizing human beings.
We cannot hope to democ-
ratize our cultural life with-
out many new avenues of
communication and educa-
tion. Our present limitations
are barriers to free discussion
of common problems, and to
the dissemination of simple
but important facts. Intelli-
gent people of limited school-
ing frequently are discour-
aged and defeated by their
own handicaps in trying to
reach a higher level of knowl-
edge and understanding and
in seeking a common ground
with those who handle easily
the tools of higher educa-
tion. As a result, we have, in
general, two groups of people
in all countries: the one, very
small, in close contact with
the knowledge of modern
times; and another and very
large group which is scarcely
touched by the great currents
of our present civilization.
Such a genius as Faraday
could explain scientific mat-
ters even to children, as he
did in the famous Lectures
on the Chemical History of
a Candle. But very few teach-
ers and experts are able in
everyday language to open up
the realm of modern science
Reading down:
1 — worker
2— coal
3— coal-worker
4 — mechanized mining
S^hand-mining
in relation to modern life. We need a new way to con-
vey information, a method which is simple to teach
and to learn, and at the same time comprehensive and
exact.
What I might call "consistent visualization" is such a
way. Visual impressions have become more and more
important in our "visual era," and especially to un-
schooled adults and to children. The usual visual meth-
ods— even the most careful charts and the most elaborate
exhibits — are frequently confusing rather than enlight-
ening, because their elements are unfamiliar. It is almost
as though people had to learn a new language for each
new communication. One solution is Isotype, a method
with a special visual dictionary and a special visual
grammar; that is, a new visual world, comparable to
our book and word world. [See Survey Graphic, No-
vember 1936, page 618.] Charts, pictures, models,
movies, games, illustrations can, with a little related
text, show in this symbol language
the main facts and explain the impor-
tant problems in any field of knowl-
edge.
The first step in Isotype is the de-
velopment of easily understood and
easily remembered symbols. The next
step is to combine these symbolic ele-
ments. For example, there is a symbol
for shoe and another for factory. By
joining these two symbols to make a
new one, we can talk about a factory
in which shoes are made. By another
combination of symbols, we can dis-
cuss shoes made by machinery and
shoes made by hand. Similarly we can
add the symbol for coal to the symbol
for worker; and we can make an
Isotype for mechanized mining and
for pick mining. We can place sym-
bols on a map, to show geographical
distribution, or range them in rows
to express statistical relationships.
A man coming into a strange coun-
try without a knowledge of the lan-
guage is uncertain where to get his
boat or railroad ticket, where to check
his baggage, how to use a telephone,
or find a telegraph office, a post-
office, a comfort station, a taxi, a
hotel. An international symbol-lan-
guage would be a boon to the traveler
in a foreign land. Even in his own
country, symbols are better guides
than words alone in giving traffic di-
rections, and as signs in public office
buildings, museums and parks.
This method can also be used as an
I
Reading down:
1 — shoe
2 — factory
3 — shoe factory
4 — machine-
made shoes
5 — handmade
shoes
JANUARY 1937
25
VISUAL HISTORY
FIGHTING MEN
Victors Vanquished
479 B.C.
Battle of
Plataea
216 B.C.
Battle of
Cannae
58 B.C.
Battle of
Blbrachte
955 A.D.
Battle on
the Lechfeld
1190 A.D.
Battles for
Iconium
1231 A.D.
Battle of
Llegnitz
1346 A.D.
Battle of
Crecy
1476 A.D.
Battle of
Morat
GREEKS PERSIANS
HANNIBAL'S ARMY ROMANS
CAESAR'S ARMY HELVETIANS
ARMY OF OTTO THE GREAT MAGYARS
CRUSADERS ARMY OF THE SULTAN OF ICONIUM
ARMY OF JENGHIS KHAN KNIGHTS. SILESIANS. POLES
ENGLISH FRENCH
SWISS ARMY OF CHARLES THE BOLD
Each Figure represents 10,000 soldiers
VISUALIZATION IN PRACTICE
COMMUNICATIONS
telegrams
stamps
telephone
air-mail
money orders
VISUAL DICTIONARY AND GRAMMAR
GRAIN
produced and consumed
produced and exported
imported
COFFEE
produced and consumed
produced and exported
imported
produced and destroyed
stored
VISUAL ECONOMICS
PRODUCTION AND DESTRUCTION OF COFFEE 1933
Each symbol represents 100,000 tons of coffee
black without ship: produced and consumed
black on ship: produced and exported
black with Flame: produced and destroyed
white on ship: imported
introduction to complex historical or social statements.
Many people who are confused by books and lectures
can grasp facts and their relationships through a visual
expression, supplemented only by a brief verbal explana-
tion. The basic aim of this visual method is to human-
ize and democratize the world of knowledge and of
intellectual activity.
The best foundation for a comprehensive visual edu-
cation would be to let all children learn their own lan-
guage and also foreign languages by this method. If a
German, for example, wants to learn English it will
help him to perceive that the English language, far more
than German, is based on opposites, or antonyms. It is
more instructive to show the fact of opposition than to
try to explain it in words. Any child can understand a
picture showing a coming and a going dog. By such
symbols we can help children learn to use words readily.
Such visual education may be started with very young
children, permitting them to combine symbols as they
now combine wooden blocks to make buildings and
bridges. Their play with symbols would supplement the
pictures and designs they make with paints, crayons and
modeling clay. Many imaginative children find they
are unable to handle enough elements to tell long stories
with pencils and colors as they want to do. But they
would be able to express their thoughts and their day-
dreams if they had a supply of visual units, representing
men and women, boys and girls, houses, trees, cars,
engines, animals, rubber, cloth, sugar, apples and all
the other things that interest them. In this way children
would have a bridge between their games and their
systematic education, as well as between their own pic-
tures and the pictures they see hanging on the walls or
in their books, based on the law of perspective. It is
of course important to give children of all ages photo-
graphs and other realistic material, but it is also impor-
tant to explain schematically biological, geographic, his-
toric and sociological facts and principles.
In this way learning is not limited to acquiring the
LANGUAGE
EDUCATION
GO
Examples of language
teaching by pictures.
Taken from the book
by Otto Neurath, Basic
by Isotype. Publisher,
Kegan Paul, London
COME
IN
OUT
HEALTH
EDUCATION
Symbols Developed
for Poster*.
RICKETS
Left column: Without
treatment
Right column: With
medical treatment
From the book,
International Picture
Language, .
by Otto Neurath
28
facts necessary to pass examinations, and then not using
these facts.again. Students are led to understand the rela-
tionships of the facts within one subject field. Even more
important, they are enabled to see how one division of
knowledge is related to the facts and the theories of
other fields. We cannot say that a young person knows
what he needs to know of geography, for example, if
he can tell you only the names of the capital cities of the
different countries, and has memorized the names and
the locations of the important rivers and mountain
ranges. If geography is to be a vital thing to him, he
must see the ways in which it has affected history in the
past, as well as today. Often these relationships are quite
complicated. The visual method helps make them clear
and exact to the pupil.
Symbols in general are adapted to the child mind, as
they are to primitive minds. Yet the simple elements can
be made to show the most complicated facts and rela-
tionships. The visual method is also applicable to adult
education. Used in connection with the customary mu-
seum materials, visual models and charts complete and
enrich the exhibits in museums of fine arts, natural
history, ethnology or hygiene.
This visual method has special uses in teaching
public health lessons, child care, safety, and so on, to
adults and to children; and in teaching retarded or
handicapped children. The International Foundation for
Visual Education is working along these lines in many
countries.
The visual method, fully developed, becomes the basis
for a common cultural life and a common cultural rela-
tionship. Visualization, rightly understood, is not only
a supplement to other educational methods, but also a
foundation for the more successful education of tomor-
row in relation to important cultural and social move-
ments of today.
And so we return to our first question: when will the
Middle Ages end? We do not know. We see war, the
conflict of men against men, instead of a common fight
against common danger, and the organized upbuilding
of a better civilization. But we see new forces at work
too, and new possibilities. To give them free play, we
need more channels of communication and understand-
ing. Here, I believe, the visual method is a significant
development.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A Militant Trade Union
MINNEAPOLIS: MUNICIPAL PROFILE
by CHARLES R. WALKER
In his final article on Minneapolis Mr. Walker scrutinizes the
storm center of the city: Local 544, the economic dynamo,
citadel, school and club of the truck drivers
IN THE PAST TWO YEARS General Drivers Local 574, now
544, has become something of a legend in the Northwest.
Its enemies regard it as a calamity, its friends as an
almost magical power. The general public believes pro-
foundly that "for better or for worse" its presence in any
"labor situation" is decisive. It has the reputation among
trade unionists of having been a key factor in making
Minneapolis a union town, and among many business
men of having established a "labor dictatorship" in Min-
neapolis.
If you visited its headquarters on Plymouth Avenue
any time during the past two years you would have
found one to a dozen individuals or delegates from labor
organizations asking assistance of 574. Organizers loaned
men for the picket line, gave advice and financial assist-
ance: 574 never turned down a petitioner. Much of
574's influence in labor situations flows unquestionably
from its jurisdiction over trucking, which is strategic in
a commercial and transportation center like Minneapolis.
Minneapolis and what is now Local 544 are in many
ways unique but they are a part of the contemporary
scene in the American labor movement. Everywhere
in labor circles there is a drive for organization. The
yeast of this movement is unquestionably "the progres-
sive and militant trade union" which tends toward an
industrial as against a craft union philosophy.
Local 544 is not an industrial union but many of its
members and leaders are sympathetic to industrial union-
ism and its structure combines features from both indus-
trial and craft forms. This article will attempt to picture
its mechanics, and analyze its methods and purposes.
Local 544 in its present form arose from the bitter
"drivers' strikes" of 1934 in Minneapolis. [See Survey
Graphic, November 1936, page 620.] Its subsequent
history has been an equally turbulent struggle for sur-
vival and expansion.
A feature which has distinguished 544 from its more
conservative, and what might be called "laissez-faire"
sister unions is its almost "military efficiency" in organi-
zation. The strikes themselves gave a dramatic example
of it. Strike headquarters combined a commissary where
5000 workers were fed each day, a hospital, a hall for
mass meetings equipped with microphone and loud
speaker, and a garage housing scores of trucks which
were dispatched with flying squadrons of pickets. The
town had been carefully divided into picket districts and
some hundreds of instructions for picket captains mime-
ographed before the strike was called. This same atten-
tion to detailed preparation plus swiftness in execution
has been carried forward in the union's "peace time
activities."
Another characteristic of the progressive as compared
with the less militantly aggressive unions is a tendency
JANUARY 1937
to rely solely on the labor movement to secure economic
betterment. By 1934 workers in Minneapolis and else-
where were depending more and more on the economic
strength of their own organization in collective bargain-
ing as against legislative enactments of the New Deal or
arbitration by government agencies. When E. J. Dun-
nigan, Department of Labor conciliator, was sent to Min-
neapolis in 1934, he proposed in effect that the union
make him their representative with the employers. The
leaders handed him their demands. "Now what is the
minimum out of these that you'll take?" said Mr. Dun-
nigan. "We authorize you," said the union leaders, "to
try to get those demands from the boss. If there's bar-
gaining to be done, we'll do it ourselves. Just report back
how far you get."
The mediator left in a huff. But ultimately the union
won its demands. The union has held to this intolerant
skepticism of anything other than direct negotiations be-
tween union and employer. Bill Brown, president of the
union for fifteen years, sums history prior to 1934 as
follows :
I joined the Drivers' Union in 1919. We had our regular
meetings and the fellers would beef till two in the morning.
I once proposed an organization campaign, but a couple of
members got into an argument as to who'd moved the
heaviest piano that day. That ended the discussion. . . .
Finally for some reason or other, the Teamsters Council
gave me the job of International Organizer in 1933. So I
decided to work with a few guys who knew how to organ-
ize. We had dwindled down to ninety members. Now
we've got five thousand. After the coal owners had refused
us recognition, I proposed to the Teamsters Council that
we strike. I said, "If we lose we're no worse off than we
are, this is no union we've got anyway. The workers want
to organize if they can get confidence in us. If we win the
coal strike we can organize the whole trucking industry."
They did.
FOLLOWING THE STRIKES in the summer of 1934 the union
passed through the most critical period in its history.
Union control fell back into the hands of the leaders
who had governed the organization for twenty years.
They differed in practice and in principle with the "new
ideas." This leadership tended to split up the consoli-
dated driving trades which composed the new union
into their respective crafts. Membership slipped from
several thousand at the strike peak to eight hundred.
Finally Brown called for resignation of the "whole ex-
ecutive board," and the membership promptly elected
a progressive slate. Membership rose steadily to its
present high of five thousand, plus an additional three
or four thousand in the unemployed section. Reac-
tions of Minneapolis citizens to this ever growing
power have varied from tolerance to wild enthusiasm
29
on the one hand and to bitter opposition on the other.
There is no surer or more dramatic way of experienc-
ing the difference between an old line union and the new
and militant variety than in attending any general mem-
bership meeting of Local 544. Notoriously the average
American trade union conducts its "regular business"
with but a fraction of its dues paying membership. A
new and militant union, constantly at war with enemies
within as well as without the labor movement, must
involve a large portion of its membership in active work
if it is to survive. Each time I attended one of the reg-
ular bi-monthly meetings of 544 there was a large attend-
ance, plenty of arguments but an astonishing amount of
business transacted between eight and eleven.
Cross-section of the Union
ONE REASON FOR THE AMOUNT of routine business con-
ducted at 544 membership meetings despite their live-
liness is that each "section" of the union (ice, taxi, trans-
fer, and so on) has met previously to conduct its own
private affairs. In the general membership meeting sec-
tional questions are barred, the agenda permits only
business of interest to the whole union. The laissez-faire
unions tend to restrict membership to craft lines, the
militants to expand toward industrial jurisdiction. Daniel
Tobin, president of the Teamsters, expelled Local 574
after the strikes of 1934, but offered to take it back if it
would dismember itself along craft lines. The union
refused. The only hope of success for any separate trade
lay, the leadership believed, in organizing the whole in-
dustry into one union. And the structure has continued
in peace time.
As in most trade unions the full membership meeting
of 544 is the supreme authority. Next comes the execu-
tive board, a policy forming agency; next the stewards,
one or more with each company having a contract
with the union. "There are 120 stewards and they are
the backbone of the union," says Farrell Dobbs. The
stewards are the daily contact between the workers and
the boss; the grievances of the men come to their ears
first, and they are usually first to. report anti-union moves
on the part of a hostile employer. The stewards as a
group meet twice monthly just before the membership
meeting, and the executive board meets with them. Thus
the union leaders keep in close touch with the workings
of a far flung organism. For 544 because of the atomic
nature of the trucking industry deals with 500 separate
employers. Conversely if the executive board contem-
plates a change in policy they hammer it out with the
stewards — at once the most loyal and the most experi-
enced men in the union— before presenting it to the
membership.
As in any successful organization, there is in 544 a
subtle and personal division of labor in the leadership.
The president, Bill Brown, is known to thousands of
truck drivers in Minneapolis. He drove a truck himself
for twenty years. He speaks the lingo with original and
sarcastic rephrasings of his own. He is a popular speaker
and a good chairman. When it comes to policy or
strategy Bill admits he leans on the others. Dobbs and
Skoglund, two other members of the executive board,
are usually given assignments in contract negotiation.
V. R. Dunne has been the union's long head on general
policy. Besides these there are half a dozen organizers,
like Kelly Postal and Ray Rainbolt, who, as the rank
and file committee, ran the strike when the union's lead-
ers had been seized by the militia and placed in a mili-
tary stockade. Since the union's recent reentry into the
International, new officers and organizers have been
added; but there seems to have been no change either in
the tactics or the internal harmony of the leadership.
In the two and a half years since the 1934 strike, the
union has engaged in a number of sectional strikes, has
conducted an almost continuous recruiting campaign,
and has been constantly bringing pressure on one or
more groups of employers for renewal or extension of
contracts. It has assisted other striking unions and
through its unemployed section it has further meddled
in the administration of city relief. Each phase of this
record and its sum has been the subject of bitter con-
troversy in Minneapolis.
What are termed the "confiscatory wage demands" of
Local 544 I have discussed with employers, social work
executives, conservative labor leaders, and other Min-
neapolis citizens less directly involved. I find there is
a large body of what might be termed middle ground
opinion sympathetic with labor unions as such, but
which sharply criticizes Local 544 for its "extreme," and
hence "impractical" wage policy. In agreement with
many economists these critics point out that if the wage
rate is driven above the marginal productivity of labor,
there will be fewer jobs and labor itself will suffer. The
union, of course, replies that $28 a week is not an exces-
sive wage, and that it cannot take the responsibility for
lowering the general wage to keep afloat what it in turn
terms marginal businesses. The opinion that the wage
demands of Local 544 are uneconomic for the city as 'a
whole, however, is widespread among liberal groups in
the city. I discussed this point more fully in Article II
of this series. Here I shall consider equally serious
counts by certain citizens against the integrity of the
union, as such. These can be grouped under three
heads: a corrupt leadership; racketeering practices
against employers; coercion and intimidation of workers.
ONE HEARS IN MINNEAPOLIS many stories, the import of
which is that 544's leaders live riotously at the expense
of the union treasury. Thus, an official of a large em-
ployers' association told me: "I know a man who
-, the 544 leader, entering a house of ill-fame
saw
last week with a roll of $400 in his pocket." In this as
in a hundred other instances I heard, no direct evidence
was forthcoming. I have personally known the leader
in question a number of years, and my own impression
confirms his union reputation for honesty and sobriety.
On the whole I believe little respect should be accorded
this type of evidence and none to the purveyors of it. I
made a special effort to check the serious charge that the
leaders have stolen or manipulated union funds for their
own use. A number of responsible citizens of Min-
neapolis believe this and referred me as their source to a
former government official who has been active as a
local mediator. I went to the official. "Do you know
this to be true?" I asked. "Certainly," he said. "I'll
prove it to you. The dues of the union are $1.60 a month.
There are 4000 members in the union. The initiation
fee is $3.00. Figure that up. It's quite a lot of money.
The former treasurer of the union had a good job with
30
SURVEY GRAPHIC
In the July strike of 1934 the headquarters of the truck drivers' union functioned with military efficiency
Acme
the Western Electric Company a few years ago. Sud-
denly, he turns up working in a Minneapolis coal yard.
He joins the union and within a year is treasurer. I
have no doubt that the labor leader in question is making
a good thing out of Local 544. How else explain it?"
On investigation I learned that the "labor leader in
question" did work for the Western Electric Company,
first as a telephone line man, later in the office of the
division superintendent. He lost his job in the depres-
sion and went to work in a Minneapolis coal yard where
his father also worked. He joined the union, struck with
the rest of the coal men, and in the fall of 34 was chosen
treasurer. All conservative labor leaders in Minneapolis
with whom I talked, while critical of his "radical philos-
ophy" attested to his honesty and ability. His name is
Farrell Dobbs.
Similar charges of graft and misappropriation of funds
are made against all the leaders of Local 544. So far as
I have been able to discover, the evidence on which they
are based is similarly unsubstantial and their sources are
less trustworthy than the one I have quoted.
As to charge number two, I presume in Minneapolis,
as in other cities, gangster elements in the labor move-
ment "shake down" employers on occasion. But I have
been assured by several employers that this art is the
main source of 544's revenue and power. A notable in-
stance of the charge was made during a fruit company
strike last summer. Rumors were rife that Local 544
was forcing small grocery stores to pay "protection"
during the strike, while the Minneapolis employers' asso-
ciation was charging Local 544 with "coercing" the inde-
pendent grocers. Investigating the strike I found the
following: An independent grocer called the union hall,
said he understood a contribution of $25 was desired and
indicated his willingness to pay it. The union promptly
recruited a crew of ten organizers to visit not only the
prospective contributor but all grocers explaining that
strike was against the fruit company and not the grocers.
and that no contribution was desired or would be
accepted.
In contrast to charges one and two, my investigation
of point number three clearly reveals coercion of certain
types of workers. I can illustrate the fact and summarize
the opposing viewpoints by giving an instance of coer-
cion which I witnessed myself. A large transfer com-
pany in Minneapolis organized some three years ago
was found to have a full union membership except for
one man. Since organization, there had been three
separate wage increases in the company totaling a net
increase of 40 percent. Seniority rights and other union
conditions prevailed. The one recalcitrant non-unionist
was interviewed by three organizers. They said : "You've
had plenty of chance to find out what this is all about.
You've taken everything the union gave you and given
the union nothing. Now join up." The man joined.
There is no doubt that Local 544, like any other aggres-
sive union has used similar or severer tactics against other
rugged individualists who refused to submit to majority
rule. An employer to whom I told this story said that
the union had violated "the man's right to work without
interference from anybody." To his fellow truck drivers,
however, the man had long been violating every obliga-
tion to his social group.
"But the point is," said a liberal employer in Minne-
apolis to me, "that a union that bases its strength on
intimidating its membership into paying dues is a men-
ace to the community." No one can disagree with this,
but the whole record of Local 544 refutes the charge.
Any organization that offers nothing but "restriction of
individual liberty" can only hold its membership by
JANUARY 1937
31
employes of private organizations, and hence although
your professional knowledge and training is valuable
in administration, your attitude largely reflects that of
your well-to-do supporters whose main interest is in
cutting relief budgets. You treat the public relief client as
you have been accustomed to treat the objects of private
charity."
In the summer and fall of 1936 the issue which pro-
duced the sharpest division, and illustrates the deep roots
of the conflict, was the question of a re-registration of all
relief clients. The oldest member of the Welfare Board,
a business man long active in social welfare work fav-
ored the measure, he told me, because he felt the re-
registration would be an effective means of weeding out
chisellers, and seeing that the bona fide needy received
relief. He told me that due to the pressure of 544, and
of Farmer-Laborites on the Welfare Board, the relief
load had been so swollen it cost the city's taxpayers over
a million and a quarter a year. He felt it was time to
call a halt.
The Welfare Board — which had lost two of its more
radical Farmer-Laborites — passed the motion for re-
registration with one dissenting vote, that of Mrs. Selma
Seestrom, who, with other militant Farmer-Laborites,
and the Federal Workers Section of 544 protested that
the re-registration was a deliberate effort to cut relief
standards and intimidate clients. They pointed out that
the re-registration contained a "pauper's oath" which the
client was compelled to sign to get relief. Federal Work-
ers Section of 544 advised its members not to sign the
force — if at all. Local 544 has promised and delivered
substantial benefits. Speaking generally the wage in-
crease in the trucking industry has been from 30 to 50
percent since 1934, plus seniority rights, time and a third
for overtime and other union conditions. It is unlikely
that the majority of their recipients have been recruited
by force, unless truck drivers are less human in their
economic responses than their fellowmen.
Local 544 and Relief
ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL of all 544's activities is
its so-called meddling in the city's administration of re-
lief. The depression has run its course in Minnesota with
a Farmer-Labor state administration in the saddle, and
later in Minneapolis with the city administration con-
trolled in large measure by the same party. These
political leaders promptly applied their philosophy as
well as their authority to the subject of relief. Their
theories and methods conflicted with those of the major-
ity of leading social workers, and of those Welfare Board
officials in sympathy with the social work group. Both
sides in the struggles that followed have assured me that
this was and is the key to the difficulties in the admin-
istration of public relief in Minneapolis. Upon certain
issues, I find representatives of unions or of the Farmer-
Labor party divide, the more conservative supporting the
position of leading social workers and of other citizens.
On the other hand, within the ranks of social workers,
there is a left wing minority that tends to side with
aggressive Farmer-Laborites and with such militant un-
employed organizations as 544's "Fed-
eral Workers Section." But for the most
part, the position of the bulk of the social
agencies and their supporters tends
toward one type of approach; and that
of the Farmer-Laborites, the unions and
the organized unemployed toward an-
other.
Let me state as clearly as possible the
two conflicting positions. The social agen-
cies believe that it is possible and de-
sirable to keep relief out of politics, that
it is a matter for efficient administrative
handling by the professionally trained.
They stress the impossibility of securing
unlimited sums from the taxpayer. They
charge that the Farmer-Labor group in
the Welfare Board in 1934 and 1935, sup-
ported by the organized unemployed,
especially the Federal Workers Section
of 544, use relief for political purposes,
that they demoralize its administration
and in some cases turn the Welfare
Board into a racket for individual labor
leaders and individual unions. From this
situation they insist the relief client him-
self is the chief sufferer.
The militant Farmer-Laborites and the
organized unemployed organizations re-
ply: Relief should be controlled by work-
ers and their representatives in the
Farmer-Labor party and in the organi-
zations of the unemployed. "You social
workers," they Say, "are, many of you, Striking truck drivers receiving their orders from the union in 1934
32
SURVEY GRAPHIC
new registration, and picketed ail relief stations in Min-
neapolis. Appearing with counsel at a Welfare Board
meeting which I attended, they charged the Welfare
Board with "illegal compulsion" through the required
oath, and advised that unless the re-registration plan
was rescinded they would bring the question into court.
The oath was finally removed without, however, re-
solving the controversy. Probing behind immediate
issues I find that the more conservative members of the
Welfare Board as well as nearly all the social agencies
in the Twin Cities direct their sharpest criticism at the
influence of Local 544 through its unemployed section.
These critics hold that the origin of the Federal Workers
Section lay in the use of the unemployed by the truck
drivers' union on the 1934 strike picket lines. They
charge the union leadership with using coercion to get
loafers, hoboes and the unemployed on the picket line to
help fight the union's battles.
THAT THE UNEMPLOYED PICKETED along with truck driv-
ers in 1934 there can be no question, but interpretation
of this "tactic" differs sharply in Minneapolis. Organized
labor generally regards the participation of the unem-
ployed in the truck drivers' strike as entirely legitimate,
a heartening and even heroic chapter in labor history.
The unemployed not only refused to scab, but joined the
strikers on the picket line.
Whatever the solution of the relief problem in Min-
neapolis, it is important to point out that tensions in this
field as in all others are related to the wider economy of
the city, and not unrelated to the city's past. The eco-
nomic decline of the region, by decreasing opportunities
for employment, has unquestionably added to the relief
burden in this time of nation-wide unemployment, and
of tax delinquency in many Minnesota counties. On
the other hand, need for rehabilitation, resettlement and
so on, has demanded an increasing share of the tax-
payer's dollar, quite apart from the demands on that
same dollar by the city's unemployed. And it must be
remembered that in a social situation achievements are
not absolute, but should properly be measured against
the complexity and difficulty of the job.
Challenge to the City
To RETURN to the activities of the truck drivers' union
— the union's newspaper, The Northwest Organizer, is
one of 544's most famous and characteristic features.
Originating at the time of the July strike, it was the first
daily strike newspaper published by an American trade
union. It now appears as a weekly with a circulation lar-
ger than that of the official organ of the Central Labor
Union. Week by week it prints labor news and attacks
its enemies with a whole-hearted gusto characteristic of
its militant viewpoint and the native temper of its truck
driving membership.
Characteristic in style, punch and 544 humor is, for
example, this item which appeared in the midst of a
rumor that "Communist and Terrorist 544 is about to
start another general strike to ruin Minneapolis and
establish Communism":
There has been considerable speculation recently as to the
possibilities of another general trucking strike in Minne-
apolis. This has apparently been aroused because of a num-
ber of recent strikes against individual concerns by Local
544. These strikes took place because the employer was not
abiding by the terms of the strike settlement of August
1934. It seems that some employers are not in possession
of a memory capable of functioning over a twelve-month
period. It is therefore necessary, from time to time, to
refresh their power of retention.
As may be surmised such an editorial approach de-
lights the union's friends and consistently irritates its
many critics.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the
average truck driver regards Local 544 simply as an eco-
nomic dynamo for winning the union scale. It is also,
for him, a school, a club and a recreation center. Classes
in economics and history are held several times a week
in one of the union halls. The union has its own band
and holds dances in the big hall at the top of the old
skating rink which it rents as headquarters. Some two
or three hundred men can always be found there in the
evening playing cards or checkers, "chewing the fat,"
and patronizing the bar in the recreation room.
During the past summer, this militant local, which for
nearly two years had been officially an "outlaw" in the
labor movement, was readmitted into the Teamsters In-
ternational. It was taken back with no change in its
structure and an agreement that, contrary to precedent,
no change would be required in its progressive policies.
It provided for an arrangement of fifty-fifty represen-
tation of the former officers with new officers of the
International. This return of an expelled militant union
to the fold of the AF of L with no change in policies
is unusual in American labor annals.
The organizer comments on this latest phase of the
union's career with a strong sense of its historic impor-
tance:
What seemed to thousands of workers three years ago, as
well nigh an impossible task is an accomplished fact to-
day. All attention now must be focused upon the tasks
ahead. The drivers must lead the way to the organization
and unionization of the unorganized workers of the state
and the Northwest. Powerful in their own right, the drivers
can augment this power in only one way. That is, by fol-
lowing the example of Local 544, giving aid to other groups
of workers in making their way into the ranks of the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor. This road has been definitely laid
out; it must be improved and extended.
One can, I think, agree with the implication of these
words that in the present movement for organization
afoot in the American labor movement, the militant
unions will play an important role. At this writing and
under existing circumstances their number and influence
seems far more likely to grow than to diminish.
The reentry of this stormy petrel of trade unions into
the fold of the American Federation of Labor has not
silenced its many enemies in Minneapolis among employ-
ers or even its critics within the labor movement who
assert it is continuing its objectionable tactics "under dif-
ferent numerals," and that it is a menace to the peace and
prosperity of the city. But as I indicated in my previous
articles, I am inclined to believe that the city of Minne-
apolis in adjusting itself to a variety of new phenomena
which the depression and its aftermath has introduced
will adjust itself in the end even to as lively and bellicose
a phenomenon as Local 544.
JANUARY 1937
33
The Old Fashioned
Girl of Modern Japan
by HELEN MEARS
A first-hand portrait of Miss Nippon, the girl behind the
export statistics, whose transition from medievalism, and
what becomes of her in the process, will measure the future
of industrial Japan
Photographs by the author
IT is IRONIC that the least militant element in the Jap-
anese population should be the aggressive weapon of
industrial Japan. The little girl in the flowered kimono
standing with her paper parasol among the cherry blos-
soms is for all her apparent fragility the strongest link
in the chain of Japanese expansion. The Japanese
woman has long been the symbol of femininity. Her
qualities form a catalog of the womanly virtues. She is
self-effacing, gentle, anxious to please, tactful, softly
acquiescent, apparently imperturbable. She has the very
feminine qualities which the European leaders praise
as they displace their women from industry and put
them back in the home to raise babies. The Japanese
have it worked out better. The birthrate is high enough
so that Japan can plausibly use the population-pressure
theory as one of the reasons for territorial expansion.
But to maintain this birthrate they do not keep theii
women out of industry. On the contrary, Japanese women
produce cotton textiles at the rate of two and three-
quarter billion exportable yards a year — and babies at
the rate of 117 survivors an hour. In Japan you see a
machine age application of die most ancient social eco-
nomic pattern in the world. The women are workers as
well as mothers, and their labor, on the farm and in the
light industries, frees the men for the heavy industries
and, potentially, the army.
The significant element is that the textile industry ac-
counted for 53.2 percent of Japan's exports in 1934; and
that 83.3 percent of the operatives in this industry are the
little girls who look so helpless when posed with a
parasol against the cone of Mt. Fuji.
These are significant figures. If an industry can in-
crease its production 117 percent in a nine-year period,
it is well worth investigating. It has been investigated.
The Japanese put out brochures explaining The Secret
of Japan's Trade Expansion. Foreign observers confirm
their conclusions: rationalization, efficiency of opera-
tion, and the advantage derived from the December
1931 devaluation of the yen, have all played a part.
But the important advantage which the Japanese have
34
over their western competitors is their supply of "happy,
enthusiastic, intelligent" workers. How does the system
work to produce such an unusual body of workers?
First, a word of caution to the American reader.
There are situations in our own textile fields that would
arouse the average Japanese manufacturer to genuine
indignation. It is not the purpose here to view with
alarm the encroachments of Japan on the markets of the
world. Of the total world trade today, Japan has only
3.7 percent. That is no great threat to our standard of
living. But at a time when social organization the world
over is being subjected to incredible stresses it is inter-
esting to examine a system that so far, by statistical
proof, has functioned without a hitch.
The Girl Behind the Graphs
THE HAPPY intelligent girl workers of Japan are not
confined to the textile industry, but they have made their
most spectacular demonstration there. The workers who
produce the stuff on which Japan's export trade is
based are unlike any other group of workers anywhere.
They are young, twelve to twenty-two (in 1920, 100,770
out of 667,201 were under fifteen years) ; they are
transitory, the average length of service is three years.
The typical mill worker is recruited from her farm
home by an agent who advances her travel expenses and
a small sum to the parents, and these advances are de-
ducted from her earnings. She lives in a dormitory,
behind the mill walls, eats in a communal dining-room,
and has nothing to worry about except getting up at
four a.m. (when on the morning shift), scrubbing the
corridor of the dormitory and sweeping out the sleep-
ing (and living) room which ten girls share, and
working at her machine from five a.m. till two p.m.
with a half hour for lunch. She carries with her into
these roaring caverns of industry her courtesy and her
imperturbability. If while flitting between her forty
looms she becomes aware of the plant manager and a
foreign visitor she will take time to stop and bow, a
sharp little bow automatic as her Toyoda loom. In her
SURVEY GRAPHIC
white cap, her white blouse, and short black skirt
above her chunky legs, she seems as unlike the Madame
Butterfly conception as a mask is unlike a human being.
Off duty, sliding along the corridor, bound for the
communal bath, her long hair bobbing in a braid down
her back, her blouse and skirt changed for a kimono,
once again meeting the manager and a visitor she will
again stop dead and bow, bobbing like those Japanese
dolls of porcelain whose heads wag continuously at the
touch of a finger. If she is employed by one of the first
class (large, rationalized) mills, her afternoon and eve-
ning, except for a free hour and a half for washing
clothes and such, and a half hour for dinner, are spent
in n classroom where the courses of instruction range
from sewing to ethics and deportment. In the good
mills she is given an occasional treat, a movie or a pic-
nic. Even in the mills where there are no classes ex-
cept perhaps sewing, during her term of service she is
not allowed to leave the mill grounds until her indebt-
edness is paid, and thereafter leaving is made so difficult,
and she has so little money that virtually she lives the
life of a religious, dedicated to the service of her home
and country, housed and fed and protected while she
handles the spindles and looms that make so uncom-
fortable the textile-producing folk everywhere.
She works six days a week with Sunday a holiday and
is not paid for the days she does not work.* She begins
at a wage that in the United States would be $3.24 for
a month of twenty-seven days and from this the com-
pany gets $1.35 a month for board. Lodging, and the
classes on flower arrangement, ethics, and so on, are
free. After her indebtedness — of transportation, uni-
forms, and advance to the parents— is paid off (it gen-
erally takes six months) she receives an allowance of
17 cents a month all for herself, with which she may
buy toothpaste, or a brace for her sash or toilet tissue,
* For simplicity, tlie yen wages have been translated into approximate
il.illar valuations in terms of tile 1935 exchange. One yen equals 3.5
cents. In terms of purchasing power these dollar wages do not represent
a literal equivalent. The different price level and the differences in way
of life must be taken into consideration before an accurate picture
emerges. In addition to the regular wage, certain supplementary wages
are paid in the form of "welfare activities" (including housing, food,
education, health measures, recreation, retirement allowance). A recent
government study of 238 cotton-spinning mills found that the annua!
average per worker of factory expense for supplementary wages amounted
to about $6. Of the wage level of Japanese industrial labor as a whole
(if the girl textile worker is deducted) an International Labour Office
report of 1934, shows that the Japanese wages in 1931 were almost
equivalent in gold value to those of Poland and Italy.
or some one of the little feminine essentials without
which no girl can continue to be enthusiastic and intel-
ligent. If her allowance does not cover her necessities
she may secure them at the store conveniently within
the mill walls, and charge them against her salary. (This
feature of the system will not be an innovation to our
own textile management.) At the end of eighteen
months she will be raised to $4.55 a month and her per-
sonal allowance increased to 35 cents. When she leaves
at the end of three years she may be earning as much as
$8.91 a month. The unusual girl who stays for five or six
years may earn as much as $13.50. Once or twice a year
she receives a bonus which ranges from 35 cents to as
much as $5, the average being under one dollar. Her
savings at the end of three years can amount to $70.
The average is $25. After deductions, including allow-
ance, her wage is sent home to her parents, who prob-
ably will save at least part of it for her trousseau. For
in this respect she may well feel happy. She need never
fear becoming an old maid, and she need not go
through the nerve strain of making the decision about
her future husband for herself. The parents will find her
a suitable young man, and if his family approves of her
family, and if the trousseau is acceptable, they will marry
and her production of textiles shifts to the production
,>f babies.
IT is EASY to see how satisfactory management finds
workers of this type. There have been few evidences of
labor trouble in the textile industry of Japan- Moreover,
foreign observers who visit these mills tensed for indig-
nation come out shaking their heads, and making reports
that go like this:
The girls live a wholesome sheltered life, and eight
and a half hours work (which is the rule in the large
mills which the foreign investigators see, although the
Factory Law allows eleven hours) trains and disciplines
them and fits them for life. At the age when American
girls are chasing about all over the place, or in highschool,
or fooling around with boys, or learning to drink and
dance, or spending their parents' hard-earned money on
foolishness, these Japanese girls are learning how to fill
their place as serious adults in a serious world. It works.
Look at Japan, what she is doing in the world. It is the
stamina of her people that makes it possible. And such
stamina comes only from discipline and learning the
From the outside this dormitory of a Tokyo textile mill loots like an industrial section anywhere
JANUARY 1937
35
realities of life. To these girls their country's good is more
important than their own frivolous pursuits. And in the
long run they benefit and are happier.
You can find this speech duplicated in all languages
including the Teutonic-
Rationalization of a System
IT MAY HAVE BEEN by pure accident that the Japanese
hit upon this system that seems to work so well for
them. But Japanese leaders recognize a good thing when
they see it. As the larger mills become more and more
rationalized their number of operatives decreases. This
does not mean that the girl workers find time hanging
heavy on their hands. As they leave the spindles they
move over into such jobs as oiling machines and making
minor repairs. One theory advanced by a Japanese jour-
nalist is that having established the textile industry as a
going concern, the little Japanese girl is about to do the
same for other export products. Let me quote:
. . . hitherto the export of our country merely depended
on the textile industry, but recently we can see the rapid
progress of new industries, which we did not think of and
which is quite different from the textile industry. Com-
modities such as electric bulbs, rubber products (such as
rubber tires, rubber toys, and rubber shoes) are the products
of the so-called new industries. These are called miscel-
laneous goods . . . and can be produced by the enterprises
of very small proportions. The export amount of these arti-
cles is so small it cannot stand comparison with that of the
textile industry. But of late years, the articles which have
been produced in a very small quantity, and which were
thought not worth while numbering began to invade for-
eign countries with very great force. This is a phenomenon
which attracts our attention. Another important point,
which attracts our keenest interest and attention is the
fact that almost all laborers in some industries and at least
half in others are women laborers. This fact together with
the problem that most of the textile laborers are women
offers a subject of study as one of the still new women
labor problems.
Let us look at these "so-called new industries" and see
if this commentator is justified in considering them as
the second line defense of Japan's export artillery. In
the ten years between 1923 and 1932 the export of elec-
tric bulbs increased from 13,395,000 to 273,456.000, while
the price fell nearly two thirds. From January 1931
through December 1933 exports of rubber shoes almost
doubled, and exports of toys quadrupled. Exports of
shoes, hats and caps, buttons, watches and clocks, lamps,
machinery and parts, bottled and tinned foods and drink
have all shown a satisfactorily steady increase. The jour-
nalist is wrong in saying that all of the new industries
are called "miscellaneous." They are distributed in a
number of categories. He is right that each of them
makes a small percent of the total export value (in yen),
but lump them together and call them: miscellaneous,
9.2 percent; chemicals, 6.5 percent; machinery and parts,
5.7 percent; beverages and comestibles, 3.7 percent; and
you get a total of 25.1 percent of the export trade of
1934. And included somewhere in these totals are the
"so-called new industries" that our journalist friend was
writing about. In 1925 the same industries totaled only
15.9 percent of the export trade.
In these industries the number of women workers
has impressively increased while in chemicals, machinery
and parts, and miscellaneous industries the number of
men operatives has actually decreased. In 1920, in the
chemical industry 28.8 percent of the workers were
women. In 1933, they were 35 percent. In food and
drink, in 1920, women were 16.7 percent. In 1933, 17
percent. In machinery, women were 5.7 percent in
1920. In 1933, 8.7 percent. In miscellaneous, 29 percent in
1920. In 1935, 51.7 percent. These figures speak for
themselves. Additional light is thrown by a report made
by Farnand Maurette for the International Labour Of-
fice in 1934. In the match factory which he visited the
workers were 64.3 percent women. In the large porcelain
and pottery factory, 40 percent were women, although
the official total for the industry is 18 percent. M. Mau-
rette found that the large factories, where women are
largely employed, made the superior wares for export,
while the bulk of that intended for home use came from
the small factories. He found that 77.5 percent of the
workers in a factory for making electric light bulbs were
women; in that of watches and clocks 29.31; bicycles,
44.4 percent; breweries, 53 percent. By official figures
women are 45.8 percent in the manufacture of rubber
and celluloid articles and even in the explosive industry
the women are 44.3 percent. The wages of these women
workers are consistently under half of those the men
receive at the same or similar jobs.
Class in deportment: how to enter a room and leave it
Japanese women are "demanded and welcomed by
their employers for their cheap labor, diligence and
obedience," comments a journalist in the Japan Times,
who goes on to explain that in the non-dormitory, non-
contract industries (and in banks and business offices)
employers are beginning to enforce regulations govern-
ing terms of employment so that no girl worker over
thirty is allowed to retain a job. This ensures the turn-
over of the young and low scale wage workers whose
36
SURVEY GRAPHIC
efficiency and tractability have been so thoroughly dem-
onstrated.
Modern improvements are projected into the future
further to utilize these young girls. Of the five and one-
half million farm families of Japan, 36.7 percent were, in
1932, raising silk worms as a subsidiary occupation. The
drop in silk prices and the competition of rayon seriously
affected the already low incomes of these families. As
the raising of silk worms becomes an unsatisfactory
method of securing supplementary income other pos-
sibilities are canvassed which do not neglect the superior
qualities of Miss Nippon. A plan which has aroused
considerable interest is similar to Henry Ford's decen-
tralization of industry idea, and the first demonstration
of how this could work in Japan is a factory for making
piston rings. It employs 600 workers of whom 500 are
girls. Besides such factories it is pointed out that today
"single-duty machine tools which can be operated with
ease even by women of ordinary intelligence and with-
out much skill" can be installed in the farmhouses
themselves which will save the expense of transporta-
tion and dormitories and so make possible an even
smaller wage. Some suggested products for these home
industries are watches; gas, water and electric meters;
automobile parts; typewriters and other office apparatus;
radios; phonographs; cameras; bicycles; spinning and
Class in ethics in a cotton mill: duty as wife, or mother
weaving machines; and so on. Home industries are no
new idea in Japan. According to an International Labour
Office report 60 percent of the industrial workers of
Japan are employed in undertakings which have not
more than five workers. And thousands of non-statistical
homes keep the women employed at some small indus-
trial gadget to supplement the slender wage of the men
of the household. But taking machines to the farm, other
than simple spinning machines and looms, is a new
departure.
JANUARY 1937
It is impossible to examine the system by which the
textile industry has progressed so prodigiously without
wondering what forces have made it workable. It is diffi-
cult to imagine American girls between the ages of
twelve and twenty-two, living for three years in a mill
dormitory with never a date with a boy friend, with
never an excursion outside of the mill walls, content to
work their allotted time at the machines and for the
rest, sewing, knitting and studying American history
and patriotism, while their wages went home to their
parents. The American girl would strike. Wages she
earns are hers, and though she may contribute to the
family budget it is her money that she contributes, and
she expects to buy for herself some of the products
which her labor helps to produce. The wages of the
Japanese girl do not change her standard of living. The
products of her labor are beyond her means. She is reg-
imented like the ants and the bees, to parallel with eco-
nomic conquest her brothers' activities in heavy indus-
try and the army. Why is the Japanese girl so acquies-
cent? Like so many things in Japan the practical answer
is involved with mythology. The dea ex machina is
Amaterasu O Mikami, the Sun Goddess.
THE SUN GODDESS has meaning, a very practical mean-
ing for the Japanese. The family system, private and
national, is the most important thing in the Japanese
picture. Confucianism, which is the basis of the family
system, was, in its original state, too cold and intel-
lectual for the Japanese, so they gave it some improve-
ments of their own. The Sun Goddess is the connecting
link that ties the family system into the Japanese emo-
tional life and makes it comprehensible and sympathetic
to him. The theory goes like this: The Emperor is the
direct descendent of the Sun Goddess and as a repre-
sentative of divinity is the divine ruler of his people.
The kingdom belongs to him and the people are his
servants. In the family, the husband-father is the direct
representative of the Emperor, and as the Emperor rules
his people with benevolent autocracy so the father rules
his family. Each individual has his place in society and
in that place is all-important to his divine Emperor. Of
himself he has no importance whatsoever. The father of
the family is responsible to the Emperor for the behavior
of his family and should a Japanese girl be disobedient
to her father she is defying her Emperor and his divine
progenitress. The rule is benign and there appears to
be no need for the concept "rights" that troubles west-
ern democracies.
Let us grant that this is theory and that the practice
is less than perfect. Nevertheless to deny the importance
of this theory in the lives of the Japanese, especially the
all-important girl workers, would be to overlook one of
the decisive elements in the molding of modern Japan.
For the family system, the legend of the Sun Goddess,
the native religion Shinto, habit, the educational system,
all combine to exert an incredible pressure on the individ-
ual. In large part the importance of the Sun Goddess
and Shinto is that its hold on the people is automatic
and largely subconscious. There are relatively few pro-
fessing Shintoists, but it is difficult to find a Japanese
who is not influenced by the things it stands for. Japan
is still one half agricultural and three fourths primitive.
A primitive nature and ancestor worship is the satisfy-
37
ing icligious manifestation for a primitive agricultural
people. It ties together man and nature and puts man
in his proper state of personal unimportance in a mys-
terious cosmos, and as part of a national family which
roots back to the Sun.
When Women Workers Organize
IN THIS SYSTEM, woman's place is not only in the home,
it is anywhere her father or husband chooses to put her.
The Japanese woman has no legal rights; it is hardly
necessary to say she does not have a vote. She does not
usually inherit or own property, and in the few cases
where she does the husband is entitled to control it. If
she is wealthy enough and westernized enough she may
sue for divorce, but it is almost unheard of. If we are
speaking about the great masses of the people, the masses
from whom the happy enthusiastic workers spring, the
economic margin is the decisive element in her educa-
tion for submission. There is nothing for the girl to do
but to obey her father, but the obedience is made prac-
tically automatic by her education, the example of her
mother, and the absence of any possibility of doing
anything else. If her father decides to send her to a mill
on a three-year contract, or sell her to a brothel, it never
occurs to her to question the decision, and if she does
question it there is nothing she can do. It is practically
impossible for her to become economically independent.
When she does get a job her wages go to her family, and
in many cases they are sent directly to the parents by the
employer while she is given a small allowance. Even if
she received all of her earnings they are seldom enough
to live on, and the pressure of her training and educa-
tion, her lack of confidence, her inability to stand on
her own feet, make living alone, away from her fam-
ily, a practical impossibility. More than this she is still
dependent on the family system and the go-between to
find her a husband, and even the modern "moga" can
not face the social pressure against spinsterdom.
All of which fits neatly into the fact that the Japanese
chief export advantage is their supply of contented
workers. When the managers of the large textile mills
point with pride to their pleasant dormitories, their
swimming pools, their classrooms, and explain that the
girls are better off there than they would be at home,
they are telling the literal truth. No matter how you
look at it the Japanese girl is not in the world to have
a good time. She has no idea of "rights." The presence
of these girls in industry partly explains the hard sled-
ding of Japanese labor organizations.
When and if a considerable body of these acquiescent
workers begin to be troubled by their way of life, the
danger point in Japan will be reached. An official in the
Home Office, commenting on the girl textile workers,
said : "Now 90 percent of them are happy and contented
and 10 percent discontented. But if agitators and
propagandists get in among them within six months 10
percent would be happy and contented and 90 percent
discontented." There seems little danger of that at pres-
ent. The propagandists and agitators that reach the mass
of these girls are from the government, which, ever
since the Manchukuo incident, has made them the chief
recipient of their "thought-control" programs. The
patriotic element in their early schooling has been in-
creased. Ancient elements of Japanese culture, once the
38
prerogative of the leisured classes, have been revived and
lessons in flower arrangement and tea ceremony, are
given to the little school girls as well as to the girl
workers. The classes in the large mills are less than
pure philanthropy. The theory that Satan finds mischief
for idle hands, works in the textile mills as well as else-
where, and a little girl who is listening to an ethics lec-
ture or is learning how to close a door correctly, is not
listening to whispers about a union that in one mill
succeeded in securing for the workers the privilege of
occasionally leaving the mill grounds.
For there are unions even among the textile workers.
Of the 1,697,955 women industrial workers, 21,000 belong
to labor unions — of which about 8000 are in the textile
industry. Just what does this mean? A labor organizer
is responsible for this analysis: "At least 70 percent of
the girls who join a union join because of some im-
mediate personal grievance, or because they are per-
suaded by some friend, or in a few instances, influenced
by group pressure. They have no philosophy. They do
not think of themselves as "workers" — they are mem-
bers of a family helping the family to attain some spe-
cific end. The 30 percent who are thinking in terms of
better working conditions approach it from a feminist
angle. A small number of these workers are beginning
to see that they are doing a man's job, and are paid
less and have fewer privileges. This 30 percent are
seeking some way of improving conditions — not for
workers, but for women workers."
JAPAN is GOING THROUGH a period of "crisis" as her
spokesmen maintain. The Japanese people, like hu-
man beings everywhere, are capable of being influenced
by ideas when they come in contact with them, and it
is impossible to bring about an industrialization of Japan
without disturbing the fundamental loyalties to state
and family (and their habits of life) that have so far
made the Japanese worker so tractable. The visitor to
Japan is astonished that he encounters so little evidence
of discontent. Generally he ascribes it to the espionage
system of the government. It may have other roots.
The propaganda of the Japanese government viewed
from the position of a Japanese is not wholly fantastic.
Japan is battling an aggressive world and battling with
an inadequate equipment. Her sole advantage thus far
has been precisely the quality and character of her peo-
ple. It seems evident that so far this character is the re-
sult of a complicated set of forces, among which the
economic dependence of the girl worker is a very strong
factor. But this does not necessarily mean that even if
a choice presented itself, the girl worker would not be
willing to continue to perform her duty for her country.
From America, Japan seems the aggressor, bold and
ruthless. From Japan, the focus is very different and
we see a small country, her back against the wall, fight-
ing to exist. The test has not yet come. But it will
come. Sooner or later these girls will be brought within
the sweep of the social changes that are the inevitable
accompaniment of economic change. The Japanese have
been subjected to incredible stresses for a long period.
How rapidly the Japanese woman makes the transition
from medievalism to Americanism and what becomes
of her in the process may well measure the future of
Japan — perhaps of the world.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS: by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
The Biggest Human Interest Story
THOSE INFORMED ABOUT THE PSYCHOLOGY of the Ameri-
can Indians and other primitive folk addicted to the
torture of their captives by fire and other diabolical in-
genuities opine that in so doing they gratified not neces-
sarily that pseudo-sexual appetite called sadism, nor even
a native lust of cruelty for its own sake, but in the main
the universal desire for entertainment. In their juvenile
stage of emotional development the agonies of their vic-
tims afforded a kind of vaudeville — the best show in
town. Even the immortal gods on radiant white Olym-
pus are depicted in the Homeric legends as infused by
this puerility. If they could shake with unquenchable
mirth, as the minstrel in the Odyssey says they did at
the "laughable and monstrous" plight of be-webbed
Ares and the fair-crowned Aphrodite on the couch of
Hephaistos (cf. Odyssey viii: 265 et sequ.) how much
more must they be holding their sides these days as they
witness the antics of that "forked radish with head fan-
tastically carved," Homo Sapiens.
For more than twenty years, our taut nerves jangled
by continuous, reiterant cacophony; by almost unre-
lieved emotional strain, with crescendo mitigated only
by brief diminuendo barely sufficient to save us from
utter madness, we have lived in a kind of hysteria. Of
war and destruction and the abiding fear of worse; lat-
terly witnessing an ancient nation in the agonies of
fratricidal butchery which can win no triumph; of un-
paralleled economic confusion attended by widespread
terrifying suffering; of tottered and tottering thrones and
the substitution ad interim of despotisms and dictator-
ships; of the scorning of international good faith-
solemn treaties torn to shreds and spit upon in the com-
mon streets by great governments pretending to respect-
ability— of who knows what next? All together stulti-
fying and threatening the destruction of the finest gains
of what we are pleased to call Civilization. At latest
suddenly, as it were out of the sleeve of Mockery . . .
all these immense considerations eclipsed, humanity
between the two Poles stops, holding its breath while
the foundations of the vast, ever-sunlit British Empire
quiver under the impact of — a love affair! All the more
that it is a love affair saturated with human tragedy.
All the more because, curiously enough, it is the one
major phenomenon of all these years of turmoil that
cannot be attributed even remotely to the World War.
As perhaps never before — certainly never against such a
background — one touch of nature has made the whole
world kin.
NEWSPAPER MEN LEARN EARLY that the prime indispens-
able elements of a first class "human interest" news story
are Power (usually though not always embodied in
Money) and Sex. Gore, in battle, murder and sudden
death, is well enough in its way but secondary — have we
not just now seen Gore at wholesale in tortured Spain
chased off the front page by Power and Love in quint-
essential embodiment intertwined? In this love story
de luxe that has had us all agog for weeks we have
JANUARY 1937
had them both — "and how!" Fudge for the beggar-
maiden Penelophon and her King Cophetua; pish for
Cinderella of the Glass Slipper and her Fairy Prince; tut-
tut for rosy cheeked Rhodopis and her Psammetichus;
fiddlesticks for Cleopatra of Egypt, her Antony and
whom-have-you-else — yes, and nothing much any more
for even Helen of Troy, that "pearl whose price hath
launch'd above a thousand ships, and turn'd crown'd
kings to merchants" . . . their laurels filched forever by
an American girl from Baltimore, for love of whom the
young King-Emperor of the greatest realm on earth, at
the beginning of a reign of brilliant promise, threw it
all to the winds.
We have watched the accelerating episodes of this in-
comparable "human interest story" with much of the
morbid enjoyment of Indians about a torture-stake,
gloating over the writhings of their victim. Or, if you
prefer, with the more refined zest and appreciation of an
audience in cultured Athens, tense in the development
of a tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. For
this has been indeed pure tragedy after the classic Greek
pattern — not Right suffering under Wrong, but two
Rights by definition, warring to the death in the tangle
of sardonic Fate.
I confess small sympathy with the old fashioned idea
that any man, or woman, is born with obligation to
suppress himself and pervert the trends and aspirations
of his nature for the sake of the old traditions and enter-
prises of his ancestors, whether those be rooted in family
pride, professional distinction, or royal descent. How
often have we seen a boy thus doomed, strait-jacketed,
his natural character and abilities stultified, his hap-
piness destroyed, by his father's or his family's demand
that he become lawyer, minister, doctor or what not, to
satisfy pride and ambition not his own. How often have
we seen a girl sacrificed in loveless marriage upon the
altar of a mother's or a family's "social" eclat!
No one, man or woman, can do a life-job well unless
his heart is in it. All the world knows and has known
since his boyhood — he made no secret of it — that Edward
Windsor, born Prince of Wales and so heir-apparent to
the British throne, never wanted to be king. He wanted
to be a man, like anybody else. In school he punched
chaps in the nose just because they "royal-highnessed"
him. In the War he bitterly resented the restrictions
keeping him for "reasons of state" out of the danger
which his fellow-officers had to face. He even resented
being an officer, for his heart was with the "Tommies"
in the rear rank. "What of it?" he cried. "If I am killed,
the King has other sons." He had little use for solemn
frumperies, adulations and genuflexions inseparable from
royal rank and barring him from the rest of humanity,
whose deprivations and sufferings increasingly concerned
him. It was his passionate desire as King, since evidently
he could not escape that dismal fate, to understand the
conditions besetting the economically dislodged among
his subjects; he neglected no opportunity to do so. Inci-
dentally to his visit to the new floating palace Queen
39
Mary, he stepped aside to where within a stone's-pitch
in the unconscionable Glasgow slums those who actu-
ally built her lived in hovels unfit for pigs. Concerning
these and other industrially devastated areas he pledged
himself — "Damnable! Something shall be done about it."
But he found that the real rulers of his government
not only had little enthusiasm for his activities and
utterances in this regard but resented them; even feared
them, as improper, unconstitutional, dangerous. Besides,
and going to the very roots of parliamentary govern-
ment— here was the monarch meddling in the affairs
of democracy, no matter how obviously for the benefit of
the people. A thing the effective prohibition of which in
England has cost, first and last, an ocean of blood, in-
cluding that of more than one king. Moreover, the con-
servative among them saw plainly and with ill concealed
alarm that this unconventional man, not yet even
crowned, was already hailed by the working people and
the unfortunate as "our" King; feared lest despite all
constitutional limitations he might even become voice
and spearhead of discontent and uncomfortably radical
changes. Generally he was looming overmuch as type
of the "New Generation," challenging the traditions and
preconceptions of the "safe and sane"; asking why
and whether really this and that Sacred Cow was sacred.
The last straw, for both sides in this situation, was the
King's declared determination to marry, and to marry
not merely outside of "blood royal," or British aristoc-
racy or even British nationality; but outside the limits
of what the mass of British people are supposed to re-
gard as respectability — a woman divorced, not once but
twice; both her former husbands still extant and her
second divorce not yet legally complete. It was a question
of religion rather than of morality; had the King, with
many a royal precedent in support, made this or any
other woman his mistress, not even the Archbishop of
Canterbury would have batted a public eyelash. But it is
only a little while since under British law a man could
not marry his deceased wife's sister, against the eccles-
iastical holding that the magic of the marriage sacra-
ment had made her equally his own sister. The Estab-
lished Church of England, immovably against the mar-
riage of divorced persons; predominantly Roman
Catholic Ireland (not to mention a large portion of
Canada) ; intensely Puritan Northern and Midland Eng-
land; still Covenating Scotland; masses of religious
people in the overseas Dominions. ... It requires no
imagination to picture the uproar, the dissensions, the
even possible civil strife, ensuing upon the King's mak-
ing such a woman Queen and Empress, which clearly
she would become automatically upon her marriage
with him. The government held the whiphand in its
refusal to sponsor legislation permitting the King's con-
sort to be less.
It is idle to dissert now upon what the King might or
ought to have done. The die is cast, for good or ill.
Whether the particular woman for love of whom he did
it is worth it; whether they will find lasting happiness
in the bizarre unprecedented "freedom" for which they
have paid so extortionately, is not appropriate for spec-
ulation here. But if shedding of hearts' blood in an
insoluble dilemma constitutes a tragedy — here it is; dem-
onstrating again the truth of what Simonides the Greek
poet wrote near three thousand years ago: that "Not
40
even the gods may fight against necessity."
On the other hand, one may imagine the ex-King
feeling despite other emotions and compunctions less
enviable, something of the elation of a boy escaped from
a distasteful school — none the less because in his exami-
nations he has been flunked by a hard-boiled school-
master. Yet at hard cost he has gained the right he
claimed, that of a man to choose the ways of his private
life. The position of mere "Symbol," such as Britain's
present actual rulers seem to want as colorless effigy
upon their throne, was never for him.
Meanwhile, regardless of all the offsets, several things
of moment have got on record ineffaceably. It has been
declared aloud by voices from whom it hardly could
have been expected, that an American woman is good
enough to be Queen of England — the objections to the
King's choice were not on that account. Further that her
station in life, whether princess, goose-girl or beggar-
maiden, has no longer anything to do with the case.
A vastly greater and more momentous thing than that
has been registered; a thing of surpassing importance
for liberty in the world — at whatever cost to the liberty
of the man who may indeed have destroyed himself in
registering it. That is that, "yea, though he wear a
crown," no man on the throne of democratic England
may do his private will in what the British Parliament,
representatives of the free people, deems a matter of
public interest. To the Hitlers, the Mussolinis and all the
rest of the despots and dictators and would-be dictators
this is notice of the power of democracy. And I think
this Edward Windsor himself, even as his tense voice
broke in that incomparable farewell of his by radio to his
people, while the whole world breathless listened in,
gave a he-man's attestation to that fact. It is a pity that
such a man seems at present to be unsuitable as a
"Symbol" upon the British Throne.
-
>1 m ?
Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
What price Romance?
SURVEY GRAPHIC
"Two Hundred Were Chosen"
NORTH OF 54° 40': NOTES AFTER A PLAY
by FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG
THE TWO HUNDRED FARM FAMILIES from the relief rolls in
Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin who were sent off
to resettle in what has been called picturesquely Uncle
Sam's attic might almost be considered the pets of the
depression, so great has been the interest in their adven-
ture. When they sailed away in May 1935, imagination
travelled with these latter-day pioneers to unknown
stretches of tundra, wild beasts and equally wild mos-
quitoes. In a short time rumors began to seep through of
difficulties and discontent up yonder. By the time the
winter twilight had descended a fifth of the pioneer
families were back home. Then visitors began to report:
Matanuska was a feasible farm settlement; Matanuska
was doomed to fail. And none reported more diligently
— or added more misinformation — than a man named
Pledge Brown who, purporting to be a reporter from
the Ketchi^an Chronicle, sold the same specious yarn
over and over again to different editors.
Recently a play appeared on the New York stage
inspired by early newspaper articles on the project:
Two Hundred Were Chosen. The playwright, E. P.
Conkle, tries to think through the situation of these
uprooted people honestly. These settlers are not heroic
adventurers but farm folk who could not make a go of
poor farms. They had been losing out year after year.
It would take very little to upset their morale in a re-
mote, strange place. Nothing was very far along when
they were hurried off to the new settlement; construc-
tion was several weeks behind schedule (as the FERA
records agree). The author goes on from this point:
Tired of camping in the open or living in tents the
colonists try to put up some sort of shacks for them-
selves. The authorities order them to be pulled down and
put up again properly. The colonists resent discipline
and remain stubbornly idle in their tents. The authori-
ties withhold food supplies. In this deadlock quarrels
and even rioting break out. The rains begin, sickness
starts among the youngsters of the colony and a child
dies. This shocking outcome serves to bump the stub-
born heads of both sides together. Authorities and colon-
ists begin to get down to the business of settlement.
All this makes engrossing drama. The novel thing
about the play is that it deals with the fortunes of a
group of people, not with that of selected individuals.
Though a few characters in the cast of thirty-two stand
out as leaders, as a few will in any crowd, their private
stories are unimportant, are even left unconcluded. The
Actors Repertory Company contributed to this purpose
by playing as a unit without star parts.
Most of the dramatic critics seemed to take Mr. Con-
kle's play as solid fact. There were probably few such
moments of strife and melodrama as the playwright has
provided, though plenty of anti-climax after the cheers
of send-off. Somewhere between the jeremiads of those
who looked on the government's Alaskan project as
turning over the depression's victims to a stupid bureau-
cracy and the romancing of those who pictured covered
steamers plowing through icy water to the Last Frontier
JANUARY 1937
lies the sturdy prose of the Matanuska resettlement proj-
ect. . . . The prose of land to be cleared in a fertile
valley where 76,000 acres are tillable and only 117 famil-
lies were living in 1934. Of long but not too cold winters
— not severe to people from Michigan, Minnesota and
Wisconsin — and of summers of long daylight which
makes crops mature quickly. Of an allotment of forty
acres to each family to be resettled; a frame or log house
and outbuilding (and thirty years' grace to pay for
them); of subsistence until the land begins to produce;
machinery, livestock and no interest to be collected on
any indebtedness until the fifth year. Of good credit at
the commissary for produce in excess of family needs,
with prices based on the Seattle market plus the freight
rate to the Valley. Of the market at hand — Alaska's
60,000 people— at any rate its 30,000 who are not natives
— still depending mainly for nourishment on milk in
cans and vegetables in cans, from the states.
In a year Palmer, the center of the project, has popped
up like a husky mushroom. The trim frame buildings of
hospital, school, cannery, creamery, power plant and staff
houses look like the snug campus of a small college. A
school bus travels along good dirt roads collecting chil-
dren from the new farms. The flourishing acres of the
long established government experimental farm and
older settlers' cabins take off some of the raw look of the
new cottages and clearing fields. Cabbages loom as big
as pumpkins from garden patches. Except for the mag-
nificence of snow covered mountains at its rim Mata-
nuska might be any farming community "Outside."
As I WATCHED Mr. Conkle's characters behaving like
pioneers in their lesser Zane Grey moments I wondered
what the first Alaskan pioneers would have to say about
it. Matanuska pioneers already have facilities that few
settlements in Alaska have achieved. Pioneering — with
"the railroad" just down the road? That stretch of 470
miles of track, only completed in the nineteen-twenties,
is the pride of all Alaska.
But the stuff of the earlier pioneers must be in some
of the government colonists. I happened to read a letter
from one of them in the Juneau paper last summer. She
told how desperate they were at home and how eagerly
they waited for word that they would be acceptable for
Matanuska. "It was rather a hard thing to break away
from family ties and friends, but it meant more to us to
try to do something for ourselves and our children. . . .
We certainly have fallen in love with this country and
have no intention of leaving it. It seems as if here is a
place where you can work and get ahead, and why
shouldn't we, with Uncle Sam behind us? There is no
reason," she adds sharply, "why this project should not
succeed if everyone concerned has the interest of the
colony at heart and strives toward that end instead of
spreading such rumors as have been spread back in the
states and condemning the project."
I think the two generations of Alaskan pioneers will
become friends.
41
LETTERS AND LIFE
Dynamo as Artist
THE DYNAMO which the questing Henry Adams posed as
the symbol of the twentieth century against the Virgin
of Chartres in the thirteenth is more than a conqueror of
gravity. It is a generator of waves, waves of light, of sound,
and even a mystical interpreter of space and time. But we
are likely to neglect its gifts, being over-concerned with its
slave services, under-concerned with the Dynamo as artist.
Yet the Machine does add to our moments of civilized emo-
tion— and moderns stand in grave need of such moments.
To motor along a lovely Westchester County parkway in
the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness is a fugue of color
and vista and motion that uplifts the spirit. Path and rhythm
are gifts of the Dynamo. At evening it paints the city dark
with the beauty and fantasy of the electric light. We may
have lost the secret of precious glass for cathedral windows,
but we have our own murals on the walls of night. Light
is more than a policeman: it is in a sense our Master of
Revels. Now, the Machine is no creator; it gives out only
what man puts in, good or bad; but it can enlarge emotions
and make them common for all as did the cathedral spire
visible over a countryside. No baron could put the spire in
his treasure chest. So we need to discover and cherish these
emotions, not of the person or family, but of the community.
If we do not, be certain maleficent forces will. Dictators
know what pageants the Dynamo can stage.
This is the handsome prelude to a casual personal inquiry
into what the community radio station can offer of civilized
emotion. Its genesis was the envy I felt for years of Andrew
Carnegie because he had a private organist to play him
awake in the morning. Organ music was a civilized mode of
getting through that queer hour between dreams and an-
other day. This is revealed by that almost universal folkway
un-musical men have of singing in the bath. But the luxury
of an organ-wakening was as far from me as Arcturus. Then
the Dynamo labored, and today I can arise to organ music
from the radio, for certain stations send us this comfort
daily. We plain folks have a kind of musical angel playing
over the whole town. But — and the pursuit of emotion is
always selfish — the consolation of pure sound is often less-
ened by bits of crooning and swing music, comment from
the organist, imitations of jazz — as if the music had last
night's confetti tangled in its hair. That may be in the
American tempo, what the broadcasters think the people
want, but it is hard to believe the man shaving, the woman
setting the table, want blues and love songs to start the day
with. So, I still envy Mr. Carnegie.
There's the text: what can we do to get the programs
we want when we want them? It's a fair question and im-
plies no attack on the commercial stations. They do wonders
for which we are profoundly grateful. No form of communi-
cation has ever developed services faster than radio in ten
years. Nor is this a reflection on the taste of the average
audience. Radio did not make that, good or bad. They also
have rights as when young people want dance music Satur-
day nights. And Ed Wynn is a fine clown who may do us
more good than the matutinal organ. Besides you can take
it or leave it: take it free (which stirs thought) and dismiss
it like a geni with a wave of the hand. But what a loss if
your mood still craves what you know radio can offer!
The answer may be in part the smaller community sta-
tion with high standards. In New York there is WQXR,
striving for quality and intelligence in programs, and hoping
by LEON WHIPPLE
thus to gather a quality audience that will draw enough
advertising to support their fine endeavor. And there is
WNYC, operated by New York City for years, the only sta-
tion in the United States directly supported from tax funds.
Talk to their directors, who are sincere, experiment-minded,
and concerned with both civilized ideas and emotions, about
better programs, and you find yourself teetering around a
triangle of which the other legs are economics and tech-
nology.
THE COMMUNITY STATION is not, apparently, vastly expen-
sive. WNYC's last allotment was $42,000. Salaries to-
taled $38,000 and of the remaining $4000, some $3800
was for wire hook-ups. Advertising revenue was nil, for the
station enforces a stringent ban against even casual plug-
ging. It is absolutely non-commercial, unlike certain other
municipally owned stations that are leased to chains or sell
time. These include WPG at Atlantic City, WCAM at
Camden, and WJAX at Jacksonville, Fla. Here is in short a
kind of model for experimenting with the government
owned radio station. The New York Local Law of 1930
contains a pretty good definition of what such a station can
do, from services to the police department through cere-
monials and receptions, music, on to lectures on current
affairs. There is no mention of how political discussion is
to be handled beyond information on civic problems.
The services performed justify the expenditure. For
example, there is a Masterwork Hour each morning of fine
music through electrical transcription and records. On
November 19 it included parts of Das Rheingold, a Brahms
quartet, and a scene from I Pagliacci. That it is enjoyed
is proven by some 27,000 letters in a year and the distribu-
tion of 10,000 copies of a quarterly program. The talks on
health, safety campaigns, market prices (Consumers'
Guide), the plays by WPA actors, and the actual produc-
tion of programs in the schools as education, show the range
of service. At one dramatization of how the city is protected
before 3000 students in an auditorium from which the pro-
gram was broadcast for other highschools, the department
head actually asked for police aid — and in forty-five seconds
without pre-arrangement two policemen entered the hall.
The radio can make the civics course real.
But good programs are still a problem. WNYC is not
allowed a dollar to pay for talent. It has secured many
volunteers, some of whom were later taken for stars by
commercial stations. But clearly no regular features can be
built on voluntary services. The WPA has given actors,
and that helps. It is also aiding in the construction of a
new transmitting station at Greenpoint. To pick up good
programs outside the studio is one possibility, especially in
New York. But here enters the factor of the cost of wire
hook-ups. One station had a chance to broadcast part of the
Harvard Tercentenary program. But it learned the cost of
a wire from Cambridge was around $600; and when it
proposed to use short wave radio transmission for rebroad-
casting it found the Federal Communications Commission
has said that short-waves are not to be used when there is an
available wire connection. Program ideals are tangled up
with costs and technology, you see.
WQXR has become a standby for New Yorkers who want
good music for some 80 percent of its programs are musical,
largely from records and transcriptions. Recently it has
42
SURVEY GRAPHIC
announced that it will broadcast direct the concerts of the
Juilliard Foundation. Its transmission of recorded music is
admirable because of fortunate circumstances. The owner
of the Interstate Broadcasting Company is an engineer,
expert in sound transmission, who gives both substance and
technical skill to this endeavor to maintain quality broad-
casting. He has developed what is called "high fidelity"
transmission, which is possible partly because WQXR is
allotted two channels, covering 20 kilocycles instead of the
usual 10 kilocycle band. Thus the marginal tone frequencies
and overtones are carried. This wide band was secured at
the top of the dial before most receiving-sets covered this
channel. Some still do not; and a further technical limitation
on its services is that its low power, 1000 watts, ordinarily
carries only about 75 miles.
This station is trying to solve the economic puzzle by
offering an entire program that will provide an advertiser
with a select audience. It broadcasts the Sunday services of
the Ethical Culture Society; it will provide cinema and book
criticism of a disinterested kind; its foreign news comment
is from The Christian Science Monitor; its drama (again
through a WPA company) will cover the theater through
the ages; even its time is by Western Union! It, is being
edited as a quality magazine might be. But here are new
puzzles: to succeed it must prove to the advertiser it has a
large clientele for his product. It is drawing steady support
from the upper brackets, but also many listeners are music
lovers whose quality is of good taste rather than pocket-
book. Its directors are proud of this cultural service, but
still it must find support. The suggestion that listeners
might contribute a dollar or so a year as 'a voluntary fee
meets the evidence of other experiments that it seems just
human to take what comes free without any sense of
responsibility. The radio set-up makes everything seem a
fairy godmother's gift out of the air. In The Art of Pleasing
Everybody (October Atlantic Monthly) Richard Ames has
some keen remarks on the inertia even of the best people.
The fact is, he says, all of us can help to get better pro-
grams, better schedules, and better taste on the air if we will
do the simple thing of sending our comments, criticisms, and
desires to the stations. "If the majority of our discriminating
listeners express themselves, they can do more to improve
the standards of American radio than any number of com-
missions." I think most program directors feel this lack of
support keenly. The popular audience writes in, the quality
folks just accept. So we get the popular program for there
is no evidence to show the advertiser or anybody else that
the excellent program will pay. One other service we can
render is to help protect the rights of a community experi-
mental station to its wave-band. Again our letters can help
the directors prove that their programs are of public value
and must be continued against the sometimes emphatic
claims of other interests to this place on the air.
The Dynamo does serve us. The broadcasting of recorded
music — at present the base element for the small station —
is a conquest of waves by machines. Between the music and
the spirit of the listener is an intricacy of diaphragms, vibra-
tions, tubes, and electricity. Something may be lost of the
living presence of art, but a great gift remains. With us lies
the answer as to whether we shall have a kind of community
maestro to bring us civilized emotions.
Liquor Control
AFTER REPEAL, by Leonard V. Harrison and Elizabeth Laine. Harper.
296 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
' I ''HERE are few reservations to offer in qualifying one's
J- respect and admiration for this competent study and
report of the administration of federal and state laws
intended for the production of revenue and the control of a
socially hazardous industry.
Familiarity with the field, thoroughness in treatment and
accuracy of statement characterize the uniform excellence
of description of the widely varying schemes suddenly, in
some instances carelessly, created by states to meet the
emergency and opportunity developed by the repeal of the
Eighteenth Amendment. One would wish that the authors
could have had a little more modern acquaintance with the
reports of Miles and Benedict and Dodge and their suc-
cessor physiologists and psychologists so that reference to
beer as a non-intoxicant and to Henderson's A New Deal in
Liquor; A Plea for Dilution as of scientific reliability might
have been avoided. These appear to be the only important
errors of statement and implication. However, the authors
are students of the practices and theories of government,
and not of the medical sciences and their deductions from
careful study of comparative results of liquor enforcement,
licensing, monopoly, and taxation systems, and of the rela-
tion of federal, state and local alcohol authorities to each
other and to the bootlegger, are just what honest people need
to know, and as presented here can trust, and upon which
voters should base their demand for action by their officers
of civil government. The authors conclude quite reasonably
that while week-end "tanking" is less, there is a greater
consumption of alcohol since repeal.
While they refer to liquor as a luxury product and "inher-
ently susceptible of abuse" they do not frankly admit that it
is substantially a dietary drug commonly if not always
exhibiting deteriorating effects upon human behavior.
They are obviously less well informed upon the active
and widespread alcohol education efforts of states, teachers
training colleges and many volunteer organizations than
upon the effectiveness of policing of saloons and liquor pro-
ducers.
Their discussion of bootlegging is courageous, realistic,
and constructive.
Three sentences fairly represent the lesson of this valuable
study:
"It is clear that the government's first moves were character-
ized by an eagerness to reap advantages from the liquor
business."
"The bootlegger could scarcely have hoped for more favor-
able arrangements."
"The liquor issues of the future will be decided as always
before, on the basis of the success or failure of enforcement
of whatever kind of control is attempted."
HAVEN EMERSON, M.D.
The Unions
EBB AND FLOW IN TRADE UNIONISM, by Leo Wolman. National
Bureau of Economic Research. 251 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
DR. LEO WOLMAN has contributed a valuable statis-
tical analysis of the ebb and flow of trade unions.
From 1915 to 1920 the membership of the organized labor
movement increased almost 2,500,000, a gain greater than
the entire increase in membership from 1897 to 1914. The
policy of the United States government during the World
War had much to do with this increase. This consisted
of encouraging collective bargaining to allay industrial unrest
and to further the industrial sinews of war. The depression
of 1921 was followed by a slight decline in membership in
the trade unions but the prosperity period from 1923 to
1929 was accompanied by a marked loss in membership.
179,400 workers were lost to the trade unions in these years
of prosperity and 469,600 more in the depression of 1930
and the years preceding the NRA. Why the American labor
movement was unable to hold its membership in a period
of rising wages and good employment, Dr. Wolman de-
clares, is subject to much speculation. Certainly one of the
important reasons was the lack of elasticity of structure in
JANUARY 1937
43
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a craft union movement which could not include the
unskilled and semi-skilled workers of the highly mechanized
new monopoly industries — steel, rubber, radio, and auto-
mobile.
The NRA and more specifically Section 7-a gave added
incentive to trade unionism. The new unions which arose
during the period were largely of an industrial nature
.".'though the leadership of the American Federation of
Labor was skeptical of the structure and disturbed by the
precedent. The unions which benefitted most by Section 7-a
were those of the industrial union type — the United Mine
Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union. The foundation for the controversy which is raging
today was laid, therefore, in the ebb and flow of trade
union membership and the attempts of certain unions to
meet the changing structure of industry.
Dr. Wolman, as usual, has presented an invaluable statis-
tical analysis of trade union membership. It would satisfy
this reviewer if he permitted himself to interpret his figures
in a more articulate fashion. Statistics don't always speak
for themselves. THERESA WOLFSON
California Co-op
CO-OP, by Upton Sinclair. Farrar and Rinehart. 426 pp. Price $2.50
postpaid of Survey Graphic.
UPTON SINCLAIR'S new novel is stranger than fic-
tion. Its story is not of some imaginary Utopia, but of
California fact. It is the story of one of the self-help co-
operatives organized by jobless men and women, and of the
skill and humor and initiative and perseverance they had
in themselves when they put their wits and pitiful posses-
sions together and literally made jobs and somewhat of a
living for one another. The big redheaded Dane who is the
central character in the book is an actual person whose
ideals and ability have fired the enthusiasm of far less sym-
pathetic observers than the author.
Mr. Sinclair is an author who writes when he wants to
convince you of something and he bursts unabashed into
preachment to make sure that you will not miss the point
of the story. These people were trying to do something new,
and they got tangled and mangled by the organized mach-
inery of relief measures. He can hardly bear it, and he
makes his picture so clear that the effect is likely to be much
the same upon you. I hope that these people could have held
together, most of their former traditions notwithstanding,
to build a permanent cooperative outlasting the yoke of the
depression. They haven't had a chance to try. There has
been money to build bridges and sewers, but only a driblet
for this innovation of trying to build a new way of living.
It isn't hard to read this novel just as a story. But it is
more impressive to read it, as the author intends, as a record
of capacities in human nature. Mr. Sinclair is writing about
people he has seen and believed in. To me his account is
convincing. MARY Ross
Indian or Spanish?
MITLA— TOWN OF THE SOULS, by Elsie Clews Parsons. University
of Chicago Press. 590 pp. Price $4 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE author of Mitla is a sociologist by training and a
seasoned anthropologist by conviction. Her research and
field experience have convinced her that motives, attitudes,
and forms of behavior may be largely explained by history
and she believes that any attempt at social control should
proceed from an awareness of all available historical data.
Located literally and culturally in the shadow of ruins to
which all Zapotecan souls return, the Town of the Souls
is ideal for the demonstration of these principles. Said to be
"very Indian," actually inhabited by Zapotecan Indians,
Spanish, and mixed breeds, it furnishes unrivalled oppor-
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
44
tunity for the study of acculturation, which the writer has
seized, not only for the rewards such a study affords, but
also to demonstrate a method of research.
Living the leisurely life of her people for three winters,
she absorbed its spirit. To this effort she brought not only
many years of intimate experience with the natives of our
own Southwest and the more primitive parts of Spain, but
also a knowledge of the literature of Mexican custom. All
this has enabled her to detect and to interpret actions and
motives which one less saturated with Indian ways would
miss. Furthermore she is fully cognizant of the psycho-
logical effects of language; she communicates with the
natives in Spanish, bemoans her deficiencies in Zapotecan.
The documentation of the record consists in personal
observation of all phases of town life, discussion with inform-
ants, comparison with customs of neighboring tribes and
historical records, and, to show that culture refuses to be
reduced to rule of thumb, a long chapter on village gossip.
All of this is interesting, but in case the layman has not
time for 590 pages, he should in any case read the final
chapter, Indian or Spanish? in which the writer summarizes
her findings, weighs her comparisons, paints a plausible
picture of ancient Zapotecan culture, and predicts the future
of the Town of the Souls. Her summary of the factors mak-
ing for acculturation and of those resisting it is required
reading for the sociologist.
Barnard College, Netv
GLADYS A. REICHARD
The Best of a Good Man
THE BEST OF ART YOUNG. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HEYWOOD
BROUN. Vanguard. 186 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
PEOPLE who know Art Young used to wonder at first,
"How did he get into this bunch?" — this bunch being
the small, unpopular, earnest, troublesome bunch who
wanted to change things with revolutionary thoroughness.
Art Young didn't look like a discontented person. Perhaps
no human being could actually be as wholly gentle, sweet
and lovable as he always seemed. Why did he enlist with
his artist's pencil against the injustice, cruelty and tyranny
of the world?
Art Young, the boy genius of his home town, began con-
tributing humorous drawings to Judge in 1883, when he was
seventeen. He became a successful newspaper artist and
cartoonist, and made jolly fun of Populist and Socialist ideas
in the campaign of 1900. If anybody had told him then that
he himself was going to become a Socialist, that he was
going to use his talent to attack respectable economic greed,
and that in the nation's next great war he was to be arrested
and put on trial as a dangerous enemy of the war profiteers,
he wouldn't have believed it.
But the trouble seems to have been that he possessed
intelligence and started to think and study. This was a
mistake from the point of view of personal self interest.
With his sense of humor to protect him and his public from
the ugliness and evil of the world, he should have had quite
a big fortune to lose in Wall Street in 1929. As it was,
working for radical magazines like The Masses, he had only
his shirt and a little house in Bethel, Conn., and at last
reports he still has them both at the age of seventy.
It is now many years since he first enlisted in the libera-
tion war of humanity, and he has always been one of the
most gallant soldiers in that cause. He kept his good humor
in the heat of the battle, he kept his sweetness and lovability,
and he never surrendered, never compromised or lost his
faith.
The militant laughter of sanity rings out of these pages of
The Best of Art Young.
Washington, D. C.
FLOYD DELL
(In answering advertisements
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7 reasons why this book ft
Interviewing in
Social Work
A Sociological Analysis
By PAULINE V. YOUNG, Ph.D., University of Southern
California. With an Introduction by JOANNA C. COLCORD,
Russell Sage Foundation. McGraw-Hill Publications in
\_Sociology. 416 pages, 6x9, $3.00. _, /
1. Gives practical suggestions on such everyday problems as:
Gathering Clues, Proper Introduction, Pace of Interview, Gain-
ing Rapport, Face-saving, Creative Listening, Meeting Objec-
tions, Dealing with Inconsistencies.
2. Includes 24 verbatim interviews to show actual field procedure.
3. Gives attention to special types of interviewing situation, — such
as those presented by the immigrant, the negro, the new poor.
4. Offers particularly helpful suggestions concerning emergency
relief, social therapy and personality problems in interviewing.
5. More than half book devoted to treatment aspects in social work.
6. Examines interviewing in its sociological, psychological and
psychiatric aspects.
7. Treats interviewing as the major tool of the social worker, an-
alyzing its purpose, showing its significance, describing best
methods and proved techniques.
SEND THIS McGRAW-HILL ON-APPROVAL COUPON
McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 330 W. 42nd St., N. Y. C.
Send me Young's Interviewing in Social Work for 10 days' examination
on approval. In 10 days I will send $3.00, plus a few cents for postage
or return book postpaid. (We pay postage on orders accompanied by
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please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
45
HUMAN INVENTIONS
Wheels Where Cellars Were
THANKS TO THE HOUSE ON WHEELS, pulled along by the gas
engine of the car in front, the Bedouin potentialities of the
masses have again got a lot of serious thinkers in a dither.
There are serious students of social trends who visualize
a raffish crew of trailerites — like houseboat ne'er-do-wells
multiplied a thousandfold — swarming over our wheel-mad
land in the future. The auto show last fall dramatized
what's a- wheel; the parking lots of Florida and the West
Coast towns visualize it. And what has the city planner,
public official, social worker and sociologist and taxpayer to
say of the development?
LEGISLATORS ARE BEGINNING to take notice. They will dis-
cover that while trailers flee from snow and sleet like migra-
tory birds, most trailers are hatched out within reach of the
automobile industry's main plants in the north. There are
at least 139 pleasure trailer and accessory manufacturers.
Their plants are turning into assembly line, mass production
factories, first cousins of Detroit. Carefree and toylike as
Romany, Travelodge, Tally-Ho, Arcady, Aladdin, Vaga-
bond or Cruiser may sound, they are made by an industry
that hires men, buys millions of tires, thousands of bigger
and better storage batteries and brake linings, compact sinks,
stoves, toilets, utensils, water-tanks and upholstery. House
trailers — homemade, custom-made or turned out by the
hundreds — must be built and equipped to insure safety. In
New York one state senator is already asking what the
state's trailer policy will be. The policy must encourage the
industry. It must also invite trailers to use park camp sites.
But at the same time it must tax the vehicles and prohibit
permanent parking so that everyone will not be tempted to
sell his house and squat for life on the public domain.
MAYORS HAVE BEGUN to ask about tax evasion, rentals for
parking on vacant lots, and some cities are already forbid-
ding pleasure trailers on busy shopping streets. .The news
that the last farm on Manhattan Island is being groomed
for a trailer camp site, right on upper Broadway, and that
the 1939 World's Fair is revising upward the expected
number of trailer visitors, indicates that the present boom is
more than a fad. Zoning, city planning, water and electric
connections, policing — even schools — are bound to be
affected. California knows from experience the kind of
problem 50,000 trailer children present to the school system.
Florida compels non-resident tourists to pay tuition for
their school children. Montana sets an example in reverse
with a trailer school for isolated pupils in Lincoln County,
like the caravan school that once existed in Great Britain
for Gypsies.
Most plain citizens, seeing for the first time an ornate
residential trailer, don't think of social implications. They
wonder why no one has ever designed a permanent house
as cheaply and scientifically. We who have no migratory
trade, no migratory means, no intention of trying our luck
Gypsying, may envy the 200,000 trailer-buyers estimated for
1937 — but we have not yet reached the footloose condition
of the million trailer addicts that the American Automobile
Association already estimates in the United States.
SOCIAL WORKERS see a host of unwelcome bogies swarming
in the wake of the trailer parade. They see still another
class rising up to vex the transient problem, as families
leave the grief of rent, upkeep and taxes in the dust of per-
manent departure — for destinations perennially unknown.
They see all the familiar, pestiferous problems of residence
requirements for relief, due to unequal state laws which may
leave a two-years-on-the-road trailer dweller practical!;
divorced from citizenship for deserting his own state, bui
five years' faithful residence short of establishing any claim
on the new state where he happens to be.
Family disorganization and modey domestic assortments
loom as possibilities. Trailer children have an unbeatable
head start on truant officers. Health hazards may pile up in
trailers — plurnbingless, water supply from anywhere, food
preparation haphazard, refrigeration doubtful or lacking.
Social workers are haunted by visions of trailer slums, when
the once comfortable portable home has become a hand-
me-down, passed from bad to worse and finally, perhaps,
broken down by some inhospitable roadside or parked for
good and all in a desolate auto camp.
Already the National Association for Travelers' Aid and
Transient Service and the American Public Welfare Asso-
ciation are surveying, studying, appraising the threats ahead.
"Trailers!" say social agencies with deep gloom. "Just more
transient trouble to us."
TAXPAYERS ARE LOOKING into the thing. An interesting civic
speculation appears in the Tax Policy League's provoca-
tive publication, Tax Policy, for November 1936. The
trailer is a challenge to dingy flat and shabby cottage, say
the Tax Policy people. It may cushion the impending hous-
ing shortage; it may give labor a new freedom, as the sud-
den dramatic popularity of the new covered wagon coin-
cides with the development of a federal system of employ-
ment offices. In Florida's resorts where half the winter trail-
erites are older people, and most of the rest young people
working in the state as waiters and so on, the average Tin
Can Tourist stays from October to April.
The Tax Policy research editor has discovered that the
permanent, as distinguished from the holiday, trailer pop-
ulation is made up of four main groups: the modestly
secure; the migratory workers; natural vagabonds; and
families unable to afford a house or apartment. But, says
Tax Policy, a trailer offers a pinched and unstable form of
housing, which would not tempt the average man, whose
desire for permanence and stability is greater than the lure
of the open road.
How and where should the trailer be taxed? It has been
ruled a human dwelling by one justice of the peace, but
certainly it can't be taxed as real estate. Not even as
tangible property, very handily, when a residence may
shift from Maine to California and the occupant can easily
shop for the cheapest tax state for his annual license. A
license tax — like that of a freight trailer attached to a truck
— is one method. Taxing and regulating trailer camps is
another. The burden of regulation falls on state and local
government.
"It is impossible to form an estimate of the additional
net cost occasioned governments by the trailers," says Tax
Policy. "The trailer does not bring a new population into
existence. . . . These people have been receiving govern-
ment services prior to the advent of the trailer. ... It may
cost a city more to inspect and offer fire and police protec-
tion to obsolete tenements housing one thousand persons
than the trailer camps where an equal number are located.
"It seems probable," concludes Tax Policy, "that the
trailer movement even though it should increase markedly
in scope, will neither greatly enrich nor impoverish our
cities. . . ."
THE SOCIOLOGISTS COME AT IT from another angle. Last
summer Howard Rowland, of the department of sociology,
..
46
Pennsylvania State College, supervised an auto tourist camp
in the Rocky Mountain National Park, just so he could
study the life and habits of the trailerites. He says the
summer caravaners he saw were mostly school teachers and
professors, or small business men and farmers who had
retired with some certain income like a pension. To every
vacationer who could get away, the old home that needed
paint, paper and curtains, had become a tombstone of weari-
ness, so he took to the roads, parks and seashores. He broke
all travel records for all time.
The immediate problems to be solved in the interest of
our trailer population, says Mr. Rowland, are those relat-
ing to health, sanitation, safety. He doesn't believe that the
trailer, which is adding color and experience to the lives of
hundreds of thousands of middle class families, is a threat
to the stay-at-homes who pay real estate taxes, support
churches and community enterprises. "The positive results
for society," he says, "will be an awakened national con-
sciousness. Of course, social and political problems will
develop. And the trailer may usher in more grandiose
changes in the culture of our times than have resulted from
any previous technological invention. But at present the
institution of real estate property and the pattern of the
American community have been affected very little by this
innovation, in spite of its magnitude. Relatively few people
using trailers have forsaken social and industrial ties in
favor of a permanently mobile abode."
Mr. Rowland fears the hotel owners will succeed in lining
up dismayed home owners with them in promoting pres-
sure group legislation to force prohibitive taxes on trailers.
Last summer, the year of the vast trailer increase, was the
best year in our history for the resort hotel and cottage
business. From that he concludes that instead of being a
menace to these interests the trailer has given great mobility
to a particular type of person who has hitherto had very little
mobility. The first purchasers of trailers, however, consisted
largely of those who formerly spent their vacations living
in the out-of-doors. "Bourgeois morality looks upon exces-
sive vacation expenditures as sinful," says Mr. Rowland,
"especially if paid to a fancy hotel or resort. The trailer
vacation is different. The major expense is the vehicle itself,
which is an acquisition of property. It is easily rationalized
as a form of savings and investment."
After attending the 1937 automobile show in Grand Cen-
tral Palace, Mr. Rowland said: "People filed past the shining
new automobiles curious, eager and silent — but upstairs at
the trailer show all was different. There was warmth, in-
timacy, no hurry. The curious stayed for hours, pondering
their future in relation to homes, apartments, and mobile
dwellings. It was an exhibit of human emotions and not one
of streamlined steel and plywood. The trailers themselves
were incidental to the psychic contagion of the mart."
To AN EDITOR who has known horse-swapping, horse-drawn
Gypsies in his boyhood days when their wagons were built
at the old Leon-Hardt wagonworks in Baltimore, and trav-
eled with them over the Middle West and the English
countryside, we are dealing with something different in this
gas-driven, trailer-buying development. But as with the
nomadic Gypsies, the best possible policy would seem to be
the immediate regulation of certain very fundamental
things. For example, with these latter day wanderers — fire-
hazards, braking power, duration of parking, licensing of
vehicles and supervision of parking areas. Under no circum-
stances should we punish the embroiderers of a continent as
a threat to all our sacred institutions. For, as fad, or as fore-
cast of things to come, they are right now a boon to busi-
ness, besides being a great stimulation to the imagination of
cartoonists, housing experts, editorial writers and commu-
ters wading through the slush to catch the 8:15.
(In tnsutcring ftlvertiscmenti
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47
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AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN: 1937 MODEL
(Continued from page 17)
(In answering advertisements
a new understanding of business upon their traditional
business creed. But the old creed was clear, even if it was
no longer applicable, whereas the newer and more construc-
tive principles had not yet been definitely formulated.
The rest is recent history. Business continued to be service,
with little definite understanding of what changes must
be made if the goal of maximum service were to be at-
tained. Business flooded America, then, not only with
automobiles, but with higher incomes for millions of peo-
ple; more of them, and more of them proportionately, than
any population had ever enjoyed before. There was mass
production and wide distribution of scores of new comforts
and luxuries.
But there was no organized effort to raise the whole
population from poverty to comfort; and no chamber of
commerce or trade association could quite conceive of such
an organized effort. They kept chanting that business is
service instead of taking definite steps to make it so.
Then, suddenly, the bottom dropped out of everything.
Herbert Hoover was President. Good, devoted, patriotic,
able; he proved to be the Dr. Machen, say, or perhaps the
John Roach Stratton, of business fundamentalism. In the
long run this was most fortunate for the whole country.
Any president not so definitely committed to the literal
creed of individualism would almost certainly have veered
this way and that; and while he might thus have hit upon
some course which would have been temporarily more
successful, the mind of America would still have been con-
fused. But Hoover was rigidly orthodox; and his admin-
istration demonstrated even to the heads of our greatest
business and financial institutions that rigid orthodoxy was
not the solution for their problems in such a national
emergency.
I do not mean that business men were suddenly converted
to economic modernism. Things don't happen that way.
Without the bitter lesson of the Hoover administration,
however, they would never have permitted the new Presi-
dent to go as far as he did. Not until recovery had actually
set in, did they allow their organizations to set out to
stop him.
Nor do I mean that Roosevelt had the correct formula —
the one, true plan for economic salvation. Things don't hap-
pen that way either. Our beliefs, right or wrong, grow out
of our experience; and we shall never know exactly what
to do about these new times until we have done it. Astron-
omy supplanted astrology, and chemistry supplanted al-
chemy; but not because some new authority appeared with
a correct, new textbook. In each case, it was because some-
thing happened which couldn't be explained by the old
formulas. Then there were experiments. Then there came
a body of data. Then there were textbooks.
Old beliefs, however, die hard. The coming of the age
of science did not mean the end of the age of supersti-
tion. When one age does supplant another, the last citadels
to be taken are the organized institutions of the former
age. In the case under consideration, it was not our busi-
ness men so much as it was our business institutions which
made the last despairing stand against the New Deal.
And now those institutions seem to be coming into line.
New England, for instance, is usually accepted as the most
conservative section of America; and the New England
Council is the accepted expression of New England's busi-
ness mind. But let me quote from the Boston Herald's
account of its meeting a little more than two weeks after
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
48
the Roosevelt landslide. The significant headline was:
Council Backs Labor's Rights.
"With an endorsement of collective bargaining," it began,
"and a declaration that the Social Security Act is an impor-
tant step forward, speakers before one thousand industrial
executives attending concluding sessions of the twelfth
annual New England conference yesterday generally ad-
vocated cooperation with labor and a new era." There was
one dissenting voice — that of Virgil Jordan of the National
Industrial Conference Board. But James M. Hook, newly
elected president of the council, declared: "We must not
waste our energy attempting to dissipate the forces that
a dynamic people have unleashed." And P. W. Litchfield,
president of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, was
quoted as saying:
"Management faces the real boss, the public, otherwise
known as the consumer. If management can go to this boss
with a needed product of good quality, properly priced and
delivered at the right time, then Mr. Public will allow the
three groups (stockholders, management and employes)
to go on working for him. If, for any reason, these men
fail to satisfy the boss, he will spot that failure and quickly
dismiss them from his service. . . . These three groups
must in their own self-protection recognize their utter inter-
dependence. . . . Actually and sensibly, unemployment
insurance as well as old age pensions should be included
in the cost of production. . . . Neither a single company
nor industry can, however, carry the burden alone. The
problem can be met, and can only be met, on a national
scale, and must have the sanction of the government."
It may be said that there is nothing sensational about
such statements. But that's the point. Such expressions have
at last become accepted in typical business conferences;
and if one wants proof of this, he will do well to find this
for himself in the daily newspapers. Some organizations,
to be sure, will still be recorded as definitely opposed to
this inevitable change, while the resolutions of those who
are yielding to it will vary from clear-cut statements to
compromising generalities. I hesitate, in fact, to quote the
specific advances toward the new viewpoint already evident
in the proceedings of certain trade associations because,
before an article like this can appear in print, some more
advanced position is likely to be recorded. The textile in-
dustry, for instance, ever since the Supreme Court destroyed
the NRA — a decision which was welcomed at the time by
many textile interests — has been obviously gradually dis-
covering the necessity for some kind of nation-wide coordi-
nation.
What is happening in retailing is equally significant.
The retail trade papers have seemed to be disturbed dur-
ing the past year by the growth and promise of consumer
cooperatives. The dominant editorial note however is not
an attack upon this new movement, but a call to retailers
to defend their position by organizing for greater service
to the public.
These are not simply somebody's individual views.
They are an indication of the change which has been com-
ing over American business men ever since that first dis-
covery that business is service. That statement, to be sure,
meant little because it might mean anything; and even
those who were supposed to be most progressive twenty
or thirty years ago tried to make it mean that industry
should give first attention to serving its employes — in the
way, often, which some opinionated employer considered
good for them. But now the secret is coming out. Industry
can prosper, it is beginning to be understood, only as it
serves the mass consumer; and not in the way which the
industrialist may find most convenient but in the way that
the mass consumer, through his buying, decrees that he
wants to be served. (Continued on page 50)
v'tri^^
ii
Un buon cappo d'anno'
for Mrs. Zingrella
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HANDBOOK ON SOCIAL WORK
ENGINEERING
By June Purcell Guild and Arthur Alden Guild
This book about the study of social problems and
money-raising, written by two experienced social
workers, can be understood by laymen and they are
able to apply the principles outlined to their own
local problems. Agency board members join
professional social workers in proclaiming Social
Work Engineering as something new in the field
of social organization and financial support, prac-
tical, readable, authoritative.
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(In answering advertisements please
49
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
FOR JEWISH SOCIAL WORK
offers graduate professional curricula for
the acquisition of the necessary knowledge
and skills for social work, leading to the
Master's and Doctor's degrees.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SOCIAL
WORK AGENCIES
increasingly require such knowledge and
skill from candidates for positions.
For information about require-
ments for admission, scholar-
ships and fellowships, write to
DR. M. J. KARPF. Director
The
Graduate
School
For
Jewish
Social Work
71 West 47th Street, New York City
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Plan A The course leading to the Master's degree consists
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
social agencies in various cities. This course is
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session
and the first winter session, and receive the Mas-
ter's degree upon the completion of the require-
ments of two summer sessions and one winter
session of supervised case work. Limited to forty.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks is open to expe-
rienced social workers. A special course in case
work is offered by Miss Ruth Smalley. Limited to
thirty-five.
Plan D An advanced course of training in the supervision
and teaching of social case work, conducted by
Miss Bertha Capen Reynolds, Associate Director of
the School, and staff. Graduates of schools of social
work with two years' case work experience are
eligible for admission. The course consists of two
summer sessions at Smith College and, in con-
sultation with the School, a winter of supervision
and teaching during which the student may hold
a paid position in a social agency. Limited to
twenty-five.
Seminars of two weeks on the following topics are open to a
limited number of qualified persons :
1. Application of Mental Hygiene to Present-day
Problems in Case Work with Families. Miss
Grace Marcus and Dr. Evelyn Alpern. July
12-24.
2. Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case
Work. Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss
Beatrice H. Wajdyk. July 26-August 7.
3. The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn
Jackson and Miss Mary Whitehead. August
9-21.
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN: 1937 MODEL
(Continued from page 49)
(In answering advertisements
But that requires industrial coordination. No industry
can longer go it alone, permitting other industries to dis-
regard the principle and thus rob the first industry's cus-
tomers of security and of buying power. To effect industrial
coordination, however, we must have the cooperation of
government at least to control the chiselling 10 percent —
a far cry from our attitude just a few years ago, expressed
in the slogan: "Less government in business, more busi-
ness in government."
The more I talk with real business men today, in fact,
the more I am convinced of one inevitable trend. // is the
trend toward consumer cooperation. But when I say that,
the chances are that few business men and few organizers
of consumers' cooperatives will agree with me. But let me
explain.
The tradition of business and the tradition of the con-
sumer cooperatives are seemingly as far apart as the
poles. "Let the buyer beware" was still commercial dogma
when the Rochdale cooperatives were founded in 1844.
Obviously it is not the principle of the American motor
car industry today. That industry has grown to greatness,
in fact, upon an entirely opposite principle. It is based
upon research; and not merely upon mechanical research
but upon consumer research. And not merely upon efforts
to discover what the motorist wants, but what the great
masses of would-be motorists want, and how much they
can and will pay. Profit may still be the motive behind
the automobile industry, although Henry Ford disclaims
even that. The industry, however, and in varying degrees
many other modern American industries, seek their profits
in scientifically ascertained cooperation with the mass con-
sumer. This is the unmistakable trend of American indus-
try. It is the study of this trend through many years which
led me, by degrees, to look into the organization of con-
sumers themselves to effect what I believe to be the next
great forward step in retailing — the same kind of thinking
which had led me, many years before, to promote the credit
union movement.
I tried to explain this position recently to a congress of
consumer cooperatives; whereupon the newspapers reported
that I, after amassing millions in profits, had broken def-
initely and finally with the whole profit system.
I had done nothing of the kind, but I can scarcely blame
the reporters. The ways of industrial evolution are intricate;
and when one knows very well that the traditions of con-
sumer cooperation are utterly opposed to the traditions of
capitalism, he may easily assume from that, that consumer
cooperatives are at war with capitalism. Many business or-
ganizations still seem to be obsessed by the same assump-
tion. A recent statement issued by a retailers' organization
in Chicago has criticized me bitterly, on the assumption
that one cannot advocate consumer cooperation without be-
coming an enemy of all business and all business men.
I happen to know, however, that retailers who are really
studying retailing know better. Naturally, I can't quote
them; but it might be well to notice that in the attacks that
are being circulated about consumer cooperatives, sup-
posedly under the auspices of organized retailing, not one
retailer of outstanding prominence in America is identified
by name. Really leading retailers — those who not only
know their business but are generally \nown as men who
know their business— are very friendly indeed toward the
consumer cooperative movement. Not one but a number
of them have made it plain to (Continued on page 52)
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50
EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORY
SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
The
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AtriUATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The 1937-1938 Session of the Pennsyl-
vania School of Social Work begins on
September 28, 1937. Applications for
tuition scholarships should be filed by
April 15, 1937. Other applications
should be filed not later than May 30,
1937. A catalog will be mailed upon
request.
Room 902, 311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
SIMMONS COLLEGE
School of Social Work
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
Address :
THE DIRECTOR
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
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THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
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fields:
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CORRELATED evening courses are
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A catalogue will be sent upon request.
122 East 22nd Street
New York, N. Y.
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
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MASTER OF NURSING
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( Continued jrom page 50)
me that they would like to convert their businesses into
consumer cooperatives; and while this may be impossible
because of financial and legal obstacles, their attitude is an
indication of the change which is occurring in the minds of
American business men.
Cooperation, of all our economic efforts in the interest
of the mass consumer, is the inescapable trend of our in-
dustrial development; and it is impossible that a business
man can be entirely unaffected by this trend. We may look
confidently therefore, not toward class divisions, nor even
toward conflicts between the business system and the co-
(In answering advertisements
operative system, but toward an increasing awareness of
our common goal. Some believe that this goal can be
achieved most quickly only on the initiative of consumer
organizations; and many business men who are already
reorganizing their businesses so that more consumers may
be given more helpful service are alarmed at any such sug-
gestions. Personally, I believe that America can reach this
goal most quickly by both routes. I believe that the con-
sumer cooperatives will greatly help all legitimate busi-
nesses to reorganize in the now more successful way —
the way of the utmost possible service to the masses and
the way of the elimination of waste. But I am equally con-
vinced that businesses taking this course will be very helpful
to the consumer cooperatives, spurring them to adopt more
and more efficient methods, and to recognize that true
cooperation is not merely a matter of good intentions and
good will but also of scientific technique.
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SURVEY
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
FEBRUARY
1937
WHO WANTS PEACE?
By Dorothy Thompson
Oil Hard -THE U.S. SUPREME COURT- Llewellyn
30 CENTS A COPY $3.00 A YEAR
As Much As $75,000,000
Worth Of Radium
THIS single x-ray tube produces as much
radiation energy as would radium worth
$75,000,000. This tube— one of several de-
veloped and built by G-E scientists is help-
ing medical science to make further and more
rapid gains in the battle against disease.
For more than 25 years, General Electric
research scientists have led the steady im-
provement in x-ray development. From their
work with thousands of volts from giant
transformers, with tanks of purified oil
have come better and ever better x-ray tubes.
Physicians and surgeons have gained more
compact and more powerful tools for diag-
nosis and therapy — better tools with which
to safeguard your health.
Other developments in the Research Labora-
tory, in Schenectady, also work for better
health. There is the inductotherm, which
permits medical science to produce, at will,
curative fevers in the patient's body. There
are sources of ultraviolet radiation for the
treatment of rickets in children. And in all
these aids to medicine, the results of years of
scientific investigation are being applied to
the relief of suffering, to the treatment of
disease, to the improvement of the health
and well-being of millions of people.
G-E research has saved the public from ten to one hundred dollars
for every dollar it has earned Jor General Electric
GENERAL B ELECTRIC
MEXICO
Exciting Land
The government taking land from the powerful and giving
it to the peon. Labor working together to win its ends.
Artists painting, sculpturing, singing. Schools pioneering
in social planning.
Here also the loveliness of high mountains and tropical
valleys, of unspoiled villages and unbelievable markets.
Here the archeological wealth of the Maya, the Toltec,
the Mixtec, the Zapotec and the Aztec.
The Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America,
a non-profit, incorporated agency for the increase of un-
derstanding and appreciation between the Americas,
invites men and women of constructive curiosity to join
Mural by Diego Rivera
The Twelfth Seminar in Mexico
MEETING IN MEXICO CITY AND CUERNAVACA JULY 7-27, 1937
Among those who will make up the faculty will be the following (changes will be announced later):
Federico Bach, economist and social diagnostician.
Ramon Beteta, economist and student of international affairs.
Phillips Bradley of Amherst, on international relations.
Carlos Chavez, composer and director of the Orquestti .*rnt>'.tin-ti
de Mexico.
John Collier, Indian commissioner.
Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, economist.
Erna Fergusson, writer on Mexico and Guatemala.
Rene d'Harnoncourt, authority on Mexican folk arts.
Hubert Herring, writer on Latin American affairs.
Oscar Rabasa, international lawyer.
Robert E. Redneld, ethnologist of the University of Wisconsin.
Daniel Catton Rich, of the Chicago Art Institute, on modern art.
Diego Rivera, painter.
Herbert J. Spinden, authority on the archeology of Mexico
and Guatemala.
Charles Thomson of the Foreign Policy Association.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano, labor leader.
A Market in Mexico
The Seminar in Mexico is an introduction to the
life and people of Mexico. It seeks to open up for
a group of inquiring Americans some knowledge of
the social program, the artistic renaissance, the
educational drive, the economic forces of modern
Mexico. The Twelfth Seminar will for the first time
include the Festival of Pan-American Chamber
Music, sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
and directed by Carlos Chavez.
We invite applications for membership. The
Seminar is planned for the discerning who wish
to know the Mexico which lies beyond the well-
traveled roads.
Address: HUBERT HERRING, Director, 289 Fourth Avenue, New York City
THE COMMITTEE ON CULTURAL RELATIONS WITH LATIN AMERICA
JOHN DEWEY, Honorary Chairman STUART CHASF, Chairman WALTER FRANK, Treasurer
SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn.
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Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3. 1917: authorized December 21, 1921
HOW MUCH DOES THE TELEPHONE
It is easy to figure how much
the telephone costs. It is not
easy to reckon how much it
saves.
A single telephone call may
save a life — brighten a friend-
ship or a day— sell a bill of
goods or land a job.
One telephone call may be
worth more to you than the
cost of the service for months
and years to come.
The telephone saves you
priceless hours of time each
week — spares you trips through
snow and storm these uncertain
winter days.
Without moving from the
warmth and comfort of your
own fireside, you are in touch
with stores and friends and
office — by telephone. The cost
is but a few cents a day. In re-
turn, the telephone offers you
54
increasing measure of security,
convenience, happiness and
achievement.
Every time you call a number, you use
some part of a nation-wide telephone
system that cost more than four billion
dollars to build and employs about
300,000 people. The facili-
ties of this entire organiza-
tion are yours to command —
anywhere, any time, and at
small cost.
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
The Gist of It
OUR LEADING ARTICLE THIS MONTH IS A
distinctive contribution by one of the keen-
est observers of our time. (Page 57) Doro-
thy Thompson writes an interpretation of
the peace movement in the United States,
based on research undertaken by Survey
Graphic and carried out by Marian Chur-
chill White. What is peace? What is neu-
trality? Miss Thompson's inquiry searches
the answers to these eternally urgent ques-
tions at a time in history when perplexed
plain people and scholars are putting their
heads and hearts into various efforts to
avert war, to promote peace and good will.
Her article illuminates not only the forces
for peace, but the forces they combat, twenty
years after 1917.
BY CURIOUS COINCIDENCE, IN AN ISSUE
containing an article by Dorothy Thompson,
who in private life is Mrs. Sinclair Lewis,
Victor Weybright, managing editor, presents
a story out of the anthracite region of
Pennsylvania that is ominously reminiscent
of Sinclair Lewis's novel of impending fas-
cism, It Can't Happen Here. (Page 63).
In Wilkes-Barre, investigating the case of
Emerson Jennings, Mr. Weybright dis-
covered that long ago, when Sinclair Lewis,
restive, youthful idealist, was tending the
furnace at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair's
Utopian colony, Emerson Jennings — so sug-
gestive of Jessup — was for awhile a mem-
ber of the group.
TO FAR TOO MANY AMERICANS HEALTH
is a luxury that they cannot afford, sickness
a financial blow as dreadful as unemploy-
ment. Michael M. Davis, whose article on
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FEBRUARY, 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 2
SURVEY GRAPHIC— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
THE SURVEY— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT. LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, associate editors; RUTH A. LERRIGO,
HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, assistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., LEON WHIPPLE, JOANNA C.
COLCORD, RUSSELL H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOL-
PER, R. L. DUFFUS, contributing editors.
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Cover Design
Frontispiece
Who Wants Peace?
It Happened in Wilkes-Barre
Human Inventions: Towns Meet the Weather
Next Moves in Medical Care
The Power Issue and the TVA
Three Years of Public Housing
Social Conflict
Ambassador of Spain
Proposed Amendment
Mr. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court
Through Neighbors' Doorways
East is East, but South is South
Letters and Life
Prophets of War
Returning Prosperity
© Survey Associates, Inc.
ISOTYPE
DRAWINGS BY ROCKWELL KENT
DOROTHY THOMPSON 57
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT 63
69
MICHAEL M. DAVIS 70
ARTHUR E. MORGAN 73
LOULA D. LASKER 78
PAINTINGS BY MAYNARD DIXON 83
BEULAH AMIDON 86
. K. N. LLEWELLYN 88
IRVING DILLIARD 93
JOHN PALMER GAVIT 97
LEON WHIPPLE 99
MARTHA GELLHORN 103
page 70 outlines the immediate possibilities
of better and cheaper distribution of our
medical services, is an authority on medical
economics. He is author of many books and
articles, chairman of the council of the
American Hospital Association, director of
the Rosenwald Fund's department of medical
servicfs, and chairman of the Committee on
Research in Medical Economics.
WHATEVER THE NATIONAL POWER POLICY
recommended by the special committee ap-
pointed by President Roosevelt on January
18 immediately following the release through
The New York Times, of the article (page
73), TVA Chairman Arthur E. Morgan's
formula for cooperation with the utility
companies is a provocative contribution.
With the permission of The Times we pre-
sent it as part of the Log of the TVA which
has been running informally and intermit-
tently in these pages. It furnishes a basis
of discussion on the whole subject of how
and by whom publicly generated power shall
be distributed and sold.
LONG BEFORE PUBLIC HOUSING BECAME
any sort of reality in America, Loula D.
Lasker, associate editor, was an informed
exponent of low cost housing, public and
quasi-public, where private builders had
failed to intersect the low wage tenant's
pocketbook. Today, with slum rents sky-
rocketing in a housing shortage, and fifty
federal housing projects almost ready to be
occupied, Miss Lasker looks back, at what
has been done; sidewise, at the present
housing scene; and ahead at the problem
of providing decent shelter for millions, not
thousands, of American families. By the
time her article is in print, a new Wagner
housing bill will probably have been in-
troduced. Miss Lasker's article is more
than timely. It is required reading.
DR. FERNANDO DE LOS Rios, SOCIAL SCIEN-
tist, former university professor, and noted
Spanish liberal, is in himself an eloquent
argument for the cause of the beleaguered
Spanish government, which recently sent him
as Ambassador to the United States. He is
the subject of a brief personality sketch
(page 86) by Beulah Amidon of the Survey
Graphic staff.
MUST WE AMEND THE CONSTITUTION, OR
will time and the law of averages operating
on the Supreme Court clear the way for
needed social legislation? Problems and
possibilities in this thorny area of American
thought and discussion are reviewed by an
expert in constitutional law (page 88) and
by an informed newspaperman (page 93).
K. N. Llewellyn, graduate of Yale and
of Yale Law School, professor of law nt
Columbia University since 1927, is a mem-
ber of the New York Commission on Uni-
form State Laws and the author of books
on legal questions.
Irving Dilliard has been on the staff
of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last
six years as editorial writer. In addition
to occasional magazine contributions, he has
written twenty-odd articles for the Diction-
ary of American Biography, and several for
the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
MARTHA GELLHORN, AUTHOR OF THE
Trouble I've Seen, does a vignette of the
unemployed. (Page 103).
55
The Seven Ages of Man
Four drawings made in 1918
by ROCKWELL KENT
Courtesy Weyhe Gallery. Nc« V'
FEBRUARY 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 2
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Who Wants Peace?
by DOROTHY THOMPSON
"MORE THAN ANY OTHER MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES, THAT REPRESENTED BY THE PEACE SOCIETIES
is a cross section of the American mind. At some point it touches all of American liberal opinion,
some of the conservative, and much of the radical. For it starts with a premise that few dispute:
Peace is the desideratum of all political activity; the condition of freedom, the necessity of sound
prosperity, the parent of culture, the demand of orderly social progress.
"On the side of peace, therefore, are not only those who hate uniforms and believe that militarism
is a primary cause of war, but those who think that peace depends upon international armament
against aggressors; for peace, are those who believe that there will be wars until national sovereign-
ties are eliminated in a socialistically organized world, and those who think war will end when every
nation has equality. On the side of peace are those who believe that wars can be quarantined, and
those who think that neutrality is immoral. The result is that peace is usually coupled in the mind
of its advocate with something else: Peace and Freedom; against War and Fascism.
"Yet there is a peace movement, and some thread of unity runs through all its numerous socie-
ties; some quality of temper, of outlook, is peculiar to them. What is it? Can it be defined, or
even described?" *
THE INTERNATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ALLIANCE, AFLAME
with intention to win civil and political rights for women
throughout the world called a convention for 1914. Be-
tween the announcement and the date of the meeting
war broke out, disrupting the women's movement as it
disrupted other international solidarities. Yet in all coun-
tries there were organizations and individual women who
refused to abandon the feminist crusade because of war.
Some of them saw, in the war itself, in the increased civic
demands and sacrifices which it required of women, the
opportunity to secure new civil rights as a quid pro quo
for new responsibilities. These women threw themselves
into war work and came out with the woman suffrage
amendment.
But other women saw that war was the negation of the
deepest feminine principle, that militarism, despite all
political concessions to women, would if it waxed eventu-
ally restore the idea of the male cult, of the warrior so-
ciety, of hero-worship and death- worship, of the mobilized
state and the re-subjection of women to become breeders
for new wars. The war therefore split the women's move-
ment although it won them the vote.
One group of devoted feminists identified the social
task of women with the reorganization of the world for
peace, and in the midst of war pulled out of the stream
to organize the Woman's Peace Party. The initiative
came from a group of British women who, through Mrs.
Pethick Lawrence, came to the United States from Eng-
land and begged Jane Addams to call a woman's peace
conference to try to stop the war. This Jane Addams
did, summoning war-hating feminists to the Hague in
1915. Despite censorship, war propaganda, rigid guards,
and the danger of imprisonment when they returned,
women from all the warring countries got through to the
conference.
In these words Miss Thompson introduces her interpretation of the
agencies and societies organized in the United States to promote inter-
national peace, an article that srew out of research undertaken hy Surrey
Craffrc and carried out by Marian Churchill White.
57
'In faith whereof
The last page of the Versailles Peace Treaty
Some day the author of a new Lysistrata may take for
an incident in his drama the moment when the German
women, the last to get through, arrived at the great hall
where the conference was in progress. Miss Addams was
presiding; French women were there, and British, and
women from all the neutral states. Suddenly the door
at the back of the room opened, and two women stood in
it, weary, hesitant, fearful. They represented "The
Enemy." What reception would they get from women
from countries with which their nation was at war? Miss
Addams, comprehending the situation at a glance, stopped
the proceedings, to say, "Ah, our German friends are here
at last!" And it was a French woman and an English
woman who sprang to their feet, rushed
to the door, and taking Frau Lydia
Heymann and Frau Anita Augsburg by
the hand, led them triumphantly down
the aisle.
The Woman's Peace Party, organized
at that meeting, failed of its objectives.
Its attempt to set up a permanent coun-
cil of representatives of neutral coun-
tries to work to negotiate peace,
received no support except from the
small neutral nations of northern Eu-
rope. Failing government cooperation,
they sought the help of distinguished
personalities in the neutral countries,
and called another conference, to be
held in Sweden. Henry Ford kindled
to the idea, but crossed it with the plan
for a Peace Ship. That was his idea,^
not the women's, and the shipwreck of*
the Peace Ship did not end their ac-
tivities.
When the women met again, it was
in 1919. They had agreed in 1915 to
convene whenever and wherever the
final peace conference should be held,
and the peace treaty signed. But the
French government would
not permit them to meet
in Paris. So they gathered
in Zurich. Women of
twelve nations were sitting
when the Treaty of Ver-
sailles was presented to the
Germans. They were the
first group in the world to
protest it, instantaneously,
unanimously. They in-
sisted that it violated the
spirit of the armistice,
based upon Mr. Wilson's
fourteen points, that it
betrayed the Germans and
sowed the seed of new
strife. They demanded no
annexations and no indem-
nities, and the restoration
of devastation by coopera-
tive effort. They demand-
ed an investigation of
munitions industries, and
advocated what Russia
was to propose twelve years later to the League of
Nations — total and universal disarmament. A world
about to make "peace" paid no more attention to them
than had the world just embarked upon war. And
fourteen years later, the German delegates to the confer-
ence were all exiled by Hitler, whose symbolic emergence
they were the first to foresee.
From that day to this the peace movement in America
has been preeminently a woman's crusade, inheriting
more than any other cause the passions, loyalties, and
hard political work of organized and individual women.
The movement has taken some of its tactics from the
suffragists, and many of its best organizers and publicists.
International
International
The last page of the document that we know as the Kellogg-Briand Pact
58
SURVEY GRAPHIC
This is true not only of the specifically feminine organi-
zations including the People's Mandate and the Na-
tional Committee on the Cause and Cure of War founded
by Mrs. Catt, but of the other societies as well. Men
who are officials in peace societies admit it. "The twelve
thousand most reliable peace workers in the United
States are women," according to Frederick Libby, ex-
ecutive secretary of the National Council for the Pre-
vention of War.
The Christian Effort
IF WOMEN SUPPORT THE PEACE SOCIETIES SO DO THE
churches. Reading the roster of the organizations affili-
ated with the two great American federations of peace
societies: the National Peace Conference, and the League
Against War and Fascism, one is impressed with the
number of bodies who have made work for peace a part
of the practice of religion. They range from Catholicism
through most of the Protestant sects, to one oriental-in-
On the ceiling of the council chamber of the League of Nations
Jose Maria Sert's mural, join hands in a pact
spired group. All of them testify that although "Chris-
tians"— as Lord Byron remarked — "have killed each
other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have
done as they did," nevertheless the Christian conscience
still seeks uneasily, and often vaguely, a world which ful-
fills Christian prophecy and Christian aim.
The Society of Friends and the Federal Council of
Churches of Christ in America are both important fac-
tors in the peace movement. The latter claims, together
with the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom and the National Council for the Prevention of
War, to have prepared public opinion for the Washing-
ton Conference on the Limitation of Armaments in 1921-
22. Dr. Sidney L. Gulick, for a long time secretary of the
council's department of international justice and good
will, was a leader in this country for the promotion of
American-Japanese relations, and was the real author of
the quota legislation under which immigrants were ad-
mitted to this country. He has worked untiringly for
better relations between the United States and the Far
East.
The Range of the Movement
THERE ARE THIRTY-ODD NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
peace organizations in the United States, ranging in size
from tiny groups housed in a single room and supporting
one underpaid secretary, to the Carnegie Endowment,
which has a budget of over $800,000 a year. But the peace
movement is not confined to the aggregate activities of
these organizations. Numbers of societies, religious, cul-
tural, fact-finding, humanitarian, whose main program
is not world peace are affiliated with the movement either
in a tenuous way, in that they receive and further circu-
late the propaganda of the peace societies, or more directly
through membership in the two large federations named
above.
Indeed the aim of the peace movement as an
organized enterprise has been constantly to extend the
will to organize, plan and legislate for peace to larger
groups and bodies, organized for other purposes, such
as the trade unions, the National Grange and the Federa-
tion of Women's Clubs. The very
diffusion of the movement means
that no practical program and no
consistent ideology is acceptable to
all those who are willing publicly
to align themselves as peace ad-
vocates. The peace ranks contain
the absolutely non-resistant, who
think that war is a sin, that it is the
world's prime evil and that any
sort of peace is better than any
conceivable armed conflict. They
also contain a very large number
of people who draw a sharp dis-
tinction between wars of aggres-
sion and wars of defense, and
whose chief program is to limit
our army and navy to forces suffi-
cient to protect our own soil from
invasion or even, perhaps, to help
police the Western Hemisphere.
Still another category of individ-
uals and societies admit that war
is a fact in the world and seek to
prevent war by removing its causes.
But even this latter group do not wholly agree upon a
practical program. Some of them place the emphasis upon
international cultural and political intercourse and co-
operation; others upon perfecting a legal machinery and
technique for peaceful modification of issues affecting
boundaries, colonies, debts, and so forth. Still others are
convinced that economic inequalities between nations are
a chief cause of war and hope to achieve peace in the
world by more reasonable and liberal opportunities for
the exchange of raw materials, manufactured goods, cur-
rencies, and populations. And one large and growing
federation is convinced that war is the result, in the long
run, of social conflicts attendant upon a capitalistic crisis
and will be a part of world policy until the whole social
question is solved in equity.
Obviously programs based upon such conflicting phil-
osophies, though they may agree as to objectives, diverge
in method. From the angle of organization the peace
movement entered a more constructive epoch with the
attempt, some two years ago, to find a minimum basis
upon which most peace advocates could agree, if not in
the giant continents, in
of unity
FEBRUARY 1937
59
the field of theory, at least in the field of practical politics.
This was the object of forming the National Peace Con-
ference. But the National Peace Conference itself is only
one of two large federations which by no means agree
with each other.
i
Epochs in the Movement
FURTHERMORE, THE PEACE MOVEMENT FALLS INTO EPOCHS
during the eighteen years since the war.
Preceding the war it was largely emotional and moral
and the war itself dealt it a fearful blow. There were in-
dividuals who stuck to their ideals, but for the most part
the old line peace societies went on the shelf for the
duration of the war, and with them the Carnegie Peace
Foundation. During the war, not only the women's or-
ganizations but other newly created societies such as the
American Union Against Militarism pressed for a dem-
ocratic peace, and against the continued war-time sup-
pression of civil liberties.
New hope entered the movement in 1921-22 with the
Washington Naval Conference, to promote which the
National Council for the Prevention of War was formed
and from then until the breakdown of the Geneva
Disarmament Conference in 1933 the peace movement as
a whole concentrated on disarmament and on world edu-
cation to that end. The high spots in this period were
Lindbergh's flight, the Locarno Pact, Briand's proposal
and Kellogg's answer. This was the great period of Euro-
pean rapprochement where, for a few golden years, it
looked as though the Versailles Treaty might be peace-
fully liquidated and the world swung into a new era of
international collaboration. During all of this time most
of the peace societies favored the United States joining
the League of Nations as well as the World Court, al-
though a majority of them, from the beginning, were
against military sanctions and wanted to enter a recon-
structed League. But the breakdown of the Disarmament
Conference in which the United States collaborated on
equal terms with the League, the Japanese aggrandise-
ment in China, the withdrawal from the League by
Hitler's Germany, the Abyssinian adventure of Mussolini,
the repeated unilateral breaking of treaties, and more re-
cently the war in Spain, reacted upon the American peace
movement as they reacted upon the entire American men-
tality. Until 1933 the emphasis of the peace movement
was on international collaboration to remove the causes
of war, outlaw it and find international means for settling
disputes. Today, for the most part — and there are some
exceptions — the peace societies are far more isolationist,
although they continue to work for international eco-
nomic collaboration.
Evolution of the Peace Movement
THE PEACE MOVEMENT HAS UNDERGONE A STEADY EVOLUTION.
As we have seen it started chiefly as a moral crusade aimed
at depicting the crime of war and preparations for war,
FIRST WESBVTEBIAN
YOUNG KOPUS UNITS
Keystone
For peace, and against international hostility, the great American middle class demonstrates more earnestly than for any other cause
60 SURVEY GRAPHIC
Greene for Photo League
In a New York arena the left wing turns out for a debate on the vital question: "Which way for youth in the struggle against war?"
its biologic sinfulness in killing off the young and strong,
its corruption of the public mind through lying propa-
ganda, its deflection of wealth into forms of production
which add nothing to human comfort or amenities. This
propaganda has been going on for generations, its state-
ments almost universally accepted as matters of fact. It
has only been within the last few years that most leaders
of the peace movement have come to the recognition that
the menace to peace in the world does not arise from any
dangerously widespread love of war, but rather from the
desire to defend or extend the blessings of peace itself!
Either a country like England wishes to hold against
all comers, privileged or monopoly markets in various
parts of the world, the possession of which contributes
under existing economic organization to the wealth of a
few of her citizens and the well-being of many; or a
nation like France desires to maintain in perpetuity a
high and refined civilization created by a neatly balanced
economy among a population carefully limited and as-
sisted by an influx of colonial wealth; or a nation like
Germany seeks increased outlets for the energies and
production of a vital and hard-working people; or a na-
tion like Japan seeks compensation for arid soil and
opportunities for a teeming population outside her present
geographical boundaries; or a nation like the United
States desires to integrate its population drawn originally
from many nations, to build up a high standard of living
by maintaining wages above the world level, protecting
that standard against the influx of cheaper labor or
cheaper goods, and establishing thus a monopoly over
the rich territory within her own borders. Obviously wars
occur because of the desire of nations to partake more
abundantly of the privileges of peace, and war psychology
FEBRUARY 1937
is engendered only when something valued is menaced
or something desired is barricaded, or when the impulse
to conquest can be thus rationalized.
Yet, of the thirty-odd organizations in the United States
which definitely list themselves as peace bodies, nearly
two thirds still devote most of their activities to educa-
tional campaigns propagandizing the will to peace and
fighting militarism. Many of these groups still appear to
believe that a chief cause of war is the lack of interna-
tional understanding, and that peace can be brought about
by a more vital intercourse between national cultures,
this in spite of the fact that the most universal war in
history occurred at the zenith of a generation in which
communication had been vastly improved, travel simpli-
fied, and the ideas and literature of the western world
become common property.
Although it is extremely difficult to fit any group of
organizations into water-tight categories, the good will
attitude generally describes the Quakers, the American
Peace Society, the American School Citizenship League,
the Catholic Association for International Peace, the
Church Peace Union, the New History Society, the Peace
Heroes Memorial Association, the Peace Patriots, Peace
Posters Press, the Public Action Committee, the United
Mothers for World Peace, the War Resisters League, the
Women's Peace Union, the World Alliance for Interna-
tional Friendship Through the Churches, the World
Peace Association, the World Peace Federation, the World
Peace Foundation, the World Peace Mission, the World
Peace Union and World Peaceways, Inc.
Queried as to their aims, these organizations have vari-
ously answered: To promote peace by creating the spirit
of non-resistance; to educate or inform public opinion;
61
to stimulate interna-
tional friendship and
good will; to organize
a Christian protest
against war; to outlaw
war; to unveil super-
stition; to promote
peace thoughts; to in-
form the public on
increases of militarism;
to unite the mothers;
to enroll war resisters;
to "obtain peace
through world democ-
racy"; to "promote a
world referendum on
war"; to make Chris-
tianity real; and "to
advertise peace."
100 Percent Pacifism
Hi
Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
What Europe is reading
ONE OF THEM, THE
American Peace So-
ciety, has been in
existence for over a hundred years; some of them
propagandize for truly grandiose ideas. The Women's
Peace Union is an example of a Simon-pure pacifist or-
ganization, as is the War Resisters' League. They share
desk space at No. 4 Stone Street, New York. For years,
and without much encouragement, they have fought for
an amendment to make war unconstitutional. They be-
lieve in "disarmament by example" and holding that
"violence and bloodshed are always wrong in principle
and disastrous in practice," they propose to have war
made as illegal as murder. The amendment which they
have sponsored is: "War for any purpose shall be illegal
and neither the United States nor any state, territory, nor
person subject to its jurisdiction shall prepare for, declare,
engage in or carry out war or other armed conflict, ex-
pedition, invasion or undertaking within or without the
United States, nor shall any funds be raised, appropri-
ated or expended for such purposes. . . . Congress will
have power to enact appropriate legislation to give effect
to this article."
Actually Representative Marcantonio introduced a reso-
lution for such a constitutional amendment into the
House of Representatives on March 17, 1936, and Sen-
ator Frazier introduced it in the Senate. In 1927 the
Woman's Peace Union got a hearing before the subcom-
mittee of the judiciary of the Senate in which a number
of ardent women pacifists argued on their single-minded
theme, "War is wrong, why not abolish it in the United
States?"
With extremely limited means — they employ one secre-
tary, and their budget for 1936 has been around a thou-
sand dollars— they carry on a campaign in religious
publications and by letters to individuals. They are the
prototype of 100 percent pacifism. «
The Leaders in Organization
APART FROM THE WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR
Peace and Freedom, and the large federations, the two
organizations which are most actively attempting by
political means to influence public policy, are the National
Council for the Prevention of War and the Emergency
Hutton in the Philadelphia Inquirer
What America is reading
Peace Campaign. By and large, all three organizations
would accept the six-point program of the N.C.P.W.:
defense of the soil only; reciprocal trade treaties and
stabilization of currencies; embargoes on basic war ma-
terials; international cooperation to implement the Kel-
logg Pact by peaceful means; nationalization or control
of munitions industries; maintenance of free speech.
The National Council has extended its peace program
from the Washington lobby to the local constituency. It
checks the recorded votes of all members of Congress,
"If one wants to see more clearly what the peace movement
is one might perhaps look at what it is not." See page 111.
and establishes their attitudes from votes and speeches.
It has prepared statistical records by counties, showing
exactly where the home support or opposition lies. And
its tactic is the one — successfully used by the Anti-Saloon
League and the suffragists — to organize a minority bloc
which will vote for its representatives on this issue and
this issue alone.
It has confronted candidates for office with a formidable
questionnaire of twelve queries. Do you favor: Defend-
ing American commercial interests abroad with the navy
and marines? Confining our defense policy to defense
against invasion? Reorganization of the defenses into
one department? Reducing arms expenditures? Using
the national guard in domestic disputes? Nationalizing
munitions? Taxing profits out of war? Stronger neutral-
ity legislation? Popular referendum before declaring war,
except in case of invasion? International cooperation in
the settlement of disputes? Reciprocal trade agreements?
Guarding constitutional guarantees of civil liberties?
Its slogan: "Put Peace Men in Power," has been pub-
licized with extreme effectiveness. It has literature
shrewdly designed for farmers, church members, women,
youth, and organized labor. With farmers it appeals to
the conservative impulse, the (Continued on page 105)
62
SURVEY GRAPHIC
It Happened in Wilkes-Barre
by VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
In Luzerne County, Pa., Emerson Jennings, crusading printer,
fights a bombing conviction in a drama uncomfortably parallel
to the story of Doremus Jessup in It Can't Happen Here
IN THE HEART OF THE ANTHRACITE DISTRICT OF PfiNNSYL-
vania I met Doremus Jessup, face to face. "If Doremus
had not come from three generations of debt-paying Ver-
monters," wrote Sinclair Lewis in his novel of impending
fascism, "he would by now have been a penniless wan-
dering printer — and possibly less detached about the Sor-
rows of the Dispossessed." That is the Doremus I met,
the printer, past middle age, and graying, a man with an
open countenance and kind brown eyes. His name in the
flesh is Emerson P. Jennings, and he and his patient Ver-
mont wife are as thoroughly American as the country
newspapers which they used to edit before they came to
Wilkes-Barre in 1925 to start their job-printing business
there.
Emerson Jennings is a small town type of publicist
who curiously reminds me of a blend of Westbrook Peg-
Emerson Jennings, printer, and his favorite press
FEBRUARY 1937
ler and Upton Sinclair. As a pamphleteer, a persistent
litigant and a writer of letters to newspapers he has been
a vehement critic of "political corruption" and "corporate
greed." Mild and gentle in person, he is a peppery icon-
oclast in print. Just a few months ago, in October, he was
convicted of a crime, the evidence of which he avers was
manufactured by those who wished to silence him. A
Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, jury found him guilty of
dynamiting an automobile belonging to Judge W. A.
Valentine of Wilkes-Barre, a jurist whom Jennings had
frequently and conspicuously criticized. The explosion
had occurred on March 28, 1935.
The trial, a year and a half later, admittedly was fair
as far as its conduct by Judge Samuel E. Shull from a
nearby county was concerned. The jury, however, was
deaf to the summation by Arthur Garfield Hays of the
American Civil Liberties Union in Jennings' defense.
The jurors gave more heed to the word of a railroad de-
tective, a confessed bootlegger during prohibition and
after repeal, than to the word of Emerson P. Jennings,
printer. There is a reason for this, a tragic and alarming
reason, which cuts deep into the very roots of an indus-
trial region like the Wyoming Valley of which Wilkes-
Barre is the leading city. Back of the trial lies a melo-
dramatic and bizarre set of circumstances which gives
weight to the popular belief in Wilkes-Barre that Jen-
nings was "framed." Back of the Jennings case, too, lies
a hint of the kind of unwitting fascist repression that an
American community is capable of when political and
industrial rulers combine to hold their own in an econ-
omy that has begun to slip.
WILKES-BARRE, BEAUTIFULLY SITUATED ON THE LANDSCAPED
banks of the Susquehanna River, is a mining metropolis.
It grew rich with the rise of anthracite and it is more
fashionable than its industrial neighbor and rival, the
city of Scranton. Wilkes-Barre has never really boasted a
genuine middle class. Its upper and upper-middle class
society includes almost everybody who is anybody ex-
cept a few self-made Polish, Irish, Welsh and Italian
politicians. In their own way the best people have benev-
olently attempted to preserve a pleasant status quo. They
have founded and they generously support private social
services. Some of the institutions are magnificent. But
the gulf between the right people and the wrong people
is so wide that the newly established Bucknell Junior Col-
lege will find it very difficult to bridge it for the second
generation.
For more than a decade, now, anthracite, once the favo-
rite fuel of the eastern householder, has been threatened
by cheaper or more convenient substitutes, by soft coal,
by oil and gas. In the best of times life was never
63
March 28, 1935, immediately after the explosion that wrecked the Valentine roadster
gentle in the anthracite fields. The old families sold the
principal anthracite lands of our planet into the hands
of seven leading corporations, all of them originally and
still indirectly related to railroads.
The coal companies had the troopers and the militia
on their side whenever there was trouble. District No.
1 of the United Mine Workers, under the domination of
the Irish, Welsh and Poles has tended to concentrate on
immediate grievances and contracts rather than any long
range plan to keep the anthracite communities from de-
generating into ghost towns as distressed as the hopeless
mining areas that Edward VIII advertised so embar-
rassingly to Britain last autumn. When anthracite began
to decline it was the Poles and other recently arrived
immigrants who were the first to feel the economic pain.
Some of their womenfolks went to work in the few
newer industries that came to the valley to utilize their
labor — textiles and tobacco primarily. A few of the men
have reverted to a
primitive life of
scavenging, coal
picking, coal boot-
legging, loafing,
fishing and hunt-
ing, a condition
fraught with social
danger.
Into this complex
community, practi-
cally a one industry
valley with currents
of prejudice strong
beneath the still
fairly prosperous
surface, came Em-
erson Jennings and
Fred Buckner alias Gerald Williams Charles Harris, ragged stranger, today
his wife Laura. Their plan at that time was to build up a
mail order specialty printing business that would carry
them along while Jennings developed and financed some
of the printing inventions he had been working on, with
some success, for years. Born in New Jersey of New Eng-
land Revolutionary ancestry, he comes from a well
known family of printers. Until the post-War slump
wiped out his business in the Lehigh Valley, he had been
a manufacturer and salesman of printing machinery all
his life. Printers ink is in his blood. As he walked about
his shop talking to me (he is free on bail) he paused at
one of his presses, a neat little model with a Jennings
automatic feeder of his own design attached to it. With
the artless affection of a trainer caressing a thoroughbred,
he patted the machine. "This is the nicest little press I've
got." To Emerson Jennings a printing press is possessed
of a strange beguiling magic, the most important inven-
tion in the history of human progress.
HlS FIRST CUSTOMERS
in Wilkes - Barre
were small store-
keepers wanting
weekend circulars
got out in a hurry;
lawyers with urgent
briefs; religious and
fraternal societies
with their pro-
grams; politicians
wanting posters at
election time. Soon
Emerson Jennings
was as well acquain-
ted with Wilkes-
Barre as if he had
64
SURVEY GRAPHIC
lived there all his life. He began
to take a personal interest in
local affairs. More than one edi-
tor learned to duck when, in-
sistent as the ancient mariner,
Jennings appeared at deadline
time with a long article of his
own composition.
Jennings cannot be described
as a tactful crusader. He never
attempted diplomatically to en-
list the support of liberal citi-
zens who might be described as
the board-member type and
whose open sympathy would
now be useful to him. Rather,
through lonely introspection
and constant reading of the
Constitution and of the writ-
ings of Thomas Jefferson, and
with perhaps a vague desire to
emulate Upton Sinclair whom
he had known in Sinclair's
Helicon Hall days, he early
became an individualistic re-
former. His social philosophy
may not be profoundly rationalized but it is sincere. In
his own unselfish Yankee pamphleteer's style he has
striven for justice. Mrs. Jennings long ago gave up her
composition of pipe-organ music and her housewife's
leisure to work by his side in the family printshop.
There is no point in reciting all the causes with which
Jennings has been associated. The local water company
was his first ambitious target. He still protests against
the monopoly of that utility. In the course of his affili-
ation with one protest group that openly resisted the
shutting off of water to those who refused to pay their
bill, he won the disapproval of citizens who were at-
tacking the problem through the slow but perhaps more
logical channels of the public service commission. He
is now secretary of a third group that persistently snipes
at the meagerness of rate reductions that have been
received. As a printer for an unemployed group he be-
came known, after a fashion, as a sort of unofficial
spokesman for all the dispossessed.
He is the kind of man who stops at red traffic lights,
and who expects everyone else to do the same. One
day in 1932 when he was in police court making a
complaint against a man who had bumped his fender,
he observed two citizens who appeared to have been
beaten up by the Wilkes-Barre police. At once his sense
of civic duty drove him gratuitously to take up the cause
of these men. Later, when the policemen pleaded non
vult, and Judge Valentine suspended sentence on them,
Jennings wrote a story condemning Judge Valentine.
His desultory crusading, first here, then there, against
any appearance of legalized violence, certainly brought
Jennings into disfavor in the courthouse crowd which,
through a powerful political machine headed by a Repub-
lican judge, literally ruled Luzerne County before the last
election when an equally dictatorial Democratic machine
challenged its power. But it is to be doubted whether
Jennings would ever have been accused and convicted of
a crime if he had not had the foolhardy temerity to
mix into the main business of the valley — anthracite.
Judge Samuel E. Shall, who presided at the Jennings trial in October
In the winter of 1935, Jennings, who could be counted
on to extend liberal credit to any underdog group, was
the printer for an insurgent group of miners who called
themselves the Anthracite Miners Union. They seceded
from the United Mine Workers and, despite the contract
of that organization with the operators, called a strike
against the Glen Alden Coal Company to gain recogni-
tion of their union. The cleavage between the unions
precipitated a civil war in the valley, a terribly violent,
destructive and deadly quarrel. The Glen Alden Coal
Company secured from Judge Valentine an injunction
ordering the leaders of the insurgent Anthracite Miners
Union to call off the strike. This the leaders claimed
they had no power to do without a vote. When the lead-
ers refused to obey the order, Judge Valentine sent
twenty-nine of the men to jail for contempt of court.
At the time the whole valley was tense; the courthouse
steps were manned by troopers, armed with tear gas,
sidearms, rifles and clubs. With characteristic hatred of
what he conceived to be tryranny, Jennings promptly
complained that Judge Valentine had denied the men
their rights to a jury trial. When the insurgent miners
attempted to impeach Judge Valentine, Jennings, the
persistent crusader, drew up the petition which claimed
that the judge had acted as inquisitor, judge, jury and
committing magistrate. The petition was signed by more
than five thousand miners, and Jennings himself sub-
sequently took it to the state capital at Harrisburg.
After presentation of the bill of impeachment in Harris-
burg no further effort was made to jail ninety-one others
who had been cited for contempt. In defense of the
judge, two hundred members of the bar of Luzerne
County later appeared in Harrisburg to refute the stub-
born, audacious printer, who, perhaps foolishly, had
taken the insurgent miners' cause as his own.
If you pick up a Wilkes-Barre paper for almost any
day during March 1935 you will find that somewhere out
in the hills a stick of dynamite was exploded by one side
or the other in the struggle between the United Mine
FEBRUARY 19?7
65
Prosecutor Thomas M. Lewis
Workers and the insurgent
union. Among colliery
workers accustomed to use
dynamite, the explosive
that they use in the pits,
and fearful to laymen, is
commonplace. They use it
for their Fourth of July fire-
crackers. At first dynamite
was set off only under
porches, privies, or small out
buildings. But soon there
were deaths and heavy prop-
erty damages.
On March 28, Mary Val-
entine, whose father was
cordially despised by thou-
sands of miners, drove from
the Meyers Highschool
where she worked as libra-
rian to the corner of Frank-
lin and Market Streets and
parked the car, a Pontiac
roadster bearing a judicial
tag, alongside a No Parking
sign outside the Miners
Bank building. She got out
of the car, went to the bank and was proceeding up
the street when a loud explosion rocked midtown Wilkes-
Barre. The parked automobile was wrecked. A passing
newsboy, Charles Smith, was slightly injured. Several
windows of the Miners Bank were shattered and some
damage was done to the Wyoming National Bank across
the street. That explosion, the most spectacular in the series
of dynamitings up to that time, was the crime for which
Emerson Jennings was tried, and of which he was con-
victed.
IN THIS ARTICLE THERE IS NOT SPACE TO REVIEW ALL THK
evidence that the state presented through its special
prosecutor, Thomas M. Lewis. At the time of Jennings'
arrest on August 2, 1935, four months after the explosion,
a county detective, Leo Grohowski, testified that all he
had against Jennings at the time of his arrest was that
Jennings was seen during July in the company of a man
known as Tom Lynott (alias Tom McHale, or J. J.
Sullivan). This man, whom we shall call McHale, was
the state's star witness. As an employe of the Rafter
Detective Agency he had worked for the Glen Alden
Coal Company. In the spring of 1935 this McHale, under
his real name of Lynott, was in the employ of the Lacka-
wanna Railroad, which has an affinity of interest with the
Glen Alden mines. He met Judge Valentine through
Gomer Morgan, chief of the legal department of the
Lackawanna Railroad. He was hired by the district at-
torney at the direction of the court at $15 a day, plus
expenses, to follow leads which he said he had on the
bombing of Judge Valentine's automobile. According t£
Jennings' testimony, McHale, who later admitted on the*
witness stand that he had lied to Jennings, first came into
the life of the Jennings family on July 18, 1935. After
making a telephone appointment with Mrs. Jennings, he
walked into the printshop at 4:30 in the afternoon. In-
troducing himself as Thomas McHale, he inquired into
the possibilities of Jennings' printing a labor newspaper
Judge W. A. Valentine
for a wealthy and responsible New York client. A fluent
man of pleasant address, with a muscular air of easy go-
ing success, McHale could not have appeared at that little
printshop with a more enticing proposition. Jennings was
excited. Here, at last, was a customer whose work would
take the business out of the red. Even more alluring to
Jennings was McHale's professed interest in Jennings'
literary ability, and his suggestion that an arrangement for
5(>50 a week extra might be made if Jennings would be
responsible for last minute editorial duties and the make-
up of the proposed paper each week. In the course of
several conversations Jennings, completely taken in by
the plausible stranger, dug up samples of the writing he
was proudest of — in the Unemployed News, which he
had printed for the unemployed group, and in the Blacl{
Diamond, organ of a local voluntary grocery chain.
It was finally suggested by McHale that the party he
represented, a Mr. Sullivan, would be present on Aug-
ust 2. An appointment was made at the Hotel Sterling
for 8:20 of that evening.
ON THE EVENING OF AUGUST 2, JENNINGS TESTIFIED, HE
partook of a leisurely dinner at the hotel as McHale's
guest. During the meal McHale was paged and left the
table for a while. When the meal was finished the waitress
came to their table and told McHale that a man wished
to see him in the lobby. He excused himself to see what
was wanted and asked Jennings to wait upstairs on the
mezzanine floor.
In a few minutes he came up the stairs with a man
poorly dressed and without hat, coat or necktie, rather
an unusual figure in the best hotel in town, who said
that he recalled meeting Jennings somewhere before, pos-
sibly in a night club. Jennings had never been in a night
club and he regarded the interloper with suspicion. The
ragged stranger trailed along with the two men to Room
60, and again when Jennings said, "I don't recall you," the
stranger said, "Just call me Joe." Joe went out for
66
SURVEY GRAPHIC
cigarettes and returned, and still did not take Jennings'
broad hints that he was unwelcome. Then, all of a sud-
den, there was a bang on the door. A swarm of police
entered the hotel room. Jennings was told he was under
arrest.
Jennings was not informed what the charge was
against him. He was searched, his money and papers
were taken from him. In the melee Assistant District
Attorney Dando, for whom Jennings had in the past
printed legal briefs, appeared. He told Jennings that if
Jennings stated what his business with McHale was he
would let him go. Upholding his notion of a printer's
ethics, Jennings said it was none of Dando's business.
To Jennings a printer's client was at least as confidential
as a lawyer's. McHale was out of sight and Jennings
said he was determined not to incriminate his new found
friend in any way. For some unexplained reason, Jen-
nings was whisked across the river to the Kingston jail.
JENNINGS' DEMAND FOR AN IMMEDIATE OPPORTUNITY TO
question his accusers forced a preliminary hearing the
following day. He dispensed with the lawyer who had
been called to his assistance. Representing himself, he was
confronted by a man called Gerald Williams (whose real
name is Buckner), a friend of Lynott alias McHale alias
Sullivan, who testified that he had been hired earlier by
Jennings to blow up Judge Valentine's car but had failed
to so so. Nevertheless he stated he had extorted money
from Jennings after the explosion occurred.
McHale, detained as John Doe, was held during Jen-
nings' first hearing. He was not acknowledged by the
court or by the district attorney's office as their paid agent.
He remained silent.
Jennings was held on the statement of Williams alone.
Williams later turned out not to be the man from New
York he said he was, but a hanger-on from Scranton with
family connections in Wilkes-Barre. At the trial in Octo-
ber 1936, when the defense attempted to subpoena Wil-
liams, he strangely disappeared till the trial was over.
The ragged stranger, seized in Room 60 with Jennings,
was not produced at Jennings' preliminary hearing. He
was lodged in the Wilkes-Barre lockup for seventeen days
before he was given a hearing. He gave his name as
Charles Harris. In the middle of August he was remanded
to the Luzerne County prison and held in solitary con-
finement until September 14, 1935. Then Leo Grohowski,
a county detective, started taking him on tours. The
detective and his prisoner went to night clubs together
and, by Harris's own statements, Grohowski also took
him to houses of prostitution. Once they went to New
York City together. On these parties Grohowski urged
Harris to write a confession and everything would be all
right. Finally, in September, prompted by Grohowski,
Harris wrote the confession saying that in the presence
and pay of Jennings he had put the bomb in the car the day
of the explosion, while it was parked near the Meyers
Highschool. A weak-willed, ragged, youthful tramp, a
street corner character and itinerant waiter, Harris then
escaped. After writing his confession he walked out of a
roadhouse where County Detective Grohowski had left
him to his own devices during one of their forays to-
gether. He was a fugitive for three days before the dis-
trict attorney's office revealed his escape, when the case
against Jennings was called for trial. At once the local
newspapers communicated with the warden of the county
prison and he, not knowing the district attorney had let
the news out, insisted Harris was still in his cell. Months
later, to the embarrassment of Luzerne County authori-
ties, Harris was picked up in Hornel, N. Y., by a police-
man there, and returned to Wilkes-Barre. In Hornell he
claimed his arrest was a mistake, that he was the most
unwanted man in Luzerne County, and that he had con-
fessed only to frame Jennings. He repudiated his strange
early confession, and is now in the Luzerne County jail,
a convicted co-defendant of Jennings. He is a pitiable
devil of a fellow who has had the misfortune to be drawn
January 8, 1937, in the Luzerne County courtroom when move for a new trial was begun. Left to right: Emerson Jennings,
Arthur Garfield Hays, Francis Biddle, Dudley Field Malone (appearing for Harris), Arthur Sullivan
FEBRUARY 1937
67
into a fantastic drama that misfired into a cause celebre.
A noteworthy feature of the strange case is that despite
Jennings' insistence upon an early trial, the district at-
torney's office was not ready. Eventually District Attorney
Thomas Lewis's term expired, and District Attorney Leon
Schwartz came into office. Schwartz moved to nolle prosse
the case — to discontinue it. That was March 31, 1936.
District Attorney Schwartz's petition set forth that he
was not satisfied with the quantity or quality of the testi-
mony available to try the case. All the while, however,
since the court never acted on the motion, Jennings in-
sisted upon being tried at once and by a jury. In
October 1936, with the returned Harris as a co-defendant,
Jennings got his wish, and with a vengeance.
THE TRIAL WAS ONE OF THE MOST SENSATIONAL AND WIDELY
attended ever to take place in Wyoming Valley. Local
Attorney Arthur Sullivan had taken the case of the im-
pecunious Jennings because of a genuine belief in his
innocence. At Jennings' own insistence. Arthur Garfield
Hays of New York had assumed the leadership of the
defense. Defense counsel could not have entered a case
with rosier confidence in the acquittal of their client.
After refusal of District Attorney Schwartz to prosecute
Jennings, Thomas Lewis, former district attorney, had
been appointed special prosecutor by Attorney General
Margiotti of Pennsylvania, at what is said to have been
the insistence of some local judges, and especially of Judge
Valentine himself, who is a friend of Attorney General
Margiotti. As Lewis exhibited his panorama of state's wit-
nesses it was felt by many present, including visiting at-
torneys and members of the press, that surely no jury
would convict on the evidence of a man like McHale, a
detective of dubious connections. McHale's friend, Wil-
liams, proved so elusive that he was not even called to
the stand; McHale's other friend, Charles Harris, the
ragged ne'er-do-well from up the river, a vagabond who
admitted he had been tricked into his early confession as
part of a scheme against the printer, now appeared as co-
defendant. Mary Valentine, exhibiting a knack for re-
membering automobile license numbers, said that the
number of the car that had followed hers on several oc-
casions was that of Jennings. There were several well
meaning but not weighty witnesses, who might easily
have been mistaken, who identified Harris, or Jennings,
or both as present near Mary Valentine's automobile while
it was parked near the highschool where she worked.
But Jennings' own workmen testified that Jennings had
not left the printshop even for lunch that day. A rush
job of briefs had been on the press.
In his summation for the defense, Arthur Garfield Hays
described Jennings as "a man with one particular fault,
almost a disease, which I would call Constitutionalitis."
He did not deny that Jennings had found much to criti-
cize in Judge Valentine.
Prosecutor Lewis, in his summation, asked the jury,
"Who put that bomb there but the man of malice?"
The jury brought in a verdict of guilty (1) of bombing
the automobile (2) with intent to injure Mary Valentine.
On the charge of injury to Charles Smith, who was hurt
by the explosion, Jennings and Harris were acquitted.
They were likewise acquitted of injuring the two bank
buildings.
Jennings is now free on $30,000 bail, a sum which was
raised by citizens of the valley, most of whom know him
68
only through his reputation as a fighter for popular
rights.
WHEN I LEFT THE JENNINGS APARTMENT, ON THE SECOND
floor of an old mansion in Union Street, the ground floor
of which is occupied by the Polish Women's Mutual Aid,
I was perplexed. First I had seen him in his printshop,
only a few minutes' walk up the street; then I had seen
him in his home. He was preoccupied, of course, with his
case. But often he digressed and ardently tried to persuade
me of the Tightness of his fights against the water com-
pany, against judicial tyranny, against the political bosses
of the country, against the coal companies. He denies any
knowledge of the bombing. He is an earnest business
man, not the type to associate with such a crime.
In confidence I interviewed many civic leaders, and
also everyday plain townsfolks. "Oh, Jennings, he was
railroaded; it was all a frame-up," was a bootblack's
cynical comment. A civic leader said: "I don't know
whether or not Jennings did it; but he was a public
nuisance. I'm not proud of my opinion, but honestly I
don't care what happens to him. This valley has troubles
enough, without stirring up sympathy for a printer who
after all did meddle in that illegal insurgent strike when
nobody knew who was going to be blown up next."
And another, "Don't talk to me of Pennsylvania
justice. How about Governor Pinchot who abetted the
thieves who are now stealing coal and bootlegging it?
Although there isn't any coal bootlegging to speak of in
Wyoming Valley, the bootleggers have depressed the
whole anthracite industry. Write an article about that.
Forget this printer, Jennings. Would you buy a stock or
bond based on anthracite?"
But the case of Emerson Jennings does throw consid-
erable light on the troubles of anthracite. Certainly the
case reveals some peculiar acts in the name of Pennsyl-
vania justice in the turbulent hard coal country.
Judge Valentine is considered the ablest legalist on the
bench of Luzerne County. Lawyers invariably praise his
brisk efficiency, his quick mind. Yet, despite his reputa-
tion for stern uprightness, I have been told that events
of recent years have greatly disillusioned him and af-
fected his attitude toward all insurgency. He is not a
conspicuous civic or cultural leader, not the force in the
community that President Judge McLean — a man of lib-
eral tendencies and idealism — has been. Judge McLean,
who has been frequently ill of late years, cannot be in-
cluded as a part of the political courthouse crowd. Like
Jennings himself, Judge Valentine is a lonely figure, self-
made, industrious; he has happened to be on the priv-
ileged side of the fence.
Lewis, the prosecutor, who was district attorney of the
county at the time Jennings was arrested in Room 60 of
the Sterling Hotel (of which Lewis was receiver) is a
typically ambitious politician. Although he refuses to give
interviews, and received me very curtly, prior to the
Jennings trial his office frequently released items to the
newspapers, among them the sensational statement that
Dictaphone evidence, secured from Room 60 of the
Sterling, incriminated Jennings. Yet Lewis did not intro-
duce any stenographic transcription of such a record at
the trial. I have read a copy of a so-called conversation as
transcribed from the alleged records. It is fragmentary,
meaningless, except for Harris's words, as Jennings has
testified, "Just call me Joe." (Continued on page 104)
SURVEY GRAPHIC
HUMAN INVENTIONS
Towns Meet the Weather
ABOUT 1912 THE INCREASING USE OF THE AUTOMOBILE WAS
responsible for a new and unpredictable item on the
budgets of cities and towns in the thirty-six states that lie
in the snow belt. Snow fighting became a civic job. Up to
that time snow had usually been left to accumulate in the
streets. In fact, people complained when it was cleared
away, for it interfered with the use of sleighs. Only the
railways possessed specially designed, speedy snowplows.
The first municipal snow removal conference held at
Philadelphia in 1914 called in the engineers.
FROM 1915 TO 1920 THE ENGINEERS PROPOSED ALL SORTS OF
trick schemes for getting rid of snow. That was the hey-
day of inventors' ideas for melting it — with hot water,
steam, or chemicals. Melting was soon found impractical.
Heat was too expensive; chemicals destroyed the streets.
The nineteen-twenties showed a steady and sensible de-
velopment of special machinery for snow removal. Snow
fighting really began.
FIGURES HAVE NEVER BEEN COMPILED TO SHOW THE COM-
plete cost of a blizzard to a city. In 1934, the latest year for
which U. S. census figures are available, New York spent
$6,704,117 on snow and ice removal; Wichita, Kan., spent
$19; Boston listed the cost as $1,030,528; yet Philadelphia,
which had heavy snows that year, recorded extra blizzard
expenses totaling only $999. The disparity in various mu-
nicipal figures indicates that every city in the United
States has a snow problem peculiarly its own, and a
method of accounting for the expense that has never been
standardized. For example, in that same year of 1934,
Milwaukee, Cleveland and Albany each spent less than
the $28,565 that it cost the New York suburb of Yonkers
to dispose of its snow, slush and ice.
NEW YORK'S TRAINING SCHOOL, CALLED THE INSTITUTE OF
Street Cleaning and Snow Removal, is conducted the year
round by the department of sanitation. Sixty students at
a time are enrolled. They learn the strategy of battling
blizzards, and familiarize themselves with the special ma-
chines which the city owns. During the summer a snow
map is drawn, and through the fall regular city employes
practice with their equipment on downtown streets. Own-
ers and managers of buildings have pledged their em-
ployes to take part in moving the snow into sewers. The
drive to prevent parking in the streets during or after a
snowfall has been commenced by closing blocks to traffic
while snow machinery is working. Every third crosstown
street in Manhattan is now closed simultaneously while
snow is being removed, with only an emergency lane kept
clear for deliveries.
DISPOSAL OF SNOW is A KNOTTY PROBLEM. IN PHILADELPHIA
the sewers will not accommodate it so most of the snow is
dumped through special hatches in the bridges of the
Schuylkill. In most cities it is either stacked on vacant
lots or, if the sewers are large, dumped into the nearest
manhole. Westmount, Quebec, has a stunt all its own.
Formerly piled on vacant lots, where it remained an eye-
sore well into the summer, the snow is now dumped into
a pond of hot water. The pond is a part of the city's steam
electric generating plant, and heated in the regular routine
of use in the condensers of the plant. Salt Lake City is
even more fortunate in its hot water supply; from natural
hot springs within the city limits hot water is pumped to
flush snow and ice from the downtown streets.
TEN YEARS AGO AMERICAN CITY SAID, "SNOW REMOVAL
has become a trucking problem." This prophecy would
have come true were it not for two circumstances. First,
the depression increase in number of unemployed, who
have slowed down the elimination of hand labor on pub-
lic enterprises of all kinds; and second, the perversity of
the average American citizen who insists upon parking
his automobile in the street and thereby impedes snow
removal by machines. Patient Akron employes shovel
snow from beneath parked automobiles by hand. In a few
spunky towns the authorities tow parked cars away to an
auto pound, where they may be claimed on payment of a
fee. This quickly persuades motorists that they have got
to cooperate with their winter friends, the snow fighters.
IN ADDITION TO PLOWING SNOW, AND REMOVING IT, AND IN
many instances clearing private sidewalks as well, a great
many cities also use sand or salt on hills and slippery
intersections. Burlington, Vt., a winter-conscious city, with
an annual snowfall of over five feet, docs a sensible New
England kind of job. Property owners clear sidewalks in
storms of less than two inches; beyond two inches, the
city plows all sidewalks, beginning at 4 a.m., and finish-
ing the whole 120 miles of them before 9 a.m.
BEYOND CITY LIMITS THE WAR PUT STATES IN THE SNOW RE-
moval business. For example, the federal government re-
quested Pennsylvania to keep its stretch of the Lincoln
Highway passable for the trucks that were supplementing
the overtaxed railroads hauling food and munitions. Now
Pennsylvania's annual million-dollar campaign against
blizzards on 10,000 miles of highway is directed from the
capitol at Harrisburg. There a large map shows weather
and road conditions in every county. The teletype system
for the apprehension of criminals is used to keep track of
Old Man Winter.
THE FUTURE OF SNOW FIGHTING LIES IN THE FURTHER
development of techniques like those of the fire fighters.
Speedy light equipment will be called out and work com-
menced at the very threat of a snowstorm, followed up
with the heavy artillery, the powerful specially built ma-
chines. American cities have not standardized their book-
keeping and pooled their knowledge so that taxpayers
can learn just what it really costs comparable cities to dis-
pose of comparable storms. But at present, the taxpayer is
definitely demanding better service, and is willing to pay
the expense.
FEBRUARY 1937
69
Next Moves in Medical Care
by MICHAEL M. DAVIS
IN THE SEVEN YEARS SINCE THE GREAT BULL MARKET, WE
have had much cool statistical light thrown on our medi-
cal facilities, on sickness costs and their uneven distri-
bution. We have also witnessed a march of opinion and
of action. Of major importance have been: a forward
movement within the medical profession; the emergence
of hospitals into the arena of social action; and enlarge-
ment of action by national, state and local governments
concerning medical care and public health.
In December 1932, the recommendations of the Com-
mittee on the Costs of Medical Care were condemned in
the editorial pages of the Journal of the American Medi-
cal Association as "socialism and communism, inciting to
revolution," although the chairman of the committee was
a physician, a former president of the association, and a
member of Mr. Hoover's not exactly socialistic cabinet.
Three years later, ten principles officially promulgated by
the American Medical Association to guide state and local
medical societies in practical experimentation with new
plans of medical care involved the principle of voluntary
sickness insurance, which was as far as the Committee
on the Costs of Medical Care had ventured. "Medical-
Dental Service Bureaus" have been established at the
initiative of medical societies in several cities. Several
group clinics, initiated by physicians, sometimes combat-
ted by medical societies, are receiving payment for ser-
vice from consumers on a cooperative basis.
Local medical societies are everywhere participating in
the extending plans for voluntary insurance against hos-
pital care. Experiments in general sickness insurance
have been launched by a few medical societies, as in At-
lanta, Seattle, and Portland (Oregon). A state-wide plan
for the cooperative care of a large part of the farming
population of North Dakota was recently entered into by
the State Medical Society and the Resettlement Admin-
istration.
Some of these experiments are substantial, others in-
consequential; still others are too new to judge. Within
a large body such as the 150,000 physicians of the United
States, a variety of attitudes would naturally be manifest.
Hungry doctors have welcomed state medicine because it
yielded income; well-to-do doctors have decried money
payment to hard-worked physicians for their services in
hospitals and clinics. Progress and reaction, arguments
from and mis-statements of foreign experience, under-
taking and sabotage of experimentation, increasing pro-
gressivism among many quiet individuals, outspoken
radicalism of some minorities, official formulations of pol-
icy which look two ways — all these have been exemplified
within the medical profession in recent years, as they
have within political parties and business groups which
are also experiencing the pressures of social change.
The service bureaus, for example, represent merely the
extension of fee adjustment to an organized public scale
instead of on the private individual scale. Patterns of
charitable relationship familiar to most physicians and
to many patients have been followed. But these plans
represent the very important recognition that the eco-
nomics of medical care constitute a public and not merely
a private, professional problem.
UP TO THE END OF 1932, FOUR OR FIVE HOSPITALS, CHIEFLY
in Texas, had started arrangements with groups of peo-
ple, such as school teachers, through which hospital care
could be paid for in advance for about $10 a year. In
February 1933, the American Hospital Association offi-
cially approved the idea of these schemes, put forward
principles for their organization so they should be non-
profit plans of community service rather than means of
financing hospitals, and set under way a program of pro-
motion and advice administered by the council of the
association with the aid of C. Rufus Rorem, loaned on part
time for this purpose by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. At
the end of 1936, plans of group hospitalization, as they
are most commonly called, were organized in some sixty
cities (aside from wholly commercial plans) from New
York, with its 200,000 members, down to towns of 10,000
population. The number of persons eligible to benefits is
at least 600,000. In Rochester, N. Y., one sixth of the en-
tire population is already included.
Insurance against the costs of hospital care has more
potential importance in the United States than in any
European country, because a large proportion of the
American people have been expected to pay their way in
hospitals, whereas most hospitals in Europe are either
run by governments or are endowed to provide wholly
free service. On the other hand a plan of sickness insur-
ance which covers only the hospital bill and not the ac-
companying bill of the physician or surgeon, and which
costs from $8 to $10 per person per year may be too ex-
pensive in proportion to benefits, to reach more than the
middle class and the better-paid wage earners. Possibili-
ties of reducing the costs have already been exemplified
in some plans which, as in Akron, Ohio, have been estab-
lished by the employes of large establishments.
In calling forth unprecedented expenditures from gov-
ernment for the relief of the unemployed and their fam-
ilies, the depression also launched public expenditures for
medical care on a scale previously unknown in this coun-
try. The medical relief programs which began under the
FERA in the summer of 1933 were not new as a matter
of policy, for some medical care to persons without in-
comes has long been supported by taxation. But because
they extended care to a substantial fraction of the whole
community and particularly because they drew the or-
ganized medical profession (in some degree dentists and
nurses also) into systematic participation, these emer-
gency medical programs were a new adventure.
With the demobilization of FERA insufficient local
funds to care even for the subsistence needs of the unem-
ployables have often precluded more than the most ele-
mentary efijergency provision for care in sickness.
SHOULD THE PUBLIC PAY FOR THE CONTINUING NECESSITY
of food among people without incomes? If so, why not
pay for the discontinuous but urgent necessity of medical
70
SURVEY GRAPHIC
*5OO
I50Q-3OO «30O-»2OO >2OO
»IOO «IOO-»6O »6O-»<»O «4O-»7.O •2O-MO UNDER «IO
Picture Book on the Costs of Medical Care, Julius Rosenwald Fund
Each man represents a million American families; each bag the sickness bill; large bills fall on wage earners as well as the wealthy
care? The emergency programs of the depression an-
swered these two questions affirmatively and through a
loud speaker. Several million citizens who received care
and some tens of thousands of physicians who furnished
it had good reason to hear that broadcast. The quantita-
tive extension and the qualitative improvement of tax
supported medical services for people who cannot meet
the cost themselves have thus been advanced by perhaps
twenty years. Medical care as a part of relief is an ines-
capable responsibility of welfare departments. Federal
participation in meeting the expense of physicians' and
hospital service is as reasonable as federal sharing in di-
rect or work relief.
On the staff of the President's Committee on Economic
Security which drafted the Social Security Act of 1935
was a group engaged in studies of public health, tax sup-
ported medical care and health insurance, and the find-
ings of the first section of these studies — that relating to
public health — were incorporated in the law. For some
years previously, an average of about $300,000 annually
had been appropriated by Congress through the United
States Public Health Service for grants-in-aid to the
states. The act raised the amount to $8 million, and also
authorized appropriations of nearly as much more for
closely related purposes of child health and welfare
through the Children's Bureau. The extra millions of
money — which, moreover, will bring additions from
state funds — are important, but still more so is the en-
larged conception of public health from mere sanitation
to broad responsibility for control and care of disease.
THE MAJOR SECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT RELATE
to unemployment and to old age, and these programs
have medical implications which are even more impor-
tant than the direct health grants in the law. Within a
few years, most of our industrial states will doubtless
have unemployment insurance laws. When John Brown
is laid off for a month because his factory is short of or-
ders, he will get back a part of his lost wages from the
unemployment insurance fund. But when Tom Jones,
his bench-mate, is out the next month because of pneu-
monia, he will be entitled to no compensation, although
Jones will probably need help more than Brown, for he
will not only lose income but will have the expenses of
medical care besides. In every European country which
has unemployment insurance, sickness insurance had
been established previously. It would be surprising if in
America workers could be compensated for unemploy-
ment due to industrial reasons, without soon causing
Tom Jones and all his friends to demand compensation
tor the equally unpredictable and even more burden-
some unemployment due to sickness. Disability benefit
for sickness, furnished on an insurance basis, can more
wisely link up with unemployment insurance than with
insurance to meet the costs of medical care.
What proportion of old people suffer from preventable
or postponable physical disabilities? How many have
chronic illness which could be cured or alleviated? What
proportion suffer from illness or disability which could
be cared for at home instead of in an institution, if medi-
cal and nursing attention were available through an or-
ganized plan? To what extent can some types of heart
disease or arthritis (two of the common crippling diseases
of middle and old age) be alleviated through adequate
medical care, so as not only to prolong life but to make
life worth living longer?
In making people throughout the United States con-
scious of new responsibilities for old age and unemploy-
ment, the Social Security Act will demand the appli-
cation of preventive and curative medicine to lessen the
costs and reduce the human wastage of disability and
invalidity. In a population like ours where the proportion
of middle-aged and elderly persons is increasing greatly,
these questions will be of fundamental importance to
public welfare, to the practice of medicine, and to the
maintenance of our hospitals. This year, governmental
surveys of sickness among 700,000 families, of the costs of
sickness among 60,000 families, and of medical and hos-
pital facilities in ninety-six cities and towns will furnish
material of public interest and scientific value.
The advance of public sentiment is reflected in the
adoption last autumn by the American Federation of
Labor of the proposal of its executive council, urging "the
federal government to create a commission to study and
recommend plans for coordination and improvement of
our provisions for social security and their expansion to
include compensation and medical care for sickness."
This involves not only health insurance, but also tax
supported medical care. Recently the Cooperative League
of America established a section of its organization for
studying and promoting the cooperative purchase of
medical care.
LAST OCTOBER, THE MAGAZINE FORTUNE PUBLISHED ITS SUR-
vey of public opinion concerning Doctors, Dentists, and
Dollars. For hospital care insurance at $10 per person per
year "there would be wide acceptance," said the report,
"representing about half of the population. It also seems
that a great many people are willing to pay more for
this protection than they paid for the services they re-
CALL3 0« OAVB or SCRVICC PCM t.OOO IULXESSCS
•AL, OAVS IVISmfM MVM»,CAIU
1,000 2,000 I 100 ZOO 3OO
Public Health Reports Vol. 50. (Perrott and Collinsl
Service per patient by physician, hospital and visiting nurse
in typical wage earning families of seven cities in 1933
FEBRUARY 1937
71
ceived last year." Of their sample population 74 percent
said "yes" to the question, "Do you believe the govern-
ment should provide free medical and dental care at the
expense of the taxpayer for those who cannot pay?" The
prosperous, the middle classes and the poor returned ap-
proximately the same percentage of affirmative answers.
This, declares Fortune, "indicates an impressive body of
opinion among all classes in favor of extending govern-
ment health service from the preventive to the clinical."
Underlying all these movements of action and of opin-
ion run three long range trends:
1. The advance of medical science and technology, re-
vealing new ways of preventing, curing or controlling
disease, and calling forth professional and economic in-
centives to put this knowledge into practice. Medicine
has thus been continuously moved, by forces within it-
self, towards more specialized and extensive organization,
towards larger use of equipment and personnel provided
by society, and towards increased participation with other
professional and lay groups in the furnishing and the
financing of medical care.
2. The forward movement of public welfare and pub-
lic health (mainly though by no means entirely gov-
ernmental), improving and enlarging the services fur-
nished those who cannot meet the cost themselves.
3. The widespread demand for security against risks
with which the individual alone cannot cope. It has be-
come apparent that the attainment of individual security
requires in many instances organized social action.
These three trends in medical service, in public welfare
and in social security are broader than medicine and
deeper than political parties. Most consumers of medical
services can have little to say about procedures and re-
sults except those which are wholly financial. Judgment
on these matters must be left, more largely than in most
economic issues, to those who furnish service — physicians,
hospitals, dentists and nurses. Of especial importance,
therefore, is the participation of these professions and
agencies in policy-making and in administration. These
groups should thus be assured fair conditions of service
and of remuneration, and the public in turn can prop-
erly hold physicians and hospital authorities largely re-
sponsible for the organization of services and institutions.
LOOKING INTO A CRYSTAL BALL is DANGEROUS TO THE REPU-
tation. But no second sight is required to discern, among
next moves, the forward march of public health work,
extended to more rural areas; intensified and broadened
in the cities. Public health authorities will come to grips
not only with communicable diseases like tuberculosis
and syphilis, but also with diseases which are infused
with a public interest because they are prevalent, costly
and capable of reduction if certain known measures are
available for the use of physicians and patients. Cancer,
pneumonia and diabetes are already within this group.
Laboratory, clinical and administrative research will add
more diseases to the list, particularly, it may be hoped,
those prevalent in the later periods of life.
How far will the extending administration of such
medical service, and of medical care for all illness among
people without incomes, be under public health or under
public welfare departments? The answer will vary in dif-
ferent localities. Everywhere these two public bodies
should seek coordination with one another, with the
medical profession and with voluntary agencies, in behalf
72
of a coherent and effective service, adequately staffed and
guided by medical personnel. Home medical and nursing
care, bed patient and clinic care in or through hospitals
are all necessary in any satisfactory system. All these
parts of care should be closely related so as to give con-
tinuity of service to the patient. These principles have
been exemplified for some years in Buffalo.
National leadership should contribute to the shaping
of policy. National funds are needed to assist states and
localities. But the administrative units should be less than
national and by no means merely governmental.
Health insurance applies of course to self-supporting
economic groups as a means through which they can
meet some burdensome costs of care without dependency
on either government or charity. A program of "health
security" includes preventive measures, tax supported
medical services, and health insurance. The relative im-
portance of taxation, insurance and individual payment
as means of supporting medical services will vary with
time and locality. All new programs in this field must fit
the psychology and resources of the people as well as the
legitimate demands of the professions. Americans will
continue to expect and to have service from a physician
with whom they feel a personal relation of confidence.
The diversity of resources and conditions among and
within our states makes likely a variety of different ap-
proaches in the application of the insurance principle to
sickness, and renders it probable that federal action will
be stimulative and sustaining rather than administrative.
Health insurance as a means of payment will be likely to
proceed with much voluntary experimentation. Some
states may before long require some form of health in-
surance by law. Diversity may be expected in scope of
service as well as in sources of funds. High cost illness
may conceivably be a starting point for some large scale
health insurance plans in this country, instead of general-
practitioner service, as in Great Britain.
Will the forces which are moving medicine and the
allied groups forward keep the professions abreast of
changes compelled by broad social policies? The medical
professions and institutions have a high tradition of ser-
vice and there is every reason to believe that in propor-
tion as they meet their obligations of service, the public
will support their efforts to maintain high professional
and economic standards.
Will the voluntary agencies in health, hospital, social
work and industry maintain their traditions of initiative
and pace-making? Will they help to advance the public
services, as well as their own, in scope, quality, and co-
ordination? Here again there is a fine tradition, to be
courageously cultivated through changing times.
No crystal ball is needed to make clear that medical
care and disease prevention have recently moved nearer
the focus of public attention, and that much experimen-
tal action is taking place which demands study and de-
cision in behalf of more definitive plans. Decision upon
wise courses of action by public bodies, professional
groups and voluntary agencies is the essential problem
during a dynamic period like the present. Changes are
not born of fate, but are built out of existing conditions
by the impulses and the plans of men. In few arenas of
public affairs are the interests more varied than in medi-
cal services. In no arena are more substantial arrays of
facts at hand; with consequent opportunity for the plan-
ning of action by cooperation and intelligence.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Power Issue and the TVA
VIII— BENCHMARKS IN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY
by ARTHUR E. MORGAN
In mid- January, (followed by the President's appointment of an expert com-
mittee to formulate a national power policy) , the chairman of the TVA pub-
lished in the New York Times a comprehensive statement here presented with
permission of the Times, as a chapter in his "log of the TVA" in Survey
Graphic. Mr. Morgan's contribution to today's power discussion advocates an
attempt at cooperation with the utility companies in the Tennessee Valley
THIS IS AN EFFORT TO STATE MY PERSONAL VIEWS ON THE
electric power issue, especially as it affects the Tennessee
Valley Authority, and also to indicate the social attitude
which leads to my conclusions. In its physical setting the
power program of the TVA is part of a far-reaching
project for the unified development of the Tennessee
River system. The spirit in which that program is
worked out will tend to reflect the personal and social
outlooks of those who formulate and administer it.
In the background of the electric power controversy
is the long struggle over the elimination of special privi-
lege and the reduction of arbitrary and capricious in-
equalities of opportunity. No less important than equality
of opportunity is the increase in total opportunity
through technical developments and social organization.
The electric power industry should exist for the con-
sumer, and not primarily as a profitable field of invest-
ment or to supply business for investment bankers.
In the long run this main purpose of providing the
widest and best possible service at the lowest possible
cost will be most fully realized if aggressive action in the
public interest is undertaken in a spirit of open dealing,
and of honest regard for legitimate interests, both public
and private. In the long run sharp practice and arbitrary
methods will not be helpful either to the public or to pri-
vate interests.
A very important decision is involved in the treatment
of the power issue in TVA territory. Shall there be an
effort on the part of public officials to work with the
private utility companies to remove abuses, to insure max-
imum service at minimum cost and to insure opportunity
for public ownership where it is desired, or shall men
who administer public projects drift into an attitude of a
fight to the finish against the private power companies,
which might have the natural and perhaps inevitable con-
sequence of disruption of the private systems, the destruc-
tion of legitimate investments and of economical service,
and the sudden, if unexpected, throwing of great power
systems into premature and unprepared-for public owner-
ship? The results of non-cooperation might have the effect
of a violent public reaction against government participa-
tion in the power business.
I believe that we should deal with the private power
companies to the end of eliminating abuses, while pre-
serving the right of the people to acquire their own power
service by public ownership if they choose. In the process
of transition from private to public ownership there should
be respect for legitimate private investments in the utility
business, and individual local communities should be
required to respect the interests of the larger communities
of which they are a part by preserving the economy and
efficiency of well-integrated power systems. I believe we
should endeavor to work with the private companies on
the basis of mutual cpnfidence and good-will, but with
circumspection, and without surrendering any weapons
before a satisfactory settlement is reached.
The Past of the Private Companies
I DO NOT ADVOCATE COOPERATION THROUGH ANY NAIVE BE-
lief that the private companies have a consistent record
of good behavior, for I believe that those who advocate a
fight to the finish have strong arguments in their favor.
The aim of some powerful leaders in the private electric
utility industry commonly has been to ruthlessly destroy
public ownership by every possible means. For years the
National Electric Light Association published a propa-
ganda yearbook called "Political Ownership," which, in
my opinion, failed to meet the standards of fair play and
good citizenship. While president of Antioch College I
was informed by the vice-president and general manager
of a large power company that "the least suggestion of en-
couragement" to even mildly discuss public ownership of
power would be an offense to his company. I have per-
sonally been approached with a proposal that I take part
in what I considered to be undercover power propaganda
in the public schools. For years before the creation of the
TVA, I was personally subjected to adverse propaganda
by utility interests, sometimes open and sometimes private,
and the institution of which I was the head was similarly
subject to adverse and, I believe, misleading propaganda
from the same source. I need to rely only on statements
made to me by utility executives and their business asso-
ciates to believe that disregard for the public interest and
abuse of power have been great though not universal.
Partly by such direct personal knowledge and partly
by the reports of the Federal Trade Commission and oth-
erwise, I have come to the belief that the attitude of a ruth-
less fight to the finish and without quarter against public
ownership of power has been a characteristic position of
the private utilities. I believe that in their fight, private
utility interests have bribed legislatures and public utility
commissioners, controlled newspapers and banks, endeav-
ored to cripple or destroy responsible and sound educa-
tional institutions which dared to be independent, threat-
ened college professors and others with libel if they dared
to publish the facts, and perhaps have made it difficult
FEBRUARY 1937
73
for public ownership projects to sell bonds.
It is my opinion that the ruthless attitude which in the
past has been exhibited by some of the private utilities,
and which to some extent was the "mental climate" of the
utility industry as a whole, is not an isolated phenomenon.
I think it has been only a typical case of the arrogance and
intolerance which special privilege and economic power
have very often exhibited.
I BELIEVE, TOO, THAT THE LONG FIGHT TO ELIMINATE UTILITY
abuses is part of a slow-moving social revolution which is
striving to free the mass of the people from exploitation
and to remove arbitrary and capricious inequalities of
opportunity. Some men, among whom Senator Norris is
outstanding, have given their lives sincerely and unsel-
fishly to the fight against utility abuses and similar mis-
use of power. However, in any great public movement,
along with such completely sincere and public-spirited
men, there will be others with various mixtures of public
interest and self-interest, and they tend to complicate the
problem.
Some of those who have vigorously opposed private
utility abuses have had long experience with the tactics
associated with such abuses and- have no confidence in
any apparent change of attitude. They hold it to be a case
of
When the devil was sick
The devil a monk would be,
and that should the private companies again get the upper
hand it would turn out that
When the devil was well
The devil a monk was he.
It is the honest opinion of some public men that any
negotiation with the private utilities is unwise and dan-
gerous.
A Basis of Cooperation
YET NOTWITHSTANDING MY OWN EXPERIENCES AND WHAT I
have learned of utility abuses, I believe that at the present
time the proper attitude to take with reference to TVA
power is to strive to find a basis of agreement between
the TVA and the private utilities which will protect both
public and private investments, and will lead to the widest
possible distribution of electric power at the lowest possi-
ble rates. I believe that only in that way can we secure
the greatest sum total of social values whether under pub-
lic or private administration. Since the creation of the
Tennessee Valley Authority I have taken that attitude.
There are several reasons for such a position.
FlRST, I BELIEVE THAT IN 1933 THE UTILITIES WERE GREATLY
concerned over the general course of events, and that there
was then a fair chance to find a basis for procedure which
would have protected the public interest and kept open
the way for public ownership, and which might have
made possible a much greater advance in the TVA pro-
gram. I believe that some leading utility executives are
today in a mood to desire a reasonable working arrange-
ment, and that it may be possible to arrive at a solution
which will protect both public and private interests, and
which would mark a great advance in public policy.
Aggressively liberal governments seldom have remained
in power for long at a time. If there should be another
world depression during the next few years, and if the
optimism of rising prosperity should change again to the
depth of depression, political power might shift, and
reaction might be in control. My attitude would be to try
to establish a substantial advance in public policy while
there is opportunity. For perhaps the first time in our his-
tory the electric power interests are on the defensive. Nei-
ther utility executives nor public officials know what will
be the future trend of public policy. It may turn on world-
wide issues rather than on domestic causes. When neither
side is sure of the future is a good time to promote in-
telligent reasonableness, and thereby to improve the qual-
ity of government and of public life.
SECOND, DURING RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A CHANGE IK
the quality of the leadership of utility companies. A great-
er number of more public-spirited, forward-looking men
are coming into control of some of the large systems,
though that change has not yet gone as far as could be
desired. This change for the better is due partly to the
increasing emergence in business of innate American de-
cency, and partly to the fact that those who control the
utilities see the handwriting on the wall, and are trying to
put their house in order while there is yet time. I am for
recognizing any such effort.
It is not wise to so center attention upon utility abuses
as to fail to see the great achievements of the electric
power industry in America. There has been an intelligent
aggressiveness in technical development and activity in the
integration of the industry which has brought about a
high level of convenience and service. There should be
honest recognition of that achievement and an effort not
to lose the technical and executive ability which has
brought it about. It is unfortunate that more of these sav-
ings and efficiencies have not been passed on to the con-
sumers, but have so often been used to inflate capitaliza-
tion or to support excessive service charges.
One of the chief obstacles to effective cooperation of
the government with the power industry is the continu-
ance in positions of power and authority of some utility
men who seem not to have changed their habits of mind
from the days of exploitation and unscrupulous use of
power. So long as those in ultimate control of the industry
choose to be represented by such men, the position of those
who stand for open and impartial dealing with the indus-
try is made extremely difficult. Under such circumstances
it is very hard for such public men to refute the charge
that they are playing into the hands of an industry that is
essentially unregenerate. Nothing would so much strength-
en the position of public men who are striving for fair
play between the government and the industry as the
uniform presence in key positions in the private industry
of men who by their attitudes and habits give assurance of
open dealing and sincere acceptance of socially sound pub-
lic policy. This is a real crux of the power issue, and it is
difficult for progress to be made except to the extent that
the condition is corrected.
I hold that wherever a high quality of industrial states-
manship exists in the industry, it should be recognized
and cooperated with, and thereby strengthened. The
growth of mutual confidence and respect must be con-
tributed to from both sides. To some degree a basis for it
already exists, and it is the business of every one con-
cerned to encourage its increase, rather than to destroy it
by arbitrary hostility. Mutual confidence does not come
into existence fully matured. It is an achievement growing
out of open dealing, patience and perseverance.
74
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THIRD, 1 AM FOR ARRIVING AT A FAIR WORKING ARRANGEMENT
vith the utilities in order to allow a gradual transition
rom private to public ownership, to whatever extent that
proves by experience to be desirable. I believe that a con-
siderable period of experiment and development will be
necessary before America is ready for wholesale public
ownership. It is no secret that graft, incompetence, bureau-
cracy, red tape, and patronage have been realities in Ameri-
can government. Unless these can be brought well under
control they may devour more than does all the waste of
exploitation and abuse in the private industry, serious as
that is. (We should recognize, however, that it is not only
government which suffers from internal politics. Most of
the great power combinations are less than twenty-five
years old, yet I suspect that few of them are free from the
problem of bureaucracy, nepotism, and patronage which
tend to go with bigness, either public or private.)
Our government has little experience in handling large
operating businesses, and we have not yet developed effect-
ive methods. With all the good will in the world, it will
take time to evolve them. The assumption that only polit-
ical agitation and action are necessary to bring about
sound public ownership of power is nai've, and will lead
ultimately to higher costs and to more restricted service.
There are real and difficult problems to be solved, both
technical and administrative.
I favor enough public ownership to enable the country
to work out effective methods on a life-sized scale, but not
so much public ownership that we shall be swamped by
inefficiency before we learn how to make it effective and
economical.
The American people have a right to actual examples
of public ownership to supply a basis for coming to long-
time conclusions on the subject. We should not be forced
to decide by abstract theory. I disagree both with private
utility men who would prevent any trial of public own-
ership on a large scale, and with public ownership advo-
cates who would take a course the success of which would
bring the utilities to unconditional surrender.
To promote fair and consistent conditions in Federal
power projects, and in accord with the President's ideas,
there probably should be developed through Congressional
action a national power policy administered by a Federal
agency, which will enable the people of the United States
and the utility interests to predict future action and to
plan accordingly. Such a uniform policy is desirable, too,
in order to prevent government projects in different parts
of the country from entering into competition with each
other to secure industries using large quantities of power.
FOURTH, THERE is ANOTHER REASON FOR MY DESIRE TO FIND
common ground with the utilities, which perhaps is more
important than all the others combined. By the manner in
which this conflict and others like it are handled. America
is deciding little by little whether, in the great social re-
adjustments that are taking place, there shall be a strength-
ening of democratic methods, reasonableness, fair play,
and open dealing; or whether we shall drift into bitter
class controversies which lead to violent and arbitrary
action, so prevalent today in several other countries.
There are powerful forces which tend to drive govern-
ments to extreme and despotic action. Some governments
which abandon reasonableness and open inquiry for the
exercise of arbitrary power are looked upon as very radical,
and others as correspondingly reactionary, yet they tend to
become much alike in their development of class bitter-
ness, in the supplanting of freedom of opinion by arbi-
trary force, and in the development of irresponsible dic-
tation. America may have a difficult time in keeping to
even the limited degree of orderly democracy which has
been achieved. That issue is so serious, and the destiny
of our country is so much at stake, that a spirit of toler-
ance and reasonableness on both sides is a public obliga-
tion. Such an attitude does not imply indifference or lack
of aggressive action.
The Way of Reasonableness
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL METHODS WE SET UP MAY CONTROL
our national life for a longer time than the physical
changes we cause. To bring about desirable changes by
wholesome and civilized methods requires more of states-
manship and of courage than to bring them about by
arbitrary coercion or destruction of values. To achieve
and to maintain disinterested justice in the processes of
government, and the fundamental decencies of govern-
ment and society, is even a greater accomplishment than
to quickly increase the supply of electricity.
If the power issue can be worked out by the process of
open analysis under qualified leadership, with both sides
disclosing all facts, and with honest recognition of dif-
ficulties, the solution may not be perfect, but it will be a
contribution to good government. Public demand for such
methods would do much toward bringing them into use.
That process would result in a decrease of class hatred
and of false propaganda, political manipulation, intrigue,
destruction of investment and of wasteful duplication of
facilities. The invaluable habit of reaching the solution
of public issues by reasonable methods would be strength-
ened. There would be an advance in the quality of public
life. That, I have hoped, would be a contribution which
the TVA might make to the art of government in
America.
Even though we hold that the utilities in the past have
been dictatorial and have tended to thwart democratic
government, that does not justify a similar attitude on the
part of men in public life. For a long period France and
Germany have been bitter enemies, each trying to dom-
inate the other. Is that antagonism never to be erased?
Is there not developing in America a similar chronic bit-
terness ?
At some time or other such vicious circles must be bro-
ken. It is the part of statesmanship to recognize oppor-
tunities to do that, and to make the best possible use of
them. It is by such seizing of opportunities that civilized
government and society develop. Now, while the private
utilities are on the defensive, there is opportunity to break
the circle of conflict and to seek for a fair and impartial
analysis of the issue, and for its solution on the basis of
fair play in the public interest. More than cheap power is
at stake; a new element of democratic decency can be in-
troduced into public life. The sovereign government is
under obligation not to make capricious or arbitrary use of
its power, but to act with restraint and fairness and with-
out a spirit of retaliation.
But what if the power companies reject such an ap-
proach? In that case two steps should be taken. First, a
clear program should be developed and announced, indi-
cating what in the opinion of qualified public authorities
would constitute a fair settlement; and second, a vigorous
campaign should be waged to compel the utilities to accept
FEBRUARY 1937
75
the process of settlement by open-minded analysis. Public
authorities should not give up any powers of compulsion
until a reasonable process of solution has been worked
out and well established. Until the method of solving the
issue by open inquiry and analysis has been accepted by
the utilities, there should be no respite from aggressive
action by public authorities. But the utilities have a right
to know what it is that is asked of them, and what are
the conditions under which peace might be established.
A sovereign government should have policies known to
all, and its programs should be faithful expressions of
those policies. I regret to say that the power companies in
the Tennessee Valley region have not been assured as to
what are the intentions of the TVA concerning them. It
is my personal conviction that such disclosures should be
publicly made.
Making a Power Bargain
ON BOTH SIDES EFFORTS TO ACHIEVE PEACE HAVE BEEN TOO
much a process of threatening and bluffing, just such a
process as preceded the World War and is again threaten-
ing a European conflict. That process is a menace to dem-
ocratic government and so far as possible should be re-
placed by open inquiry and analysis. Not all elements of
the problem are subject to definite analysis, and perfection
would not be achieved at once, but a great advance could
be made. I believe that if the power companies should
refuse to respond to such an attitude, public opinion
would compel them to do so. They have a great stake in
the matter, for if class hatred and suspicion continue to
increase there may develop extremes of antagonisms too
great to be healed, and very destructive conflict may result.
Now let me outline what in my opinion would be some
of the conditions of a reasonable settlement.
There should be clear and unqualified admission of
the right of the public to own and to operate its own
power supply if it chooses to do so and if it proceeds in a
fair manner. There should be agreement not to obstruct
reasonable efforts to that end.
It should be recognized that the public is under no obli-
gation to pay for inflated securities, excessive service
charges or for any manipulated profits in the purchase or
transfer of properties. It is under no obligation to pay
tribute to vested power or strategic position, but only rea-
sonable compensation for legitimate and useful services,
the open competitive interest rates on money invested in
used and useful investment committed to the public ser-
vice, and reasonable charges for management, operation,
maintenance and depreciation. Because electric power sup-
ply is a public monopoly and is not regulated by compe-
tition in the manner of private business, it must be con-
ducted in the spirit of service, in an effort to give the
widest possible service at the lowest possible cost, and not
in an effort to get the largest possible net return from the
most profitable business. It should be recognized, however,
that a utility can give most satisfactory service if com-
pensation under these headings is adequate to allow con-
siderable freedom of action and to support a vigorous
and progressive business policy.
THRIFT, SAVING AND PRUDENT INVESTMENT IN SERVING THE
public are in the public interest, and should be respected
in the utility business as elsewhere. In the long run fail-
ure to recognize that fact will cost the public dearly in
high interest rates and loss of public credit. Duplication
of facilities should be avoided. If a community undertakes
public ownership, the existing private properties should
be taken over at a fair price, as determined by agreement
or by impartial appraisal.
Studies should be made to define power distribution
areas or districts of the most suitable size for satisfactory
and economical service, or legal provision should be made
for such determination when the need may arise. Then in
case of transfer from private to public ownership the
change should be made by entire districts and not by frag-
ments, unless some program of progressive transition
should be worked out. In deciding on the size and boun-
daries of power distribution districts there should be an
effort to leave no area unprovided for, even if immedi-
ate service to the less productive areas should not prove
feasible. American state and local governments have
evolved varied and adequate procedures which can be
adapted to nearly every problem that may arise with ref-
erence to the boundaries and interrelations of power dis-
tribution districts.
There should be effort to avoid arbitrary disruption of
existing efficient systems. Cities in general should be suit-
ably associated with a fair proportion of surrounding rural
areas. Distribution districts should be large enough to jus-
tify good management, engineering and other technical
service and adequate operating equipment. They should
be large enough for efficiency, but oversize and the result-
ing tendency to bureaucracy should be avoided. Study to
determine the best size of operating districts is needed.
The large private power networks within TVA trans-
mission range depend for operating efficiency on a rela-
tively small number of the larger cities. A campaign which
would result in public ownership in ten to twenty of these
cities might practically destroy the ability of the large sys-
tems to render maximum service or to maintain econom-
ical generation and transmission systems. Effort to bring
about such disruption seems to be under way. On the
other hand, if distribution areas of sufficient size should
be taken over by the public as units, with suitable propor-
tions of city and country and of good and poor territory
in each, and if the properties taken over should be paid
for at reasonable prices, then transition from private to
public ownership could be an orderly process without de-
structive disruption of existing systems. Legitimate private
investments would not be menaced; there would be no
confusion tnd waste in unrelated local projects through
duplication of services and facilities, and public projects
would not compete with each other to grab the best near-
by territory and to avoid the less profitable communities.
Additional State and national legislation would be nec-
essary fully to bring about such results. Certificates of con-
venience and necessity for public or private projects might
be given by State utility commissions only when such
reasonable conditions should be met. These results cannot
be achieved all at once, but it would be well if some ener-
gies were reserved from fighting over the electric-power
issue and used in solving some of these important prob-
lems. To contribute to their solution should be one of the
major interests of any public organization dealing with the
power issue in the TVA area.
jr
A Fair Yardstick
IN REPORTING ON PUBLIC OWNERSHIP IN "YARDSTICK" UNDER-
takings, public statements should be fair and representa-
tive. There should be no hidden subsidies, either of money
76
SURVEY GRAPHIC
or services. Demonstrations with public subsidies may be
useful, but they should be honestly represented as sub-
sidized demonstrations.
There should be absence of arbitrary coercion on both
sides. Private companies should cease coercion in the form
of obstructive litigation, inaccurate and misleading propa-
ganda, interference with financing public ownership proj-
ects in the investment market, if such interference exists,
or by bringing government into ridicule and contempt.
Public officials should cease coercion, as by subsidies to
duplicating and competing systems, by threats of construct-
ing duplicating systems if arbitrarily fixed prices are not
accepted, or by threats of disruption of private systems
with the effect of preventing their refinancing.
As a part of its program for the unified development
of the Tennessee River system, the TVA is building a
series of great dams which inevitably will develop a very
large amount of power. It would be a great economic
loss for this power to be wasted while the private utilities
build duplicate and competing power plants. If the TVA
has power over and above its own needs and the needs
of all its other customers, it should sell that power to the
private utilities at about what it would cost the private
utilities to generate their own power. The private utilities,
on the other hand, if assured of such supply, should not
build additional generating plants until that assured sup-
ply of government power is fully used.
A Power Pool
I AM OF THE OPINION THAT SOME TYPE OF POWER TRANSMIS-
sion pool, as recently suggested by the President, perhaps
somewhat along the lines of the British grid system, may
prove to be desirable. One form of pool might be some-
what as follows:
The power pool organization would own the transmis-
sion lines. It would not generate electricity, but would buy
it from the private or TVA power plants, which would
remain in their present ownership. The pool would trans-
mit that power and sell it at wholesale to any local distri-
bution system, either publicly or privately owned. The
transmission pool would buy from the cheapest sources,
and would sell wherever the power was needed. This
method would reduce the total amount of generating
capacity necessary, for if any region needed more power
than the plants in that region could supply, the shortage
could be met from some other region where there was
a surplus. Such a project would raise questions vital to all
interested parties. Before a transmission pool could be
established it would be necessary for the parties to agree
on the conditions of purchase, transmission, and sale.
"Power transmission pool" is a very general term which
might be applied to many types of working arrangements.
At one extreme some public officials, I believe, have sug-
gested conditions which might largely destroy the private
utilities; while at the other extreme the private utilities
have suggested arrangements which would seem to be
contrary to sound public policy.
If the idea of a power pool were in danger of being
dismissed as not feasible, I believe it should be approached
by a body of disinterested and competent economists and
other qualified men who would explore it from a non-
partisan position. If the TVA and the private utilities can-
not get together, the public should know from such dis-
interested sources the exact reasons for failure to reach
agreement.
A Future Based on Experience
IT IS MY OPINION THAT AMERICA HAS NOT YET DEVELOPED
methods and policies which would justify settling perma-
nently upon a policy with reference to ownership and
operation of electric power facilities. The issue is not only
one of good intent but also one of solving technical, ad-
ministrative and legislative problems. At the moment the
problem may seem to be one of removing inequalities of
opportunity, but the no less important issue remains of
so developing the industry as to result in a very great total
increase of opportunity to use electric power. That result
will be furthered best by cooperation rather than conflict.
Private ownership has had grave faults, but effective
public ownership methods on a large scale have yet to be
developed. Suddenly to add a vast business to our national
government, which might be the unexpected outcome of
war to the death on certain large utility systems, might
discredit public ownership and set it back for a genera-
tion, or it might create another government bureaucracy
without adequate controls. There are great governmen-
tal bureaucracies which, like some utility organizations,
are considerably removed from direct responsiveness to
the public will.
Democracy is general participation of the people in
government and sensitiveness of government to the needs
of the people. It may be possible to devise forms of control
and administration which will have more of the real
character of democracy than would a great government
bureaucracy, and without destroying the efficiency of well-
integrated power systems America has not been very cre-
ative in developing effective forms of democracy. When
the power issue is finally worked out. I believe its or-
ganization may have some of the characteristics of private
business and some of public business. That is the tendency
in democratic Switzerland and in certain other progressive
countries. In public ownership there may be combinations
of local autonomy in distribution, with centralized super-
vision and control, and with much larger organizations
for transmission and perhaps for generation of power.
One reason for not rushing headlong into extensive public
ownership is that we need time to work out effective meth-
ods. The TVA is excellently situated to make such a con-
tribution.
THE POWER ISSUE is NOT PRIMARILY A QUESTION OF LIBERAL-
ism or conservatism, but of discovering how to do the job
best. Compulsory cooperation of public and private power
organizations may be the necessity which is the mother of
invention. When the mature result is achieved it may be
neither private power as we know it, nor public power as
we know it now, but something new in government. That
achievement will not come best in an atmosphere of war-
fare and of arbitrary coercion, but rather in an atmosphere
of cooperative inquiry for the best solution.
I repeat, we should do well to reserve some of our ener-
gies from fighting over the power issue, and use them in
trying to solve it in such a way as also to make a contri-
bution to good government. The art of planting the seeds
of mutual confidence, and of giving the young plants a
chance to grow, is a great art. Most of Europe has not
learned it. Let us hope that we in America may do so. The
manner in which we achieve our ends may have a more
enduring influence on the country than the ends we may-
achieve.
FEBRUARY
77
Three Years of Public Housing
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
by LOULA D. LASKER
Home Shortage Looms; State and Federal Aid Only Possibility of
Getting Adequate Dwellings.
One Million Housing Units Needed Annually for the Next Ten Years.
Asserts Shortage Will Spur Housing. "Cruel, Hard Way" Is the Only
Means to Awaken Public.
HEADLINES LIKE THESE IN NEWSPAPERS FROM COAST TO COAST
give a clue to what's abroad in the land in this year of
recovery, 1937. But "recovery" in housing is something
more intricate than recovery in other fields. We found that
out in the hard times. There was much talk of how
housing construction might supply work to prime the
pump of purchasing power. You know the phrases and
the net result. There was the all but complete cessation
of new home building during the lean years of the depres-
sion. These arrears have alarmingly aggravated our long
time housing problem. The experts put it bluntly when
they say that one third of the American people have never
been decently housed — another third far from adequately.
The exciting thing is whether this acute shortage, this
new pressure not of need but of demand, will do more
than pick up the slack, whether this aroused public interest
can and will make us profit by what we have learned in
public housing during the last three years. We may well
ask what has the much publicized government program
accomplished? How far has it produced decent homes
within the means of two thirds of the population? What
changes are now called for in law or administration?
All available funds are completely allotted. Unless
the new Congress acts, slum clearance and low rent hous-
ing plans will slump back from the brick and mortar stage
to the inertias and idealisms that antedated 1933. The first
spadeful of legislation was a provision for loans and grants
for low cost housing and slum clearance in the National
Industrial Recovery Act. Later this legislation was supple-
mented by a provision in the Emergency Relief Appropri-
ation Act of 1935. The administration early came to the
belief that low cost housing could not be achieved by pri-
vate limited dividend companies, and only seven out of
over 500 loan applications were granted. From then on the
program was confined to straight public housing projects.
The general reader has no doubt been confused by the
number of agencies which seemed to be tackling the prob-
lem: Home Owners' Loan Corporation; Federal Housing
Administration; Federal Home Loan Bank System; Fed-
eral Savings and Loan Associations; Farm Credit Admin-
istration; Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage
Company; Resettlement Administration, and the Housing
Division of the Public Works Administration. All except
the last two agencies, however, have been chiefly con-
cerned with assisting home owners, with holding up the
general credit structure, or with guaranteeing credit for
building new homes with private capital — homes too ex-
pensive for the lowest income groups. These functions
78
have been urgent and important, but they are beside the
mark of low cost housing. Out of all these agencies only
the Resettlement Administration and the Public Works
Administration through its Housing Division have been
directly aimed at that. Moreover, with the exception of
three "green belt towns" for people of modest means, Re-
settlement has been concerned with rural housing. The
PWA Housing Division alone, in its half hundred
projects, is endeavoring to build homes to meet the needs
of urban families in the income classes below $2000.
We are now ready to begin our reckoning — plus or
minus, usually plus and minus:
Does Housing Put Men to Work?
THE HOUSING PROGRAM WAS ORIGINALLY ENTERED UPON AS A
recovery measure to stimulate employment. By November
1936, 26,186 workers had been hired at prevailing rates
on the sites of projects; on December 15 there were actu-
ally 16,300 men employed. But that by no means tells the
story. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that PWA
has created two and one half times more work in private
industries supplying building materials than in the build-
ing trades constructing its projects. The estimated number
of man hours of labor required at sites up to December
15 was 47 million; in mines, lumbering, manufacturing,
transportation, over 127 million. With the mass of over-
hanging unemployment today, these figures, relatively
small as they are, show that investment in housing can,
if we will, be made an all-round stimulus and stabilizer
for employment.
Slum Clearance and Its Economics
LESS THAN HALF OF THE PROJECTS (22) HAVE BEEN BUILT ON
vacant land. Large slum areas in twenty-eight cities have
been cleared. In the long run this can only mean a saving
for those cities. Taxes from slum areas never equal the
claims they make on a city's budget. Although there has
never been absolute proof of the relation between slum
conditions and health, delinquency and other social mal-
adjustments, their coincidence is very definite. Thus in
Cleveland, in 1932, 2.47 percent of the population, occupy-
ing an area which contains only 1.73 percent of the land
within the city's limits, paid taxes of $1,972,437. But this
fell short "by $1,747,402 of covering the costs of the munici-
pal services maintained in this district. Areas inhabited by
10 percent of the people were consuming 26 percent of the
services rendered by police, fire, health, and sanitary de-
partments; 36 percent of those rendered by city hospitals.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
But slum clearance is always the most
costly approach in any attempted solution
of the housing problem because of the high
land values in most congested areas. In
England, only today, after almost a half
century's experience with public housing,
is an attempt being made on a large scale
to wipe out slums.
The Demonstration to Date
TODAY THE HOUSING DIVISION PWA HAS
its fifty-one projects in thirty-five cities in
various phases of construction. They will
provide living quarters for some 20,000
families at a cost of about $133 million of
which the federal government is making
an outright grant of $59 million. Qualita-
tively they are splendid but quantitatively
they are only a drop in the bucket. Only
a particle of that drop, as things stand;
for in four years but one project — Tech-
wood in Atlanta — has reached the stage of
occupancy, with four others about to be
opened.
For today at last we know the size of
that bucket, statistically. The first compre-
hensive data on American housing became
available in 1934 with the publication of
the Real Property Inventory of sixty-four
typical American cities undertaken by the
U.S. Department of Commerce. At one
end of the scale only a third of the dwell-
ings surveyed had both hot and cold run-
ning water; at the other end, one third had
coal or wood stoves for heating; 17.1 per-
cent had no private indoor toilet, 25 per-
cent no bathing facilities, 8 percent no in-
terior water supply whatever. Only 37
percent were designated as being in good
condition; that is, as needing neither ma-
jor nor minor structural repairs.
Half of the dwellings in these sixty-
four typical cities rented for $20 a month
or less. The tenants could hardly expect
much for that. Yet two out of five Ameri-
can families cannot afford to pay over $25
a month rent. According to the Brookings
Institution, in prosperous 1929, 21 percent
of all families had annual incomes of less
than $1000, 21 percent between $1000 and
$1500, and 17 percent between $1500 and
$2000. With the traditional 20 percent allo-
cated to rent this means that roughly a
fifth of all families had less than $17 a
month to spend for housing; another fifth
could spend up to $25; and only the high-
est paid of these groups could spend be-
tween $25 and $33. Small wonder, per-
haps, that the building industry with its
antiquated methods and organization
cannot supply a product within their
means. Small wonder that interest in pub-
lic housing has mounted as a possible way
out.
If a crystal gazer in the early 1930's
PWA HOUSING PROJECTS
(as of December 15, 1936)
SLUM SITES
Average cost per square foot #.90
Location
Name
Land Costs per
Square Foot
ATLANTA, GA.
ATLANTA, GA.
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J.
BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
CHICAGO, ILL.
CINCINNATI, OHIO
CLEVELAND, OHIO
CLEVELAND, OHIO
CLEVELAND, OHIO
COLUMBIA, S.C.
DETROIT, MICH.
ENID, OKLA.
EVANSVILLE, IND.
INDIANAPOLIS, IND.
LACKAWANNA, N.Y.
MEMPHIS, TENN.
MEMPHIS, TENN.
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
MONTGOMERY, ALA.
NASHVILLE, TENN.
NASHVILLE, TENN.
NEW YORK, N.Y.
OMAHA, NEB.
PUERTO Rico, (CAGUAS)
PUERTO Rico, (SAN JUAN
SCHENECTADY, N.Y.
TOLEDO, OHIO
WAYNE, PA.
Techwood Homes
University Homes
Stanley S. Holmes Village
Smithfield Court
New Towne Court
Jane Addams Houses (Add'n)
Laurel Homes
Cedar-Central Apartments
Outhwaite Homes
Lakeview Terrace
University Terrace
Brewster
Cherokee Terrace
Lincoln Gardens
Lockefield Garden Apartments
Dixie Homes
Lauderdale Courts
Sumner Field Homes
Wm. B. Paterson Courts
Cheatham Place
(Add'n)
Andrew Jackson Courts
Williamsburg Houses
Logan Fontenelle Homes
Caserio La Granja
) Caserio Mirapalmeras
Schonowee Village
Brand Whitlock Homes
Highland Homes
VACANT SITES
Average cost per square foot #.14
BOSTON, MASS. Old Harbor Village
BUFFALO, N.Y. Kenfield
CAMDEN, N.J. Westfield Acres
CHARLESTON, S.C. Meeting St. Manor and Cooper
River Court
Jane Addams Houses
Julia C. Lathrop Homes
Trumbull Park Homes
Cedar Springs Place
Parkside
Durkeeville
Blue Grass Park and Aspendale
LaSalle Place
College Court
Liberty Square
Parklawn
Riverside Heights
Harlem River Houses
Will Rogers Courts
Hill Creek
Fairfield Court
CHICAGO, ILL.
CHICAGO, ILL.
CHICAGO, ILL.
DALLAS, TEX.
DETROIT, MICH.
JACKSONVILLE, FLA.
LEXINGTON, KY.
LOUISVILLE, KY.
LOUISVILLE, KY.
MIAMI, FLA.
MILWAUKEE, Wis.
MONTGOMERY, ALA.
NEW YORK, N.Y.
OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA.
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
STAMFORD, CONN.
VIRGIN ISLANDS
CHRISTIANSTED
FREDERIKSTED
ST. THOMAS
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Bassin Triangle
H. H. Berg Homes
Langston
.49
.40
.91
.48
2.72
1.84
2.13
.79
.88
.69
.28
1.06
.28
.47
.49
.31
.51
.56
.15
.23
.35
.22
4.30
.37
1.61
.57
.48
.40
.10
.06
.06
.37
.39
.08
.07
.17
.04
.02
.11
.31
.004
.05
.03
3.66
.07
.10
.33
.01
.14
Allot-
ment*
( 3,074,500
2,592,000
1,700,000
2,500,000
2,500,000
5,000,000
6,500,000
3,384,000
3,650,000
3,800,000
706,000
5,500,000
557,100
1,000,000
3,207,000
1,500,000
3,400,000
3,128,000
3,500,000
522,000
2,000,000
1,500,000
12,634,000
2,000,000
275,000
500,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
344,000
6,636,000
4,855,000
3,176,161
1,350,000
1,950,000
5,942,000
3,038,000
1,020,000
4,500,000
1,000,000
1,704,000
1,370,000
758,000
970,000
2,800,000
403,000
4,219,000
2,000,000
2,260,000
929,000
250,000
1,842,000
Total Projects 51
* 45 percent is outright grant.
Total Allotments $133,445,761
FEBRUARY 1937
79
could have visualized the fifty
public housing projects now
under construction, American
experts would have felt that
the millenium was coming.
In those days the principle of
public housing was but the
dream of a small group here in
the United States. That in four
years it had become fait accom-
pli no matter on how small a
scale is essentially the greatest
plus of these four years.
But this same crystal gazer
would have had to turn around
to add in the language of crys-
tal gazers, "These develop-
ments are magnificent. Fortu-
nate is he who lives in them.
But, alas, only a small propor-
tion of them are within every
man's reach."
In the one occupied project,
Techwood in Atlanta, rents
(including charges for heat, hot
water, and electricity for light-
ing, cooking and refrigeration) range from a low of $5.95
monthly per room for a three-room apartment (roughly
$18 a month) to a high of $8.33 per room for a six-room
house ($50 a month). It must be remembered that Tech-
wood is located in a southern state where the average in-
dustrial wage is low. In 1929 and 1933 it was $697 and
$523 respectively — half the average annual wage in New
York, California or Illinois. Of Techwood tenants, 46.7
percent have incomes of $1040 and below, 41 percent are
between $1170 and $1300; 12 percent between $1400 and
$1820. Tenants were selected from the group in Atlanta
who formerly paid an average of $5.88 a room plus $1.81
for utilities, totaling $7.69.
Rents in the remaining projects will not be set until
each project is practically completed. Reliable sources re-
port that most of them will be out of reach of the people
they are designed to serve. In this connection it is sig-
nificant that Chairman Langdon W. Post has stated that
he hopes anticipated rents can be reduced before the
Williamsburg project is turned over to the New York
Housing Authority.
The Crux of the Trouble
WHAT THEN is THE TROUBLE WITH OUR PUBLIC HOUSING
formula: a government grant of 45 percent with a loan of
55 at y/2 percent covering the remainder of the costs, to
be amortized over a period of sixty years. Will this for-
mula produce dwellings to rent for $5.50 to $6.50 per
room monthly, which comes within the means of the
low income groups?
The answer is categorically No. Evans Clark, economic
adviser to the Housing Authority of New York City, has
brought it down to a matter of simple arithmetic in a
pamphlet issued by the National Public Housing Confer-
ence. He takes for illustration the financing of a multiple
dwelling project receiving a 45 percent grant ($6,500,000)
and a 55 percent loan ($8,500,000). He assumes the com-
paratively low interest rate of 3>l/2 percent; land bought
at $1.10 per square foot, and maintenance costs of $45
Photographs from PWA
Before and After: Slums in Atlanta, Ga., which were razed to give place to-
per room. So calculated, $8 room rents would be required
to keep the project in the black.
To reduce rents, some or all of these costs must come
down, or government subsidies must be considerably
raised. Lowering construction costs by $100 a room would
reduce rents by 18 cents a month. In contrast a one per-
cent cut in interest rates would lower room rents by $1.00
each. It would be practically necessary to get the site free
to match this saving when it comes to land.
None the less there is every reason to formulate a long
term land-use and taxation policy. In the Scandinavian
countries large municipalities purchase land in outlying
areas to hold for future housing projects before prices be-
gin skyrocketing. Frederic A. Delano, chairman of the
Central Housing Committee, has suggested in outlining
a tentative housing program (American City, January
1937) that "the federal government might properly
offer to pay a certain percentage of the cost of acquisition
of land by municipalities, on condition that the munici-
pality, in using such land, should take suitable precau-
tions to insure the sound development of the neighbor-
hood." Perhaps we should amend state and federal con-
stitutions so that we could adopt a policy similar to that in
effect in England — empowering the government to pay
for land on the basis of its housing value and not of
speculative hopes.
High construction costs have their roots in wasteful
and obsolete practices prevailing in the building industry,
which has been conducted on a seasonal basis. The highly
organized unions have long taken advantage of the short
season, the exposed location of construction jobs and the
heavy losses due to delay, to jack up wage rates. Wage
earners who inhabit the houses often get very much less
a day than those who build them and their rents are cor-
responding!^ out of line with their earnings. But under
all this is the fact that the many strikes in the building
trades are part of the long struggle of their workers to
earn a year's income in the short seasons. Today, advances
in construction methods make it possible to work in the
80
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Techwood, first of fifty PWA housing projects to be completed and
winter months. On the other hand, as the private build-
ing boom gets under way, co«ts are bound to rise. Build-
ers, realtors, investors will say, as they have always said,
"Get union labor to lower its rates." But before the gov-
ernment launches a long term building program all four
ought to be asked to agree not to raise costs while it lasts,
a procedure which worked in England. Some form of
guaranteed employment and assured annual earnings
might give greater security to labor and also cut down
payroll costs. In the same way contractors' charges might
be telescoped; and mortgage interest on new construction
reduced. The lead for such a concerted attack on the prob-
lem should come from Washington.
Again, there are new inventions in building materials
and in fabrication. It would take a long article to attempt
to cover these developments in detail. They are in their
incipiency and if public housing is to share in them the
time is overdue for a federal experiment station in this
field, paralleling federal agricultural "laboratories."
As things stand there is opportunity for a flank attack
on construction costs. Our public housing demonstrations
these last four years were entrusted to experts who, out of
years of study and practice, were alive to the importance
of small land coverage, modern sanitary conveniences,
cross ventilation, central heating, fireproof construction,
social centers and so forth. Here was a chance to show the
building industry that such housing makes for stable
values, satisfied householders, more permanent and re-
sponsible tenancy. It therefore became accepted practice
to include in public housing developments items far in
excess of minimum health and safety standards. But to at-
tempt to put these advantages — desirable though they are
— into practice in a new housing program was, in the
judgment of many, to lose sight of the main problem;
that is, to provide adequate, though not necessarily ideal
accommodations for low income families. Well disposed
critics do not contend that if housing of less high stand-
ards had been built the reduction in costs would have been
startling, but any lessening of the discrepancy between
required rents and what the
low income groups can afford
to pay, is important.
Thus, because the buildings
must last during a sixty-year
amortization period does not
mean they must be built to
endure forever, so to speak;
or that they should anticipate
every improvement in housing
standards for the next half cen-
tury. No one gainsays that cer-
tain fundamentals must be in-
cluded, nor does anyone advo-
cate barracks-like structures.
But the proponents of a sim-
pler type of housing maintain
that though an extra gadget
here and there may cost little,
though a land coverage of only
25 percent is ideal, though a
fully fireproof building is al-
ways the best, though land-
scaped gardens offer amenities
that mean much to tenants —
until we are prepared to pro-
vide these things regardless of the ability of the recipi-
ent to pay for them, we must be content with more
modest standards. It's all very well to say, "It's a short-
sighted policy to start low," but the realities of the situ-
ation must be faced.
Until we have higher subsidies, or lower interest rates,
or improve our building industries we cannot go as far
as we would like. To those who regard high subsidies
as revolutionary, even communistic, we cite the long
experience of democratic European countries — England,
Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and others. They have all
found through experience that good low rent houses only
can be provided through government agents and that it
is well worth the cost. Washington, like London and
Stockholm, cannot lay bricks without this mortar.
The Coming Swing Toward Decentralization
To DISCUSS A NATIONAL HOUSING PROGRAM BEFORE TAKING
up the administrative scheme through which it might be
put into effect is perhaps getting the cart before the
horse. To date public housing in the United States has
been strongly centralized. To this many attribute a large
share of the difficulties encountered. It is now a matter
of practically unanimous agreement that it must be de-
centralized, but with the federal government still taking
the leadership. At the start few responsible local agen-
cies existed. Today twenty-three cities in twenty-six
states where legal machinery has been set up have estab-
lished local housing authorities. But municipalities will
not wake up to their responsibilities if there is popular
assumption that everything is done at headquarters.
Moreover remote authority means arbitrary and inflexi-
ble standards, with resulting delays and- high costs.
Where does all this lead us? Simply to the conclu-
sion that a nation-wide program conceived in high hopes
has been a failure? No. When, as and if additional funds
are available we are in a far better position in 1937 to
tackle the problem than we were in 1933. Moreover the
high planning and building standards that were put into
FEBRUARY 1937
81
practice will doubtless be reflected in future building
operations of private builders. There has been an amaz-
ing amount of progress in the acceptance of the principle
underlying them. And as costs are lowered, these same
standards — once accepted — can be incorporated in a low
cost housing program.
That the Housing Division, PWA, is aware of the situ-
ation is indicated by the attitude of Howard A. Gray,
who for the last six months has headed it. His point of
view may be paraphrased thus: The possible rents that
low income groups can pay must be our starting point;
we must work out a formula as to what items outside of
essentials can be included with the limitations of their
pocketbooks; but at the same time we must be deter-
mined not to be held up by land owners or by con-
tractors who see in a government building program an
opportunity to jack up prices.
As evidence, take these items chosen at random from
late December PWA releases:
Redesign of Parkside, PWA low rent housing project in
Detroit, Mich., to make possible lower prices for its con-
struction, was ordered today by Public Works Administra-
tor Harold L. Ickes. . . .
Redesign of Schonowee Village, PWA's $1,500,000 slum
clearance project in Schenectady, New York, to increase
the number of living units and achieve a more economical
type of building was authorized ... by Public Works Ad-
ministrator Harold L. Ickes upon recommendation of How-
ard A. Gray, director of PWA's housing division. . . .
Speaking before the United States Conference of May-
ors in November, Secretary Ickes said:
We may now consider the future of housing as a pro-
gram improved, modified and perfected against the recovery
background of 1937 and not the depression background of
1933. . . .
Our experience has shown that housing is properly a mu-
nicipal undertaking. The federal government was willing
to blaze the way. . . . The time is at hand for us to ana-
lyze the situation and determine what part the cities are
willing to play in this new social drama.
The federal government should be willing to make loans
and grants to cities in aid of low cost housing. It can con-
tinue to give technical assistance and make available to
municipalities the fruits of its experience during the last
three years. It can go forward with a program of research,
without which genuine low cost housing is impossible —
such research as could not be undertaken by individual
cities. With its wider resources and with its greater oppor-
tunity for leadership, the federal government will be in a
position to provide a great pool of valuable information for
interested municipalities.
Last December, Edward J. Foley, director of the legal
division, PWA, announced at the annual conference of
the National Association of Housing Officials that "the
Public Works Administration is about to decentralize
public housing."
What then is the sphere of local — and state — responsi-
bility? There is practically complete agreement that initia-
tive and operation should rest squarely on the shoulders
of the municipal 'authority. When it comes to financing,
"housers" of all shades of opinion agree also that a plan
should be worked out looking toward local and state par-
ticipation in the financial set-up. It might well be that the
city should contribute tax exemption, the state credit with-
in certain limits, while the federal government should
continue to offer grants and loans.
The matter is complex, however, and the wisdom of
making federal grants contingent on such a framework
of collaboration at this stage may well be questioned. Nec-
essary state action is likely to be slow; in some states im-
possible because of the financial situation or constitutional
limitations. Possibly states which do make financial con-
tributions should be given preference in the matter of
federal grants. Clearly this year, with most of our legis-
latures in session, the twenty-two states which have not
done so already should pass laws enabling their cities to
set up local housing authorities.
The Wagner Bills
FRESH HOUSING HISTORY WAS WRITTEN LAST YEAR WHEN SEN-
ator Robert F. Wagner's bill passed the Senate, in a some-
what reduced form. The companion bill in the House
introduced by Congressman Ellenbogen, failed to come
out of committee. My anticipation is that by the time this
is read a new Wagner bill will be before the 75th Con-
gress. The 1936 draft affords a gauge of how far the ex-
perience of the last four years has been taken to heart.
The core of the measure was provision for an inde-
pendent agency, in reality a housing authority. That is,
instead of a departmental bureau or an outside commis-
sion, the proposed set-up would correspond to that which
has yielded such good results in the Tennessee Valley
and in bridge and tunnel construction in New York Har-
bor.
This United States Housing Authority would be ad-
ministered by five directors, one of them the Secretary
of the Interior. Its major responsibility would be to assist
local public housing agencies by grants and loans for
decent low rent housing. Grants as now would be lim-
ited to 45 percent of the total costs, to be amortized with-
in sixty years. Interest on loans could be fixed by the
authority. In the case of private limited dividend compa-
nies or corporations, loans could be made up to 85 per-
cent of the value of the project, interest to be set at not
less than the going federal rate. No subsidies could be
used for private profit. The authority would be given no
power to control the acquisition of land, or the construc-
tion or operation of any except "demonstration" projects
in localities as yet unprepared to undertake such ventures
and these would be sold to the latter as soon as practical.
The measure called for a four years' budget of approxi-
mately one billion dollars, to be made available: $251
million the first year and $225 million succeeding years.
Funds were to come from direct appropriation ($326
million), from RFC loans and from the sale of the au-
thority's own securities, guaranteed by the U. S. gov-
ernment.
Such a framework would give us an altogether new
base of operations for the four years ahead. However,
recent experience, with fifty projects Hearing comple-
tion, has suggested improvements for the 1937 bill. For
example, how about giving the authority power to fix
maximum rents, a more workable control than standards
of construction, since building costs may change? To the
same end, it might be well to give the authority not
only the proposed power to lower interest rates, but to
increase the J^io of subsidy. The amortization period
should be reduced from sixty to fifty years. The 1936
bill was put forward at a time when there were tre-
mendous drains on the U. S. Treasury from other direc-
tions. A budget of a quarter (Continued on page 115)
82
SURVEY GRAPHIC
NO PLACE TO GO
Maynard Dixon, born in California in 1875, has
always been of the West. He has painted its history,
the magnificence of butte, desert, plain, and the
elemental quality of men, particularly the Indians,
who live among these strange splendors. His mural
decorations on these themes have been many. But
with the depression other phases of the West came
into his studio. The bitter months of conflict on the
waterfront, culminating in the San Francisco general
strike of 1934, left no man untouched. Unemployed
casual workers, embattled longshoremen and their
comrades, police, National Guard, vigilantes — these
were part of a San Franciscan's life that year. The
paintings on this page and the two pages that follow
portray without bias stages in the struggle. But the
stark statement and strong design lift each scene
from the topical and imbue it with wider significance.
Here is our country today
MAYNARD DIXON LOOKS AT
SOCIAL CONFLICT
FORGOTTEN MAN
FREE SPEECH
SCAB!
LAW AND DISORDER
KEEP MOVING
Ambassador of Spain
by BEULAH AMIDON
FERNANDO DE LOS Rios, AMBASSADOR OF WAR-TORN SPAIN, is
not the first of his line to serve this country. One of his
ancestors was Martin Alonso Pinzon, the navigator who
laid the course for Christopher Columbus on his voyage
across uncharted seas. A century later, a Fernando de los
Rios prepared a memorial that so fired the imagination of
Philip III that that monarch commissioned the Conde dc
Monterey to undertake a voyage of exploration which
finally led his captain, Vizcaina, along the coast of Cali-
fornia and into the harbor of Monterey. Still later, an-
other ancestor was one of the first recorded group of
Europeans to sail through the Golden Gate into San
Francisco Bay. In one generation after another the
family, using its spacious leisure for learning rather than
for sport or pleasure, has given Spain noted scholars.
Dr. Fernando de los Rios (he prefers "Doctor" to "Don"
as a title) thinks of himself first as a teacher. Called from
his chair of political science in the University of Madrid,
he has in the last two and a half years served as Minister
of Justice, of Education, of Foreign Affairs and, since
September, as Ambassador at Washington.
But he says, "If I were to be born twenty times, I would
always choose to teach. It is the way most truly to learn."
The only honor of which he speaks with quiet pride is
that he was formerly president of the Madrid Atheneum.
The Ateneo Cientifico y Literario y Artistico is one of
the oldest and most noted intellectual clubs in Europe.
Dr. de los Rios considers that his "spiritual master" was
Francisco Giner de los Rios, an uncle who, forty years
ago, was also a professor at the University of Madrid, a
noted writer .on educational and social problems. His
own bent, and the guidance of this learned and idealistic
mentor turned Fernando de los Rios as a student toward
a liberal philosophy and into fellowship with liberal
groups.
As a scholar, he holds that in order to understand the
Spain of today it is necessary to consider the Spain of the
sixteenth century. This was the starting point of his
paper before the International Congress of Philosophy at
Harvard in 1926, in which he analyzed the older Spain
and revealed there the origin of the concept and method
of the totalitarian state. In that period, as in the years
until the abolition of the monarchy in 1931, the Spanish
church and state were a unity, popular education was a
church prerogative, the church-state monopolized the
conscious life of the individual and of the community.
In this ancient "totalitarian" scheme began the drama of
the minority in Spain. The problem in that troubled
country has been since 1931 "the renovation of the state."
The moment in history is not favorable. Many European
countries are returning to sixteenth century concepts.
But in Spain, the pendulum is swinging the other way.
The minority became the majority in the election of Feb-
ruary 16, 1936, which was a victory of the liberal as
against the totalitarian philosophy.
A university chair in Madrid has had many advantages
as a place from which to view and also to participate in
these developments. Writing in the Encyclopaedia of the
86
Social Sciences six years ago, Dr. de los Rios recorded
that, since 1881, the Spanish professor had "enjoyed as
complete academic freedom as his English colleague. In
Spanish universities today, professors in conflict with such
institutions as the monarchy, the Catholic religion (and
concretely with the church) and the capitalistic property
system, are not as a rule hampered in their activities."
It is natural for an authority on political institutions
to see events in long perspectives. The very word "liberal"
to Dr. de los Rios glows with historical color, for it was
coined by the Spanish in 1810, in their struggle against
Napoleonic absolutism. Little more than a decade later,
Jeremy Bentham wrote, "The only hope at present for
Europe is Spain, because from 1820 to 1823 it has been
the only liberal focus in Europe." The Holy Alliance,
like the unholy alliances of the present, mustered an army
to put down "dangerous liberalism." Today, this scholar-
diplomat sees the same absolutist power under another
name and a new slogan, proceeding in many countries
with the motives and the methods of a century ago. It
has succeeded in interrupting — perhaps in diverting or
postponing for years — Spain's peaceful "renovation." The
country is now torn by civil war provoked by reactionary
forces in the midst of social revolution. It is necessary,
Dr. de los Rios has pointed out, to see that the present
Spanish scene has these two essential parts — conscious
social change simultaneously with armed rebellion which
is essentially resistance to that change.
To the Republicans, the February election was a
mandate to the Azafia government to proceed with the
social revolution "by legal method." It was a coalition
victory. The Republican Party was made up of "all
parties which support the Republic, Left and Right Re-
publicans (liberals), socialists of many shades of opinion,
and a small minority from the extreme Left — syndicalists
and communists.
Twice in the difficult years of the Rivera dictatorship,
Dr. de los Rios was "called before the tribunal," charged
with subversive activities. Both times he was found not
guilty, but finally he and six of his colleagues retired from
their university posts, because they "could not in con-
science accept the situation."
With the February election came new hope of realizing
what Dr. de los Rios, speaking in November at the New
School for Social Research in New York, described as
"one of the main goals of the founders of the Spanish
Republic ... to develop in the masses to their fullest extent
all the potential qualities inherent in the Spaniard." This
meant, he went on to say, "the economic transformation
of the country."
This transformation, to the Spanish Republicans,
demanded first that the power of the Catholic Church in
Spain as a political-economic institution be broken. The
Catholic Cjfyrch, present Spanish leaders have been care-
ful to state, must in this connection be considered not in
its religious but in its temporal aspect. In Spain, in 1910,
the wealth of the Church amounted to one third of the
total wealth of the country, with all its vast properties tax
SURVEY GRAPHIC
exempt. Until 1931, the state church, the only one of-
ficially recognized in Spain, also received an annual
appropriation of 61 million pesetas ($12 million) in the
state budget. As the Ambassador pointed out in an ad-
dress before the Council of Foreign Relations, "all digni-
taries from the Archbishop of Toledo to the priest of the
smallest village, receive honoraria from the state." Fur-
ther, the church had its own special tribunals and its
highest dignitaries were senators in their own right. Dr.
de los Rios in 1931 drafted the disestablishment bill
which he recently explained to the National Press Club:
"This law [separating church and state and establishing
freedom of worship] was not conceived in a spirit ot
animosity, but was inspired by respect for all, for abso-
lutely all creeds. Not only for the Catholic faith, but also
for Protestant, Jewish, agnostic and other beliefs. In
brief, it was inspired by respect for human spirituality,
which is the refuge of all possibilities, for the same reason
that it is the seed of all possible cultural fruits." The
Ambassador elaborated this statement, when he said at the
New School for Social Research, "Some may wonder why
a great portion of the Spanish people is today so antagon-
istic to the Church. I would tell them, with deep and
sincere sorrow, that such antagonism exists because,
unfortunately for the spiritual welfare of Spain, the
Catholic Church in my country has never stood by the
weak and the humble, but, on the contrary, it has con-
sistently helped the powerful, and has fought side by
side with the latter against the former."
Trying to make clear to Americans the meaning of the
current news from Spain, Dr. de los Rios has briefly
explained the systems of land ownership, and their results
for the people, 72 percent of whom are farmers or farm
workers :
"The land in the northern part of Spain is divided into
innumerable parcels, so small in size that the farmer can-
not produce enough and lives in extreme poverty. In the
southern part, on the other hand, there is such concen-
tration of the ownership of the land in the hands of a
few landowners that the agricultural population, in its
overwhelming majority, is made up of wage earners
In both cases the masses are political vassals living under
economic feudalism."
The new Republic recognized from its beginning in
1931 the need of changing the bases of these agrarian
systems. "Our ambition was to establish an agrarian
democracy, to create the small farmer or the collective
agricultural unit." The agrarian law of 1932 appropriated
an annual sum of $10,500,000 to buy up land and to
finance the new units, thus seeking "to eradicate a semi-
feudal tradition, and to turn a semi-feudal political sys-
tem into positive and effective democracy."
The educational plan of the Republic, in which Dr. de
los Rios and Senor Domingo were among the leaders, was
to take secular education out of the hands of the religious
orders, to cut down the national illiteracy figure, and to
give Spanish youth opportunity for education in the mod-
ern sense through a national system of public schools,
and through community centers for discussion and the
arts. Over 7000 of the proposed 20,000 new schools had
already been organized when the civil war broke out last
July.
It was against the three main tenets of the Republic—
the effective disestablishment of the church, the fresh
impetus to agrarian reform, the educational program
Harris and Ewing
Fernando de los Rios
which struck at ignorance and superstition — that the
Franco rebellion was launched. Broadly speaking, the
situation in Spain when civil war broke out in July was
what this country might have faced if, after the sweeping
victory at the polls of the disparate groups supporting
Roosevelt, the forces of the opposition had tried by vio-
lence to overthrow the election results and block any
further progress of the "new deal."
But the Ambassador of Spain draws no such parallel.
Nor does he comment, directly or by implication, on those
American newspapers which, before election, branded
Roosevelt leadership as "communistic," and now refer
to the Spanish government as "Reds," "Leftists," "Com-
munists." Perhaps the fact that Dr. de los Rios has at
times seemed to overstep the narrow limits of diplomatic
usage in his efforts to explain the Spanish situation to the
American public is in itself a commentary on the way the
news has been distorted.
The Ambassador of Spain is a scholar in the great
tradition, too wise and too civilized for bitterness. His
face darkens with pain, not anger, when some turn in a
conversation recalls to him what is happening now—
today — in his own land: the bombing of open cities, the
personal peril of friends and colleagues, beloved streets
and landmarks broken and burned, great hopes and
plans postponed, perhaps destroyed. And speaking of the
goals of the government he represents, he says:
"We want the masses to turn from mere masses into a
conscious people. We want them to become conscious of
themselves, of their lofty destiny. For only thus can
they hope actively to cooperate in the creation of new
institutions, and of new political, juridical and economic
standards."
FEBRUARY 1937
87
Proposed Amendment
by K. N. LLEWELLYN
A legal expert analyzes the outstanding proposals for enlarging
the powers of Congress or curtailing the U. S. Supreme Court,
and shows some of the profits and perils of thus speeding the
growth of our basic law. On page 91 a journalist demonstrates
by the law of averages that before 1940 the President, with or
without amendment, will remake the Court
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT HAS BEEN IN THE AIR THESE
days. The President's first message to the new Congress
would be enough to prove it. It would be a national
misfortune if that message should work enough relief—
by producing a shift in the lines of decision of the Su-
preme Court — to take this troubling but stimulating fla-
vor from the atmosphere. The message may well do just
that. The Supreme Court has long been statesmanlike in
spotting what the limits of the leeway are which a peo-
ple accords to its oracle of constitutionality.
But another part of the President's message needs most
careful thought in connection with the Court. What the
message says about "recovery" applies, and should be ap-
plied, to our recovery from "prolonged failure to bring
legislative and judicial action into closer harmony." In
that matter, no less than in the fields of business, indus-
try, labor, finance, and farming, we need "a recovery pro-
tected from the causes of previous disasters." The mes-
sage is an indication that the President would prefer to
avoid amendment, if the Supreme Court can create with-
in itself a new and more statesmanlike majority. But I
urge that neither the President nor the people can afford
to be satisfied with that, though it occur. There is more
at stake. The relations between the Nation and the States
and the No-Man's land of government need clarification
for the future as well as for the moment. The relations
between legislature and judiciary need clarification for
the future as well as for the moment. Most of us are in
agreement with the President when he says that "right-
ly considered," the Constitution "can be used as an in-
strument of progress." But it can also be used, and used
at any time and without warning, "as a device for pre-
venting action." It is not enough to get it used in the
right way for a few years. We need to make it easier to
use as an instrument of progress, and harder to use for
preventing action. Now is the time.
For Constitutional Amendment still is in the air. You
have been breathing it in with every breath. Its flavor
does bother Americans. It bothers them either because the
Constitution seems to be holy, so that Amendment smells
like desecration; or because the Constitution seems to be
getting in the way of doing things which badly need do-
ing— which in turn smells either like despair, or like
anarchy, according to which way events may come out.
Meantime there is a welter of proposals, many being
prepared, many already introduced in Congress, which
aim to poultice or to cure our trouble by slapping an
Amendment on it, in the hope that the pain will stop.
Most will help. But for cure it takes more than a poultice.
88
I think one can only size up these proposals, or see
their values or their defects, or decide which (if any)
to support, if one sizes up the situation out of which they
arise. Yet it will hardly do to repeat here what has al-
ready been written with some fullness in Survey Graphic
for April 1936, and which really amounts to the intro-
duction to this paper.
Leeway Plus Guidance
BUT IF YOU WILL LOOK BACK. TO THAT INTRODUCTION,
you will find it suggesting that our Constitution is in
truth written only in part. It suggests that the real juice
and sap of the American Constitution lies in our funda-
mental ways of handling government, rather than in the
words of that famous Document which few of us have
read closely enough to understand. For example, we feel
that a Supreme Court, and only a Supreme Court,
can constitutionally be spokesman for our Constitution,
and tell us just what our Congress and President can, or
cannot do, by way of governing. The great Document
does not of course expressly give this power to the Su-
preme Court. The great Document itself seems, indeed,
to talk in terms of a Legislative, and of an Executive,
Power which are each of them to be quite coordinate
with the Judicial Power. Neither does the Document
anywhere suggest that a five to four vote of the supreme
judicial body is to override the views of two houses of
Congress and of the supreme executive, about what is or is
not within the powers of a national government. How-
ever, we have fallen into a habit (in which there is a
deal of sense) of picking, to determine authoritatively
what can and what cannot be done, the particular group
more removed from direct political influence than any
other group we have been able to find, to wit: the Su-
preme Court of the United States. For a century and a
half this has worked out amazingly well — except from
time to time. It would be too much to hope that any bor1
made up of mere men could be always up to its job, ar...
occasionally even the Supreme Court has fallen down.
The majority of the present Supreme Court, for in-
stance, has fallen down. Until the election, a bare majority
of them have been impelled not only to stand firm on
their own tradition (under which national powers re-
quire to be extended only very slowly, very gradually,
indeed) but to revivify those particular and least happy
branches of that tradition which most hinder growth and
most embarrass the readjustment of government to the
needs of a society. I say "those particular branches" be-
cause of course we have no single line of traditional
SURVEY GRAPHIC
action. ("Interpretation," or "application," of the Text,
is the traditional name for trying to do something about
what needs to be done.) Nobody, not even a Supreme
Court, could work through a hundred and fifty years
of all the crises in American history, along one single line
of tradition. So we have our precedents for bearing down
on Congress and the President, and we have our other
precedents for giving them room. And if you think about
it — if, for instance, you think about running a family
or a classroom, or an assistant, you will promptly see
how uncomfortable it would be if your own precedents
either (1) gave discretion, unchecked, to everybody; or
(2) withheld discretion, flatly, from everybody; or even
(3) were so clear along any line at all that when some-
thing new had to be decided, you had no choice.
The Supreme Court has, with what I feel is a deal of
wisdom, provided itself with reasonably inconsistent and
diverse lines of tradition among which it can choose, from
case to case. It has built for itself, in its decisions, a half-
dozen of these lines of tradition which offer a very fair,
though restricted, range of choice, when the Supreme
Court in any new case or line of cases sets about its task
of statesmanship. What every American should realize is
that, once the job had come to be committed to the Su-
preme Court of passing on what powers government
was to have, and what powers not, there was no other
way to get that job done adequately. For a Supreme Court
can no more foresee the needs of half a century hence
than could the Founding Fathers themselves. For both,
the statesmanlike way of dealing with the regulation of
the future lay in providing leeway plus guidance. Lee-
way for successors to be wise, means, however, and of
necessity, leeway for successors to be unwise. Occasional
mistakes and unwisdoms are the price of leaving leeway
for wisdom, when guidance does not guide.
Why Amendment Is Proposed
THE REASON WHY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT HAS BEEN
in the air and why the President brings the problem of
the Court before the country is that through these last
years mistakes by the majority of the Supreme Court
have been more than occasional, and have threatened to
become a menace instead of merely a nuisance. One
group, until lately constituting a majority (although the
election and the message may shift the majority some-
what) have dug themselves in on a line whose implica-
tions are in net effect an attack on the most precious fea-
ture in the American Constitutional scheme. The problem
is this: in a democracy, and in a changing world, shall
Congress and the National Executive have, shall state
legislature and state executive have, their own wide lee-
way for judgment of both policy and measures — irrespec-
tive of what the Supreme Court may deem wise as to the
particular measure or policy? I say that the American
scheme of government demands that the legislative or-
gans shall have such leeway, and 1 say that the Supreme
Court majority of 1935 and 1936 have been encroaching
upon that leeway. The minority do not thus encroach.
They have a decent sense of their proper judicial
sphere of action. I should be hard to persuade that
a Brandeis or a Cardozo enjoys the prospect of trade-
marked goods being controlled in their resale price
by the trademarker. For diverse reasons, these two judges
would, I feel moderately certain, regret such a rule.
Yet both voted that a statute which gave the trade-
marker that protection was constitutional. That does
not mean they liked it. It means they thought that it fell
within the sphere of legislative action, whatever any judge
might think about its wisdom. This is the Holmes tradi-
tion, which runs thus : whether I like it or not (and mostly
I don't) it is yet within the proper function of the legis-
lature: what is a legislature for? Holmes made only one
exception to this approach: any speech or action or agita-
tion which affects men's freedom to seek to change
current policy needs wide protection; even against the
legislature and the executive it needs protection, be-
cause the central purpose of our Constitution is, along
with decent order, the provision for readjustment of
government to needs which, even though present, may
be kept by prejudice or ignorance or vested power from
being seen or felt or diagnosed. Even the recent decision
on the Oregon criminal syndicalism law does not afford
all the leeway needed by citizens on this.
The Questions Before Us
WHAT is BEFORE us CITIZENS, THEN, WHEN CONSTITUTIONAL
Amendments are proposed, is threefold. First, are we
satisfied to have some one body (notably, the U. S.
Supreme Court) continue to tell us what can, and what
cannot, be done by the Supreme Court or anybody else?
I think we should be so satisfied. I think that over the
long haul the Court has done a superb job. I think that
to cut it out would involve readjustments and serious
disrangement which it would take half a century or more
to iron out.
The second question is this: can we be content to
let our decisive body go wrong not haphazardly, but with
an actual trend toward consistency in wrongness, and that
in an era of major national readjustment? Remembering,
as we must, that when that body says, "There is no
power," they cut off the very wherewithal for any re-
adjustment. To this question I answer: No. We cannot let
any agency of our government go wrong persistently,
in an era of need. Indeed, I would say more. I would
say that such momentous decisions have during these past
two years been laid down by such slender majorities of the
Supreme Court as to force us to attend to the machinery
by which that Court acts. Not only to its action, but to
the machinery for its action. Having found what one
bare majority can do, when it gets wrong-headed, we can
best use the occasion to put the machinery of the Court's
action on a more intelligent base. For the occasion is
here, and the President has made it unambiguous that
the present disrangement will not continue. He has not
indicated that he proposes to wrestle with the machinery
of the Court's action.
Which would bring us to the third question: What
best to do? And so to a canvass of proposed measures.
Base-lines
BUT BEFORE CANVASSING I THINK IT ONLY DECENT TO LAY
down the base-lines from which I shall do the canvassing.
I am for continuance of the Supreme Court's power of
review. I think that it has proved its worth. I am for limit-
ing that power so that, within the means available to mere
men, it shall be hard for one small body of men to over-
ride two houses of a legislature, an executive, and a group
of their own kind in their own Court. I am for guiding
the exercise of that power by a clear, democratic, and
Constitutional expression of what further powers the
FEBRUARY 1937
American people think their government needs now, or
may need in the future. Finally, I am for keeping any
action from attempting to lay down now what the gov-
ernment is to do. The secret of successful Constitution-
making is to limit Constitution-making to allocation of
powers, and to arrangement of the means of governing.
Policy choices should be left to the future. If a Constitu-
tion is to last, policy choices must be left to the future.
A Two Thirds Majority
LET US, THEN, SET OUT A TENTATIVE BASE-LINE AGAINST
which to measure the multitude of proposals now brew-
ing. Say something like the following (which are rough
drafts only, not finished products intended as proposals
for enactment) : "The Supreme Court shall have power,
by a vote of two thirds of its members, to determine that
a law or act of the United States or of a state is invalid
as being inconsistent with the Constitution. In the event
of conflict between laws, acts, or claims of jurisdiction,
the Supreme Court shall have power to allocate authority
by a majority vote of the justices sitting."
An Amendment along these lines should be accom-
panied by an Act of Congress increasing the number of
justices on the Court from nine to eleven. First, because
this would increase the requisite two thirds majority by
two. Second, because new blood is needed, right now, on
the Court. Third, because the justices are overworked.
The General Welfare Clause
A SECOND AND SEPARATE AMENDMENT MIGHT READ ALONG
such lines as these: "The Congress shall have power to
regulate any aspect of business, agriculture, industry,
finance, or other social or economic phase of the national
life which in the expressed judgment of the Congress
shall require regulation in the interest of the general wel-
fare; provided, however, that hereafter no state, nor the
United States, nor any official of either, shall hinder, or
shall penalize by way of the criminal law or its machin-
ery, any assemblage or any expression of opinion or any
political, economic or social urging or counselling, ex-
cept in circumstances under which the same immediately
and unmistakably threatens dangerous breach of the
peace or disruption of a community's necessary traffic."
This must be drawn with an eye to leaving un-
touched the general lines which now prohibit indecent
discrimination in a regulatory measure, while unambigu-
ously enlarging the powers of the national legislature,
and while making explicit the basic proposition that new
thinking is intended not to be put down.
But whatever language be approved, you must remem-
ber that no Amendment dealing with powers alone is
safe unless the machinery of the Supreme Court's review
is radically changed. And since no Amendment can be
adopted save on a national understanding of why an
Amendment is needed, I believe firmly that an Amend-
ment about the Supreme Court should go before the
country side by side with one enlarging the powers of
Congress. The two together can win acceptance quite
as well as the one. And each needs the other, in action.
Our Political Fulcrum
THIS BRINGS ME TO MY FINAL BASE-LINE OF JUDGMENT.
There is little immediate use talking or writing about a
political proposal unless there is at least an outside chance
of something of the sort being realized. Many pending
proposals for Amendment are drawn in very narrow
terms because the Child Labor Amendment is taken to
show that broad grants of power are doomed to defeat.
Such a view approaches silliness. The facts give every
reason to believe these propositions to be sound: (1) No
Amendment will get through during this Administration
without immediate, clearcut, open, forceful and sustained
support by the President. He, one man, and not Con-
gress, is the political fulcrum of Amendment. We know
he wants results in this matter of restoring the Constitu-
tion to reasonable elasticity. But does he want them only
for this administration? (2) An Amendment making
unambiguous the occupation by the national govern-
ment of that No Man's Land of general welfare from
which the Supreme Court ought never to have cut
the national government off, can be gotten through,
rather speedily, with that kind of Presidential support.
(3) Where the Child Labor Amendment encountered an
interested and concentrated opposition, met until recently
only by a largely disinterested and diffused support, such
an Amendment as is proposed would rally energetic and
interested support in quarters which would tend to dis-
solve much of the opposition that met the Child Labor
Amendment. I suspect indeed that the President's open
support of that Amendment will be enough to get it
adopted.
Now as to some of the pending proposals.
Dean Clark Defines
DEAN CLARK OF THE YALE LAW SCHOOL PROCEEDS WITH
an eye toward effective change without unforeseeable up-
set. He rejects most proposals to limit the powers of the
Supreme Court, as embarrassing their primary duty of
deciding between parties to a lawsuit; he rejects any
power in Congress to repass a law over the Court's veto
for the same reason (which any lawyer will understand),
and also because it throws open any type of governmental
tyranny at all. These are reasons of weight, even as here
summarized; especially, the problem of granting new
powers without impairing those lines of limitation on
government which the Bill of Rights describes only in
part, must call for thought. Clark proposes to keep an
Amendment within bounds by redefining "interstate
commerce" so as to include production or distribution
of commodities which either head into or emerge from
interstate transportation or which compete with such
interstate commodities. This last has special teeth. He
then proposes to get rid of the one largest block of bother-
some decisions by redefining due process of law, that
catch-all of unforeseen judicial restrictions on govern-
ment. Clark would limit due process to orderly and
fair procedure of executive and administrative and judi-
cial bodies, so that it should not apply to the substance o
their action.
Clark's cautionings are more incisive and persuasive
than his positive proposals. Every proposal should be
studied with them in view. True, his own proposal as to
interstate commerce, not only has very considerable
carrying power, but coincides with the views of many
others. For reasons indicated, however, I feel that we can
either get mor^ or shall not get even so much, and that
the welfare clause is a better one to develop. And Clark's
second proposal is one which any strong-headed wrong-
headed Court can practically emasculate within ten years.
The line between "procedure" and "substance" shifts to
90
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the judges' will, once popular interest has spent itself.
The Garrison Proposal
CERTAINLY DEAN GARRISON OF WISCONSIN LAW SCHOOL
is of this opinion; he proposes a rather similar clause.
But his is attached to other clauses which would give
Congress power to promote the economic welfare of the
United States, by such laws as in its judgment [beautiful
phrasing] are appropriate for that purpose. Thus Garri-
son's proposal risks what Clark attempts to avoid: new
regulation which might cut down the sphere of civil
liberties. Garrison adds in his Amendment a direction to
Congress, so far as practicable, to put any laws in the
form of a general framework to be filled in by state legis-
lation and administered by state agencies. Language of
this sort would probably aid in getting an Amendment
passed; it would somewhat discourage over-centralization.
During a period of experimental expansion of national
powers, there is probably value in this; its possibility for
harm seems slight.
It will be noted that Garrison's "economic welfare" is
so expressed as to attempt to draw off the opposition of
those opposing extension of governmental power over
"social" welfare; though the term could readily expand,
over the years, to include the whole problem, e.g. of
poverty. Garrison's language is much broader than Clark's
proposal to enlarge the power over production and dis-
tribution even in Clark's broadened "interstate com-
merce." Garrison's might even be made a peg on which
taxation for the open and definite purpose of pervasive
reallocation of productive energy could be hung, without
encountering trouble because of discrimination.
Garrison adds an interesting provision requiring Con-
gress to declare when a new national law is intended to
suspend the operation of state powers affected thereby,
instead of leaving that question to the courts. Either way,
there will be trouble again and again. But Garrison's is
the way to capitalize today's trouble as education to avoid
some of tomorrow's trouble.
To Regulate Hours and Wages
SENATOR COSTIGAN INTRODUCED IN 1935 AN AMENDMENT
to give Congress power to regulate hours and conditions
of labor and establish minimum wages "in any employ-
ment." The regulation of production and business which
he proposed reads as if it were limited to the prevention of
unfair practices. He, too, attempted to limit the due
process clause to questions of procedure; and sought to
save state powers, save in case of conflict. The proposals
of Garrison and Clark must be regarded, from the angle
of getting the job done adequately, as superseding this
earlier proposal. There is a reason: neither a sound theory
of amendment, nor its clothing in effective language,
comes at one stroke or at seven, when precedents over
upwards of half a century (say, since 1890) lie behind,
and half a century of unforeseen problems lie ahead.
Other Suggested Ways
ANOTHER LINE OF PROPOSED AMENDMENTS LEADS INTO A
veritable welter, which can here only be charted roughly.
Their type is that Child Labor Amendment which, how-
ever desirable in itself — which it is — represents a short-
sighted and cumbersome method of operation at the pres-
ent time. From various quarters, and in various combina-
tions, come proposed Amendments to empower Congress
to deal with minimum wages and maximum hours; or
old age pensions; or collective bargaining; or regulation
of business in the general direction of the NIRA aims —
or what have you. Many of these proposals either ex-
pressly extend to a list of activities (manufacturing, min-
ing, and so forth) or expressly exempt other activities, or
both. Their aim and reason are clear. Their proponents
have seen what has been happening under general
clauses, and they do not like it. They seek to beat the
Court over the head with concrete words. But the effort
needed for any Amendment is so great that an Amend-
ment ought better to look to tomorrow as well as to
today. All such concrete proposals, for instance, take the
Court, as it stands, for granted. But the machinery of
the Court should be reformed, and can be reformed — if
the President will take and keep the initiative. If that
machinery be once reformed, general clauses become
precisely what is needed. Garrison's general clauses (save
for failure expressly to safeguard civil liberties) are the
best that I have seen.
As for proposals simply to limit the Court's action, say
by Act of Congress, they are difficult to deal with.
Merely to cut down the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court
over constitutionality would leave the nation headless on
the question, with state courts conflicting and uncon-
trolled— an intolerable result. To limit all federal courts,
likewise. To forbid lower federal courts to deal with a
national law as unconstitutional would have value: it
would force issues up to the Supreme Court quickly,
while government could proceed in the interim. To
require, by action of Congress, a two thirds vote of the
Supreme Court itself, in some such terms as are suggested
above, and add then two judges to the Court, so that a
body of precedents might be built up to buttress the reso-
lution, would be helpful and perhaps feasible. But if
Amendment can be had, Amendment is the more dem-
ocratically satisfactory, and the more permanently effec-
tive procedure.
Needs and Safeguards
BUT WHAT SEEMS MEANWHILE UNMISTAKABLE IS THIS: A
widening of Congressional powers, one of real scope, is
needed today, and will be needed desperately tomorrow.
No such widening should fail to include a safeguard of
civil liberties, nor fail to cut under the recent dangerous
expansion of the due process clause. The best clause of the
now Constitution to clarify, and to reestablish in its
pristine strength, is the general welfare clause. But no
general Amendment should fail to give to at least Acts
of Congress their explicit due as acts of the essentially
coordinate legislative power. It takes two thirds of both
houses to override the President's veto in a single case.
It should take two thirds of the Supreme Court to over-
ride Congress and the President combined — and at the
same time to hamstring all future Congresses and Presi-
dents.
Finally, be it noted that any campaign which can win
adoption for a welfare Amendment, broad or narrow,
can gain power from the addition of an Amendment
which both legitimatizes and duly limits that distin-
guished but unruly foundling of the American Constitu-
tion: the Supreme Court's power of review. And be it
remembered that now is the time to urge upon the
President that here, too, recovery requires to be "pro-
tected from the causes of previous disasters."
FEBRUARY 1937
91
Harris and Kwing
THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Seated: Justices Brandeis, Van Devanter, Chief Justice Hughes, Justices McReynoIds, Sutherland
Back row standing: Justices Roberts, Butler, Stone, Cardozo
In the Order of Appointment
Willis Van Devanter of Wyoming
Born in Marion, Ind., in 1859
Judge of U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals when
Appointed Associate Justice in 1910 by Taft
James Clark McReynoIds of Tennessee
Born in Elkton, Ky., in 1862
Attorney-General of the United States when
Appointed Associate Justice in 1914 by Wilson
Louis Dembitz Brandeis of Massachusetts
Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1856
Appointed Associate Justice in 1916 by Wilson
George Sutherland of Utah
Born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1862
U. S. Senator from Utah, 1905-1917
Appointed Associate Justice in 1922 by Harding
Pierce Butler of Minnesota
Born in Dakota County, Minn., in 1866
Appointed Associate Justice in 1922 by Harding
92
Harlan Fiske Stone of New York
Born in Chesterfield, N. H., in 1872
Attorney-General of the United States when
Appointed Associate Justice in 1925 by Coolidge
Charles Evans Hughes of New York
Born in Glen Falls, N. Y., in 1862
Governor of New York when
Appointed Associate Justice in 1910 by Taft
Resigned in 1916 to become Republican candidate for President
Secretary of State, 1921-1925
Appointed Chief Justice in 1930 by Hoover
Owen Josephus Roberts of Pennsylvania
Born in Philadelphia, Pa., in 1875
Appointed Associate Justice in 1930 by Hoover
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo of New York
Born in New York City in 1870
Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals when
Appointed Associate Justice in 1932 by Hoover
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Mr. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court
THE OBSERVATIONS OF A CITIZEN
by IRVING DILLIARD
How many new justices will be appointed to the U. S. Supreme
Court in President Roosevelt's second administration? How will
this reshaping of the highest court affect the validity of federal and
state legislation? Here are the ideas of one informed American
A FEW DAYS AGO WASHINGTON AND THE COUNTRY WHICH IT
represents shifted their attention from the new Seventy-
fifth Congress to focus on the executive branch of the fed-
eral government — to watch Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
the din of an almost unanimous electoral landslide still
ringing in his ears, go from the White House to Capitol
Hill to take a second oath to uphold the Constitution of
the United States.
In a few days more that focus of attention will shift to
the third and in some ways most powerful branch of the
federal government, the apex of the judiciary, the United
States Supreme Court. While a vitally interested nation
listens in, so to speak, the Justices will hear arguments in
cases involving the constitutionality of the Wagner Labor
Disputes Act.
What the finding will be this article will not presume
to say. Those who have only a casual acquaintanceship
with the decisions of the Supreme Court must know that
what the Court will do cannot be predicted with certainty,
that it has varying precedents from which to choose. But
the very name of the significant law soon to come before
the Court is proof of the fact that the Supreme Court Is
not only an arbiter of legal and political problems. It is
also, and perhaps more importantly, an independent
agency which passes on social and economic questions,
arising under the Constitution.
Students of the business of the Supreme Court have
known of its socio-economic work for many years; legis-
lation relating to hours and wages has been coming before
it for upward of a generation. At the close of the last his-
toric term, Justice Stone could declare in his memorable
dissenting opinion in the New York minimum wage case:
It is difficult to imagine any grounds, other than our own
personal economic predilections, for saying that the contract
of employment is any the less an appropriate subject of legisla-
tion than are scores of others, in dealing with which this
Court has held that legislatures may curtail individual free-
dom in the public interest. . . . The Fourteenth Amendment
has no more embedded into the Constitution our preference
for some particular set of economic beliefs than it has adopted,
in the name of liberty, the system of theology which we may
happen to approve. . . . We should follow our decision in the
Nebbia [New York milk] case and leave the selection and
the method of solution of the problems to which the statute
is addressed where it seems to me the Constitution has left
them, to the legislative branch of the government.
However well informed, he would be bold indeed who
would attempt to forecast what the next four years hold
in store for the United States of America — precisely what
issues will arise and how the overwhelmingly re-indorsed
New Deal, such as it is, will go about meeting them. This
article will make only two predictions and both are so cer-
FEBRUARY 1937
tain to come to pass as to remove them from the realm
of speculation. The first is that the social and economic
issues which have figured so prominently in the business
of the Supreme Court during its last two terms will con-
tinue to arise in one form or another, regardless of who
the judges may be. The second prediction is that in the
orderly course of events, fate, in all probability, will assign
to President Roosevelt the highly important task of remak-
ing the very agency which struck down so much of his
recovery program as unconstitutional — the Supreme Court
itself.
This virtually certain reshaping of the Supreme Court
will not, as I envision it, involve the sometimes discussed
increase in the size of the Court above the present mem-
bership of nine Judges — the Chief Justice and eight Asso-
ciate Justices. Neither will it be concerned with the currently
proposed curbs on the power of the Court, statutory
or constitutional, whereby an extraordinary majority
would be required for the Judges to declare an act of Con-
gress invalid or the legislative branch would be given the
authority to re-enact over the veto of the Supreme Court.
The remaking which I have in mind is no more than the
inevitable reconstitution of the membership which is
bound to come with the passage of time.
It is not my intention even to seem to be ushering any
sitting member of the Supreme Court on his way to resig-
nation and retirement to private life. Neither am I under
any illusion that one private citizen, however much he
might desire it, could have such an effect on that august
tribunal. But I do feel that this whole matter is tre-
mendously important to the rank and file of Americans
and that it is, therefore, a subject wholly suitable for
widespread public discussion.
What is the basis for my assertion that a substantial
change in the personnel of the Supreme Court impends?
First, there is the fact that in terms of the frequency
with which vacancies have occurred in the past, an altera-
tion in the membership of the Court is long overdue. The
last vacancy occurred when the beloved and truly wise
Justice Holmes resigned in January 1932, shortly before
his ninety-first birthday. That was just five years ago. The
first vacancy in this century was created by the resignation
of Justice Gray, whom Holmes succeeded, in 1902. In
the span of thirty years between that first vacancy since
1900 and the latest, other vacancies have occurred as fol-
lows: one in 1903, one in 1906, one in 1909, three in 1910,
one in 1911, one in 1914, two in 1916, one in 1921, three
in 1922, one in 1925 and two in 1930.
From this I calculate that between the resignation of
Justice Gray and that of Justice Holmes vacancies occurred
at the rate of one approximately every eighteen months.
93
Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Great Hurdle
Manifestly, if there have been vacancies every eighteen
months on the average and yet five years have passed since
the most recent vacancy, the beginning of this natural
reconstitution by President Roosevelt is, as I say, past due.
Second, there is the matter of the ages of the sitting
members. For while our Supreme Court Judges may not
be "nine old men" intellectually, the fact remains that
they are in point of years. Two thirds of them are beyond
the retirement age of seventy. Justice Brandeis observed
his eightieth birthday last November, an occasion fittingly
marked by deserved tributes from bench and bar and
press to his brilliance in the law and profound under-
standing of modern economic problems. Justice Van
Devanter, the dean of the Court in continuous service,
will be seventy-eight in April.
Three members are on the threshold of seventy-five.
Justice McReynolds will attain that age in February,
Justice Sutherland in March and Chief Justice Hughes in
April. Justice Butler will be seventy-one in March. This
leaves only Justices Cardozo, Stone and Roberts under
seventy. Justice Cardozo will be sixty-seven in May, Justice
Stone sixty-five in October and Justice Roberts sixty-two
in May.
I mean no disrespect to the members of the Court by
this recital of ages. Advanced years are no disqualification
for public service, particularly on the bench, where long
experience and ripened philosophy are especial virtues.
The resignation of a Justice Holmes is always an uncount-
able loss, however old he may be by the calendar. More-
over, to be fair it must be pointed out that while the
present Judges average over the retirement age of seventy
now, their average age at the time of ap-
pointment was only fifty-seven, an age
which may be said to be required in most
instances for proof of qualification for a
seat on the Supreme Court. I review the
ages of the members only because they, to-
gether with the unusually long interval
since the last vacancy, indicate how certain
it is that a natural reshaping of the Court
is near at hand.
In this connection it needs to be known
that in the century and a half of the Su-
preme Court's existence almost as many
vacancies have been occasioned by the resig-
nation of Justices as by the death of mem-
bers still on bench. Indeed, if we center on
the third of a century since 1900, we find
that there have been more vacancies caused
by resignations; that eleven Justices have
resigned from the Supreme bench, while
only eight members have been taken by
death in the same period. Six — a two thirds
majority of the sitting judges — were ap-
pointed to fill seats rendered vacant by the
resignation of their immediate predecessors.
When this natural reshaping comes, fate
will only be giving Franklin D. Roosevelt
his due as President with respect to Supreme
Court appointments. For the truth is that he
did not have his due, if it can be called that,
in his first term. Notwithstanding the fact
that no other President has had such a stake
in Supreme Court decisions, it seems to
have escaped public attention altogether that
had Mr. Roosevelt left office in January without a vacancy
occurring, he would have been the first President since
Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, not to place a Judge
on the Supreme Court. And the case of Johnson would
not be in point since Johnson had his opportunity; it was
a politically hostile Senate which kept his appointee from
taking the oath.
FROM WASHINGTON, WHO APPOINTED ELEVEN MEMBERS,
through Hoover, every President with but two exceptions
has been confronted with one or more Supreme Court
vacancies. As a matter of fact, however, the cases of these
exceptions would not be comparable had Mr. Roosevelt
retired without making an appointment. The first excep-
tion, William Henry Harrison (1841) lived only a month
after taking office. The second, Zachary Taylor (1849-
1850) lived only a year and four months beyond his in-
auguration. And as it happened, the Vice-Presidents who
filled out their terms, Tyler and Fillmore, each did nomi-
nate members of the Court.
Not to indulge in speculation but rather to appreciate
how much many other Presidents have had to do with
the composition of the Supreme Bench, let us ask our-
selves: What if President Roosevelt had had to appoint
five Judges — a majority on a basis of nine — as Taft, Lin-
coln and Jackson did ? What if he had had to name four,
as did HardingjCleveland, Harrison and Grant — Harding
within less than two and a half years? Or three, as did
Hoover, Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Van Buren, Jeffer-
son and John Adams? Or for that matter, even only two,
as did Arthur, Hayes, Polk and Madison?
94
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Our answer must concede that nothing short of an op-
portunity to appoint at least a majority could possibly
have resulted in the sustention of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, for that ill-starred experiment fell by the
unanimous vote of the nine Justices. The division on the
AAA, however, was six to three, so the replacement of
two of the majority Justices in that decision might con-
ceivably have resulted in the upholding of the law, five
to four. As the Railroad Retirement Act of 1933, the
Municipal Bankruptcy Act of 1935 and the New York
Minimum Wage Act of 1933 all were held invalid by one-
Judge majorities, it is altogether possible that the appoint-
ment of one new Justice in the place of one of the
majority members would have caused these laws to be
sustained as constitutional.
SINCE MR. ROOSEVELT, WHETHER THE LAWYERS' COMMITTEE
of the American Liberty League likes it or not, is going
to be called upon to perform the constitutional duty of
choosing Supreme Court members, thoughtful citizens
may well begin to give some attention to a consideration
of what may happen.
The Constitution of the United States, as Felix Frank-
furter sagely observes in his illuminating new book, The
Commerce Clause under Marshall, Taney and Waite, "is
most significantly not a document but a stream of history."
Our inquiry had best begin then with a look into the past.
For while history may not tell us where President Roose-
velt will go for our next Supreme Court Judges or what
their constitutional ideals will be, history does tell us what
other Presidents have done when confronted
with the same responsibility. Although we
might go back as far as Jackson or even
John Adams, with the same results, let us
start with Lincoln for whom all of us now
have reverence that is deep and abiding.
When Chief Justice Taney died in 1864,
several members of Lincoln's Cabinet sought
the seat. But Lincoln from the outset favored
Salmon P. Chase, his Secretary of the
Treasury and eventual choice. Writing to
Congressman Boutwell of Massachusetts,
Lincoln set forth his views about Chase in
these unmistakable words:
There are three reasons in favor of his ap-
pointment. . . . First, he occupies the largest
place in the public mind in connection with
the office; then we wish for a Chief Justice
who will sustain what has been done in re-
gard to emancipation and the legal tenders.
We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if
we should, and he should answer us, we
should despise him for it. Therefore, we must
take a man whose opinions are known.
Grant saw the appointing power in much
the same light. Six years after Lincoln ap-
pointed Chase, Grant nominated Justices
Strong and Bradley with the surprising re-
sult that the four-to-three decision against
the Legal Tender Act of 1862, handed down
in 1870, was converted into a five-to-four
majority for the law only fourteen months
later. Grant's attitude has been disclosed
only recently with the discovery of the diary
of his Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish,
the subject of a new biography by Allan Nevins. I owe
my quotation to an excellent study by Sidney Ratncr, in
the Political Science Quarterly. What Fish wrote in his
journal was that Grant had told him:
. . . that although he required no declaration from Judges
Strong and Bradley on the Constitutionality of the Legal
Tender Act, he knew Judge Strong had on the Bench in
Pennsylvania given a decision sustaining its Constitutionality,
and he had reason to believe Judge Bradley 's opinion tended
in the same direction; that at the time he felt it important
that the Constitutionality of the Law should be sustained, and
while he would do nothing to exact anything like a pledge
or expression of opinion from the parties he might appoint
to the Bench, he had desired that the Constitutionality should
be sustained by the Supreme Court; that he believed such
had been the opinion of all his Cabinet at the time.
Then there is the case of still another Republican Presi-
dent, Theodore Roosevelt. Relative to the qualifications
of Oliver Wendell Holmes for a seat on the Court, Roose-
velt wrote, in 1902, to Senator Lodge of Massachusetts:
Now I should like to know that Judge Holmes was in en-
tire sympathy with our views, that is with your views and
mine, and Judge Gray's, for instance, just as we know that
ex-Attorney-General Knowlton is, before I would feel justified
in appointing him. ... I should hold myself as guilty of an
irreparable wrong to the nation if I should put in his
[Gray's] place any man who was not absolutely sane and
sound on the great national policies for which we stand in
public life.
As a postcript, this first Roosevelt added: "I should
Kirby in the N. Y. World-Telearam
Reversing Their Positions
FEBRUARY 1937
95
know about Judge Holmes as soon as possible. How
would it do, if he seems to be all right, to have him come
down here and spend a night with me, and then I could
make the announcement on the day that he left, after we
have talked together?"
WlLSON KNEW MOST DEFINITELY WHY HE NOMINATED JUSTICE
Brandeis in 1916. After recounting his appointee's many
legal services as a feeless "people's advocate," the President
wrote to Senator Culberson of Texas, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee:
I nominated Mr. Brandeis because it was, and is, my delib-
erate judgment that, of all the men now at the bar whom it
has been my privilege to observe, test and know, he is excep-
tionally qualified. I cannot speak too highly of his impartial,
impersonal, orderly and constructive mind, his rare analytical
powers, his deep human sympathy, his profound acquaintance
with the historical roots of our institutions and insight into
their spirit, or of the many evidences he has given of being
imbued to the very heart with our American ideals of justice
and equality of opportunity; of his knowledge of modern
economic conditions and of the way they bear upon the
masses of the people, or of his genius in getting persons to
unite in common and harmonious action. . . . This friend of
justice and of men will ornament the high court of which
we are all so justly proud. ... I beg that your committee will
accept this nomination as coming from me quick with a sense
of public obligation and responsibility.
Other testimony could be introduced; these exhibits are
sufficient. If President Roosevelt fills the vacancies on the
Court that arise during his second administration with
Judges whose outlook is much like his own, he will be
doing only what Presidents generally have done. There
have been exceptions, of course. Wilson named Justice
McReynolds. To Coolidge we owe the presence of
Justice Stone on the bench and that able Judge's brilliant
dissent in the AAA case. If against his first judgment,
Hoover nevertheless appointed Justice Cardozo. And it is
true also that Judges have not always met the expectations
of the Presidents who appointed them. Justice Holmes, for
example, dissented in Northern Securities Co. v. the
United States, in 1904, notwithstanding the fact that this
"trust-busting" suit was almost personally brought by the
President to whom he owed his seat on the Court.
Again, Presidents upon occasion have not been able to
get their choices to accept nomination. It has been dis-
closed by Virginius Dabney in one of the final volumes
of the Dictionary of American Biography that the late
Senator Underwood declined appointment by Harding,
because the work of the bench would not have been con-
genial to the temperament of the Alabaman. In 1811, John
Quincy Adams, later President, declined the seat eventu-
ally filled by Story, one of the Court's great scholars.
Even so, after allowances have been made, there can be
no denying that in his Supreme Court appointments a
President extends his influence long beyond his term of
office. They are the lengthening shadow of the man.
I said at the outset that this subject is one entirely suit-
able for widespread public discussion. This needs to be
emphasized. For while public opinion exerts little or no
influence on the actions of the Supreme Court at a par-
ticular time — whatever Mr. Dooley may have said, a
majority of the Justices did not follow the election returns
of 1932 and 1934 — this same public opinion can be a factor
in the appointment of new members. Aroused sentiment,
focused through the Senate, prevented in 1930 the confir-
mation of Federal Circuit Judge Parker of North Caro-
lina, Hoover's original appointee to the seat now held by
Justice Roberts. Unquestionably, the manifestation over
the country that Chief Judge Cardozo of the New York.
Court of Appeals was the man to succeed Justice Holmes
at length persuaded Hoover that the people would not
object to the appointment of a third New Yorker and a
second Jew if he were exceptionally qualified.
Along with these evidences of the force that public opin-
ion can exert in the matter of appointments, there is good
reason to believe that people are becoming better informed
on the Supreme Court and the Constitution. I do not say
they are acquiring the status of experts. But probably
never before — and the qualification seems unnecessary —
have as many books and magazine articles and news-
paper reports and editorials, all dealing with our consti-
tutional problems, had such wide circulation.
Some part of this material has been of the town gossip
level and no higher. But it would be a mistake to ignore
the significance of the several popularly published volumes
of opinions of members of the Supreme Court; recent
sincere studies of our constitutional stalemate like The
Twilight of the Supreme Court and the Commerce Power
versus States Rights by Professor Corwin of Princeton,
The Story of the Supreme Court by Ernest Sutherland
Bates, Storm over the Constitution by Irving Brant, The
Ultimate Power by Morris L. Ernst; the articles by
Charles A. Beard, Max Lerner and many others.
To SOME, THESE WRITERS ARE IRREVERENTIAL OR PERHAPS
unthinking spreaders of doubt about the most glorious of
our political institutions. To others, they are misinformed.
To still others, they are true political scientists, performing
a notable public service.
My own conviction is that the American 'citizen is en-
titled to every material fact about the Supreme Court and
its work. If the Supreme Court is to have the power of life
and death over state and federal legislation, we cannot
know too much that is relevant about the personnel of the
bench, its findings and how these findings are arrived at,
what they mean and how consistent they are. Justice
Brewer wisely said as long ago as 1898:
It is a mistake to suppose that the Supreme Court is either
honored or helped by being spoken of as beyond criticism. . . .
The time is past in the history of the world when any living
man or body of men can be set on a pedestal and decorated
with a halo.
And so it is that with the Supreme Court being talked
about more than at any time since the Dred Scott decision
of 1857 — and if we do not make that exception, then in its
history — substantial change in the membership of the
Court and perhaps in its outlook impends. Justice Brandeis
once said that instead of amending the Constitution, he
would amend men's social and economic ideals. Can it
be that President Roosevelt had this sort of change in
mind when he steadfastly declined to make constitutional
reform an issue in the campaign?
The months ahead will provide the answer. Whether
we like it or not, for good or ill, it may well be that we
are about to enter a period during which amended ideals
will have theiTjjnfluence on the interpretation of the Con-
stitution by "the most powerful court in the world." Many
an anxious traveler through these changing times will
look hopefully to our constitutional future if it lies along
that way.
96
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
East is East but South is South
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
As WE WERE SAYING, THE GODS ON HIGH OLYMPUS SHOULD
be having these days the time of their lives, be-
holding the many-ringed circus performing all over the
world. In any direction they may chance to look, they or
any who have no pity for the infinite pathos of human
life — the blind follies of men and the incredible sufferings
which punish alike the guilty and the innocent — have
sufficient material for entertainment. In a world starving
for peace and cooperating constructive effort, after a
quarter-century of anything-but, the hordes of men hud-
dled into nations behind imaginary geographical lines,
worshipping the bunting of divisive flags and shouting
meaningless slogans and epithets, hysterically waste their
patrimony and destroy all that they affect to prize; "spend-
ing their money for that which is not bread, and their
labor for that which satisfieth not." Only such as can
vision far ahead to glimmerings upon horizons imagined,
and look back along the road of history with the geolo-
gist's and the astronomer's purview and patience, may
difficultly make sense out of it. It is cold comfort to those
living and suffering bewildered in a crazy Today to re-
flect that perhaps we are seeing only the unintelligible
"seamy side" of some Tapestry whose design will appear
admirable to those of some long-hence Tomorrow, or on
some Other Side, "where 'twill be Man's to see the Whole
of what on Earth he sees a part." Maybe so ... anyway
it's tough going just now.
And yet — perhaps we are skirting the edges of our
dreams. The hard conditions of material fact may be
forcing great lessons upon mankind. Drunkards do come
to sobriety suddenly for lack of anything more to drink.
Specifically, the "next great war" so generally feared may
well flash in the pan for mere lack of the nations' economic
ability to pay for the powder for more than a flash. And
there are still sane people, increasing in number, working
with (more or less) all their might to steer the headlong
rush, or to brake it, short of the Abyss. If only there were
not the perennial absurdities. Such for instance as the
endless dissonances among them over the definitions of
good and evil. In other columns of this issue Dorothy
Thompson discloses just such hampering of the Peace
Movement, with its good intentions, its clatter of machin-
ery, its disagreements about both target and technique; to
say nothing of those who ride upon it as fleas ride upon
the best of dogs.
Fortunately, there is dissonance too among those whose
trade and sustenance are war and its by-products toward
their own glory and power. It would be a bad business
indeed were the rulers of Germany, Italy, Japan, and
other dictatorships able to find or make unity of purposes
and interests and move side-by-side to domination in the
world. Fortunately for the rest of us, however much thev
may concur in this and that immediate particular and
temporarily, their aims and ambitions conflict at vital
points. Moreover, not one of them can trust another, for
FEBRUARY 1937
their promise, oral or written, is worthless — all the world
has seen lately each of them prove that. And even among
the righteous . . . while there was much shadow-boxing
against Italy by way of sanctions to retard the rape of
Abyssinia, was not indispensable oil going by thousands
of barrels a day to the Italians, not only from America,
which was making no pretenses, but from the Anglo-
Persian Oil Company, largely owned by the British gov-
ernment? Together with sincerity, the United States and
Great Britain could have stopped that outrage, as they
could stop the civil war in Spain, almost overnight. Even
as I write these words, the dispatches forecast a possible
blockade of the entire Spanish coast by British and French
fleets. Mobilization of what sane common sense there may
be in the world, seasoned with good faith — the ingredient
whose lack has hamstrung the League of Nations — would
change the whole world-picture.
CONSIDER NOW THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS, TOGETHER WITH
the underlying fallacious geographical assumption, of the
great Inter-American Peace Conference, lately concluded
at Buenos Aires. Admirable accomplishments they were,
so far as words on paper and in air may be called such.
For three weeks it sat, in an atmosphere tense, almost hys-
terical with Pentecostal good feeling, greatly inspired by
Cordell Hull, our own Secretary of State — not forgetting
the stirring introductory speech of President Roosevelt in
person. Whatever its ultimate results in action, those utter-
ances were wholesome in the air, and expressed bravely
the heart-hunger of the peoples all over the world. That
conference produced nearly seventy written conventions
and protocols, each impeccable in intention and utterance;
embodying the purpose of collective security as against
aggression, not merely among themselves but from all
the rest of the world. They transform the Monroe Doc-
trine from a declaration of hegemony by the United States
into an understanding and agency of mutual defense, re-
moving a cause of irritation among our American neigh-
bors. They provide a machinery (or, rather, a policy) of
group consultation in the event of a threat against the
public peace; definitely authorizing themselves as "neu-
trals" to regard it as the international public business.
They call for equality of treatment in international trade
and the progressive reduction of trade barriers. They en-
visage broad cooperation in respect of international law,
intellectual interests, exchange of publications, utilization
of radio, citizenship of women, and so on. Given a com-
mon intent to carry out their spirit; given good faith on
the part of the nations participating in them, these provi-
sional agreements would suffice to establish the great fel-
lowship in this hemisphere. "Provisional," I say, because
none of them has yet the force of law. So far as the United
States, for only one, is concerned, there is still the Senate,
that notorious graveyard of international treaties.
It is easy, too easy, to pick flaws; to point out that the
outcome is in many ways only the ghost of the United
States draft proposals; that like the Pact of Paris it pro-
vides no technique of enforcement, no sanctions upon vio-
lation, no pledges to accept any verdict of anybody. These
were not the only disappointments. On the whole, hovv-
97
ever, it marks a great advance upon the achievements ol
the Montevideo Conference of 1933; it looks forward to
further steps at the Pan-American Conference expected
to be held at Lima, Peru, next year.
But ALL OF THESE MEASURES AND ASPIRATIONS ARE EM-
bodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations, to
which they have been widely described as "a challenge."
Every whit of that Pentecostal intensity of fellowship has
been matched repeatedly in Assemblies of the League.
Some commentators, hitherto vociferous against the League
of Nations and particularly against our participation in or
traffic with it, apparently imagine some difference, with
respect to our "minding our own business," between East
and South. We must not, forsooth, however distantly get
involved in the affairs of Europe or the Orient; but from
their point of view it is all right for us to step into the
notoriously explosive doings and inter-relationships of
South America! Will it then be all right for us to partici-
pate in the projected "American League of Nations" to
insure collective security and neighborship in the Western
Hemisphere, while somehow unsuitable and dangerous to
join or even collaborate with the great one designed to
make those desirable conditions world-wide?
It cannot be a question of distance — as the crow flies
Istanbul in Turkey is no farther from New York than
Buenos Aires. In terms of travel it is much nearer.
Steam south in the Atlantic as far as the voyage eastward
to London; you will hardly have abeam the "bulge" of
South America, and you must continue full half as far
again to reach Montevideo. In time of getting there Mos-
cow is much nearer than Buenos Aires. It cannot be a
question of ocean-water — unless by air, to reach any Latin-
American country you will go to sea. Interests and psy-
chology in common? Berlin, Rome or Moscow is no far-
ther from us psychologically than Rio de Janeiro: in terms
of dictatorship none of them need give odds to Brazil.
Even our own step-child Cuba is now to all intents a dic-
tatorship as ruthless as Mussolini's. Spiritually, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Chili, Peru, are to us as exotic as Latvia. Gen-
erally speaking, our interests, sympathies and contacts
outside our own territory are far more real and vital from
every point of view with Europe than with any country
south of the Rio Grande. I have not at hand at this mo-
ment adequate statistics for comparison; but I notice that
the World Almanac table showing "country of birth of
foreign-born, in cities, in 1930," lists countries of Europe
but ignores the relatively insignificant Latin-American
element in our population. By every tie, whether of his-
tory, blood, language, mentality or commerce, the people
of the United States are closer related to Englishmen,
Scotch, Irish, Frenchmen, Germans, Dutch, Italians, Scan-
dinavians, Austrians, Czechs — yes, and Russians — and so
on down the line, than to those of any or all of Latin-
American countries.
THREAT OF WAR NOW MENACING THE WHOLE WORLD,
against which we are so frantically seeking defense, by
happy-thought neutrality legislation, prodigious expendi-
ture for armaments, and an avalanche of ill-informed, ill-
considered oratory, comes not in the least from the South.
The menace boils in Europe, with whose struggle we
have refused to show any but theoretical concern. When
that devil's cauldron boils over we shall, willy nilly, be
scalded with it — lucky if we are not steeped again, over
head-and-ears.
It is no new thing for Spain to threaten the peace of
Europe. Several times during the past two centuries it has
been a burning brand in that powder-magazine. Once
Theodore Roosevelt put it out by an undercover threat of
American intervention addressed to the German Kaiser.
In this connection I commend the discussion by Philip C.
Jessup, professor of International Law at Columbia Uni-
versity, of The Spanish Rebellion and International Law.
Illuminating and informative are the late Foreign Policy
Reports, Toward a New Pan-Americanism, and Spain:
Issues Behind the Conflict by Charles A. Thompson,
and European Diplomacy in the Spanish Crisis, by Vera
Micheles Dean.* Read these things with the din in your
ears, in desolated Spain, now as no country in recent times
"the cockpit of Europe," where thousands of men from
other countries, even outnumbering those of Spain her-
self, are bombing women and little children. . . .
Our very weather itself, like our commerce in normal
times, moves eastward. As for danger to our peace from
international strife — South America ablaze from Panama
to Terra del Fuego would threaten us immeasurably less
than would a general debacle in Europe such as now again
hangs by a hair.
Far be it from me to deprecate or despise any move or
declarations such as those at Buenos Aires, however in-
adequate or academic, toward peace and good understand-
ing anywhere, by individuals or groups or peoples, of any
nationality, race, color, condition or locality; but I am un-
able to see that it is any better — or in the circumstances
as good — moving north-and-south across parallels of lati-
tude than east-and-west across the meridians. I hereby
nominate that distinction as fit subject for the grim laugh-
ter of the gods.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS. January. 1937. $1.25. Foreign Policy Reports, voi
XII. Nos. 16, 18 and 20. 25 cents each. Postpaid of Survey Graphic.
Kirl.y in the .V. )'. World-Teltard*
He can't keep out of the Hockshop
98
SURVEY GRAPHIC
LIFE AND LETTERS
Prophets of War
by LEON WHIPPLE
HITLER OVER RUSSIA? by Ernst Henri. Translated by Michael
Davidson. Simon and Schuster. 340 pp. Price $2. SO.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, by John Langdon -Davies.
Dortd. Mead. 276 pp. Price $3.
Postpaid of Surrey Graphic
I HAVE BEEN READING ABOUT THE FUTURE. IT MAKES GRIM
work for the New Year: these prophets of doom foresee only
war and chaos. Ernst Henri, who wrote Hitler Over Europe,
marks with a cross the spot at the head of the Baltic about
fifty miles from Petrograd where the German naval, air, land
attack will strike first at Russia. Only the date is uncertain.
He traces the forces in Germany that will inevitably launch
this giant army of the North over the Baltic states to capture
the heart of old Russia, and a second in the South that will
annex Austria, destroy Czechoslovakia, gain Hungary as an
ally, overrun Rumania, screen off Turkey to protect its right
flank, roll through the Ukraine toward Kiev, and with Polish
armies of the center, close the pincers from north and south
on Moscow. . . . But, declares Mr. Henri who is pro-Russian,
this will never happen, for his measurements of Soviet
strength, weighted heavily by his sympathies, prove that the
new Russian war-machine will destroy the enemy, bogged
down under the weight of his own machines, and weakened
at home by revolution.
Here is staff literature on the grand scale, furnished out
with maps, lists of divisions, charts of metal, oil, food resources,
alignments of nations, stories of pro-Nazi leagues that are
being fostered along the proposed routes et cetera, et cetera.
It is plausible for it seems rich in facts and a knowledge of
political intrigue and economic powers that cannot be ap-
praised, especially by untutored Americans who have never
heard of Memel but may die there. Here is a piece of bril-
liant ratiocination, with the evil logic of a nightmare. It
should be read, for if these are the forces at work, and these
are the glittering illusions with which European demagogs,
army staffs, and editors dope themselves it is high time they
should be known to Americans, even to Kansas and Cali-
fornia. Foreknowledge of madness is wisdom.
It is possible to dismiss much of Henri's book as chess play
in a vacuum. It sounds like Plan XVII and the other futilities
of 1914. There are too many unknowns in this gigantic
calculus. The drive on Petrograd may stop anywhere along
that line of 360 miles from East Prussia as did Von Kluck's
pivot through Belgium within nine miles of Paris — some say
because of Gallieni's army in taxicabs. We know now that
general war is an explosion that reforms the geology of
human life. No man is wise enough to predict the upheavals,
strata, cleavages, or ruin of the new landscape. The pro-
claimed aims of statesmen are never realized; the grand
strategy becomes a series of accidents and alibis; the minor
tactics peter out in the justly named "fog of war." Who in
1914 designed to establish Communism in Russia? Or dicta-
torships in Europe? I did not happen to see one prediction
that foresaw Spain in 1936 as the borrowed battlefield of
rival ideologies. Even as I read Mr. Henri', news dispatches
told of Von Seeckt's death, and that Finland was becoming
doubtful about her share in this mystic crusade because
nearby Russian power outweighs German promise. The
fact is we moderns do not make war, war makes us.
Nevertheless, the opening at least of a war is planned by
what we humorously call human intelligence; somebody
touches off the explosive that social forces have generated.
Henri describes such forces, among them the need for Ger-
man industry to get raw materials and markets that demands
the Danubian drive; and, as he thinks, the failure of the
Nazis to solve the internal economic collapse that generates
a terrible determination to thrust out the surplus population
toward the East. To do something about these things is the
challenge of this sad book.
MR. LANGDON-DAVIES is A LONG RANGE PROPHET. HE STARTS
with the thesis that at our present stage of evolution reason
acting through democracy is inadequate to solve our prob-
lems. Therefore we are doomed to a period wherein blind
ruthless forces in totalitarian states will produce a regimenta-
tion of function that will have a cold and brutal efficiency
for survival. The ideal of the hive will win. From this
springboard he leaps down the generations with a series
of dismal prophecies: democracy will be dead by 1950; Amer-
ica will go fascist; England become powerless. But after
this Age of Stupidity, the Super-Biologic State will take
charge so that by A.D. 2000 every community will have a
controlled population . . . and by A.D. 4000 race problems will
be solved because we shall have a single short, coffee-colored
race. Mr. Langdon-Davies thus jumps beyond all criticism.
The book is a mixture of biology, economics, and politics,
parts of which are exciting fantasy, and other parts mostly
well-and-water. It may all be true, but we prefer prophets
with a dash of humility.
Concerning war Langdon-Davies believes it will not come
for five years because the governments cannot guarantee the
safety of their civilian populations against which all attacks
will be directed, and because capitalism fears destrucion in a
frightful debacle. But economic forces will inevitably pro-
duce the "holy war" between Germany and Japan on one
side, Russia on the other. The Popular Front, lead by France,
may check the dictatorships. Here we are given critiques of
the democracies, but no picture of the final explosion and
ruin. Reconstruction is a job for our unfortunate children.
These books of horror and annihilation have one good
effect. Faced with such a future, we strive desperately to
discover what is false in this picture? I am no prophet, but I
suggest that certain equations remain unsolved:
The fear of war may conquer the fear that makes war.
These very books are tracts against war. Mr. Langdon-Davies
has a bitter section, quoting the rules to be followed by the
English population when airplanes rain fire and gas on city
and countryside. He says that even if death and destruction
are only partial, there will be an inevitable paralysis of trans-
portation and technology. Now if foreknowledge of such
devastation is broadcast, do we not assume as an axiom for
war-making that peoples will choose suicide? Will not the
leaders, being human, have their personal fears? There is
some evidence, in recent years, that the European nations
have reached a stalemate of fear. Certainly events have
happened that would once have meant war, yet no man has
dared touch the button. The fury of arming rebuts this view,
but it offers a kind of desperate hope.
The second thesis accepted by the war prophets is that
internal bankruptcy of the fascist nations will force them to
go to war to escape overthrow. They will seize all they can
by bluff, but must finally gamble on war. That dilemma
might be met by international arrangements with respect to
colonies, raw materials, and markets. Such plans are in the
FEBRUARY 1937
99
air. But if nations are not sensible enough for such action,
there still remains the question: will the peoples of the dis-
integrating nations follow the dictators to war, or overthrow
the leaders who have brought on their collapse ? The revolt
that is certain to come as a consequence of war may come
before the war. The armament load in Germany has already
put the people under a war standard of living. They may
say war can be little worse than peace at this price, but pos-
sibly we will overthrow the power that forced us into these
straights. The propaganda machines may be powerful
enough to enforce the first decision. There is a chance they
may not.
The word "propaganda" brings a new vision into the
crystal. Its power was becoming manifest at the end of the
World War. Paper bullets began to count more than steel
ones. But since general staffs are always prepared for the
last war, they may neglect the armaments for propaganda.
They have not yet formed radio-broadcasting battalions — or
have they? The radio-broadcast, unknown in 1918, will be
part of the offensive, with a fury of false and true battle
claims, appeals, morale-breaking revelations. Counterblasts
of wave interference may be set up by technicians to protect
the home front so the very air will become a shrieking chaos
until no communication at all will be possible; or receiving-
sets made criminal things and that again would stop the
Ministry of Propaganda from sending out national propa-
ganda. But new waves and sets will surely come, as did gas
and tanks, and no one knows what this second war in the
air may mean for the very sanity of men. The Russians
already can carry some thousands of men in airplanes behind
the opposite line, and drop them equipped by parachutes.
There arises the fantastic notion that they might set up broad-
cast stations, and begin the counter-revoluion from within. . . .
It is clear we are talking about the human race going mad.
There is the evident assumption that the dictators will be
mad. For every past lesson proves they and their forms of
government will be ended. If they survive, they will fight
among themselves. The bottom false axiom is that these
mathematical-physical-^economic forces are the only elements
of life. If they are all, then the future does not matter any-
way. If they are not, the spirit of man will prevail against
self-destruction.
Sarah Cleghorn's Life
THREESCORE, by Sarah N. Cleghorn, with introduction by Robert
Frost. Smith & Haas. 310 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A FULL life, we say, a full life. What is that? Who of
us has lived a full life?
To read Sarah N. Cleghorn's Threescore is to know the
answer. The facts of her sympathy and her understanding
light a fire to signal. There is nothing fine to which she
fails to respond; there is no one at all, fine or not, who is
not regarded as respected potential. A full life. A life
whose attitudes have been brought under control, but only
as a first step. After that, by their own energy, they have
shouldered the sky.
To have compassed all this in a volume without com-
placence, as simply as energy derives from food, and to do
so with delicious humor, this is a great achievement. This
biography is always absorbing. Even for those whose social
or spiritual or human divinations are less than hers — and
most people's are — still the sheer joyousness, the jolly discern-
ments are enough. But she offers us the whole, the story of a
full life, exquisitely aware and in spite of its own misgivings,
profoundly able and wholly unafraid of any aspects of her
universe or in its denizens, known or unknown.
It is a book to lay in the hands of those eager for the
world, or worn by the world, filled with illusion or disillusion;
for all these are to her but at degrees of divination reached
by the likable pilgrims on a common trail.
Yet constantly she is obsessed by the conviction that life
is intended to be more. That MORE, that probable surprise,
probable abundance which life may hold, is always in her
mind as probability for everyone. The memorable unex-
pected strawberries of her childhood, keep reappearing,
shadowy, just over the edge of her awareness, as the pre-
dictable, waiting for all. Not in "possession," as we say — not
in anything, in fact, which the psychologists could discount;
but rather in the surprise withheld from us by ourselves in
general perception, in association, in routine, in personality,
in simple adventure, which we might claim and share. Again
and again she arrives at the same conclusion, in interracial
encounters, in anti-war realization, in the discovery of social
identities, in speculation on consciousness extended beyond
death, and to us she interprets these as deep experimental
richness, if only we were able to see more deeply into the
fuller living. Nothing seems to her a matter of mere struggle
or of mere moral conquest, but merely of the power to live
more deeply.
Without intention, the book becomes a kind of textbook
in sensitive approaches and reactions. If there were a glos-
sary of rich reactions, so that one might refer to and check
them off, not one would be missing from Sarah Cleghorn's
book of life.
One of the most touching of her references is to her "burn-
ing poems" — those of her poems written at white heat, on
some aspect of social life whose failure tore her. Of these,
one which went round the country and crossed the ocean,
was her simple quatrain which can not be quoted too often,
since by implication it is one of the greatest diatribes ever
written:
"The golf-course lies so near the mill
That almost any day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play."
The pictures of her family are sensitive and honest. Her
picture of Dorothy Canfield Fisher is in the extreme manner
of writing successfully of another self. Her poem, The Moon
and Emily, is one of the memorable poems of the world — for
above all else, she is a poet. Her story of her life at Brook-
wood and Manumit are flaming documentation. And one
of the bravest and loveliest things of her whole body of
writing is Chapter XX in this book.
It is a great thing to feel on closing a book, as I felt of
Sarah Cleghorn: "I must know this woman." But it is a
greater thing to feel, as I do feel: "Everyone must know this
book." For any college girl there could be no better guiding
star and benefaction than its gift.
Portage, Wis. ZONA GALE
America — for Quotation
THE RISE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, by Dr Sydney Strong.
Wilson-Erickson. 198 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid by Survey Graphic.
HERE are the trails along which Sydney Strong has blazed
his lifelong pursuit of spiritual and social democracy.
Yet there is not a word about himself, except that he, his
mother, his children and grandchildren claim Oberlin College
as their alma mater. And to Oberlin College as "the most
democratic institution on the continent," he dedicates this
volume. It consists of a rarely unique collection of the senti-
ments expressing the spirit of democracy which moved repre-
sentative Americans to speak and write as they are briefly
quoted in these pages. They are classified as the annals of
American democracy and as laws registering the free people's
will through the past three hundred years. The annalists in-
clude Columbus as he hailed the shore of the new world
from the deck^ his caravel and the Pilgrims as they signed
their pact before landing from the Mayflower; those who de-
clared the independence of America and framed and became
the founders of its constitutional democracy; those led by
Abraham Lincoln who preserved the Union and freed its soil
from slavery. American laws reach and range from the com-
100
SURVEY GRAPHIC
pact of the Pilgrim fathers to the peace pact proposed by our
Secretary of State to outlaw war following the futility of the
World War. Songs sung by the people from the old Bay
Psalm Book all the way down to the Star Spangled Banner,
My Country 'Tis of Thee and O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,
America, God Crown Thy Good with Brotherhood from Sea
to Shining Sea. Interspersed are negro spirituals and the lyrics
of American poets. Then follow wise sayings from the New
England primer, Benjamin Franklin's wit and wisdom and
from the presidential inaugurals of Washington and all his
successors to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Proph-
esies of American seers glowingly close the volume, Jonathan
Edwards and Thomas Paine, Jefferson and Lincoln, Whittier,
Walt Whitman and Edwin Markham vying with each other
in visions of democracy that has been and is yet to be. So
Scripture-like seem all these sayings to the author and pub-
lisher collating them that both think them to be the begin-
nings of a "bible of democracy" and even invite their readers
to add to its canonical contents as time goes on. Whether or
not this dream is destined to be realized, just now it best
characterizes and commends these most memorable and in-
spiring American sentiments, to view them as having been
gleaned from the grass roots of our free people's lives as they
spread from generation to generation over their colonies and
commonwealths. Thus they show democracy to be a living,
growing product of its native soil, a perennial growth, more
contemporary than historic, a dynamic spirit, transcending its
every temporary status.
Ravinia, 111. GRAHAM TAYLOR
Denmark — a Democracy
DENMARK — THE COOPERATIVE WAY. by Frederic C. Howe. Coward-
McCann, 277 pp. Price $2.50, postpaid of Survey Graphic.
DEMOCRACY IN DENMARK, by Josephine Goldmark and Alice G. Bran-
deis. National Home Library Foundation. 345 pp. Price 25 cents, postpaid
of Surrey Graphic.
DENMARK, more than any other nation, approaches
being not a capitalist society or a socialist republic,
but — what is something very different from either — a co-
operative commonwealth. Because of this novel national
phenomenon the eyes of American sociologists were turned
very much toward Denmark in the years before the World
War. Eclipsed by U.S.S.R. and other more exciting experi-
ments in human society Denmark now comes out of eclipse
again in Mr. Howe's book. In recent years we have been
curious about the cooperative movement in another country
— Sweden, where the consumer cooperatives have simplified
distribution by manufacturing their own articles of most
frequent use. Denmark over a period of fifty years has
achieved success in quite another form of cooperation, in
the cooperative export of her butter, bacon, and eggs. The
farmer cooperatives in Denmark, like the labor insurance
societies are not the children of capitalism, paternalism, or
totalitarianism, but of pure democracy. They rise from the
initiative of the people and are helped by government only
after they become strong. Mr. Howe gives an explicit char-
acterization of the Danes: "an unfettered people." "Den-
mark," he says, "is a justification of democracy." The Danish
farmer is intolerant of government regimentation. He is re-
sourceful and self-reliant and insists on organizing his rela-
tions in a scientific way.
In Denmark under the cooperative system each unit of
currency expended on food goes only one third to distributor
and processor and two thirds straight to the farmer. In the
United States the situation is just the reverse. It is more than
the reverse as to tenantry and freehold farming. Steadily
tenantry has declined in Denmark until it is now negligible.
Cooperatives in Denmark of course are not confined to agri-
culture. Nearly every type of cooperation exists, from bank
to cement factory. At present every family of four averages
membership in two cooperative societies.
Mr. Howe has given us a well rounded picture of this
healthy, scientific farming state. He has expanded his earlier
book and brought the long history of the Danish cooperative
movement down to date. As he is a keen journalist and ob-
server as well as an enthusiastic sociologist the book does not
suffer on that account. The student, of course, would have
been better pleased if the book were more fully documented
with footnotes and source material.
In Democracy in Denmark, Josephine Goldmark and Alice
Brandeis have now made the experience of Denmark in
applying scientific methods to cooperatives, rural education,
and social insurance, as accessible as Childs has made the
similar social-economic success of Sweden. What a pity that
this painstaking and readable primer is not supplemented by
statistical tables. HENRY GODDARD LEACH
Humanity in Action
THE RISE OF LIBERALISM, by Harold J. I.aski. Harper. 327 pp.
Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
INTELLIGENCE IN POLITICS, by Max Ascoli. Norton. 280 pp.
Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
HP HE first significance of these two books is that two writers
JL of undoubted power, two thinkers of wide learning and
shrewd insight, both of whom are sincerely concerned with
the future of liberalism and democracy, do not bother, either
of them, to tell us what they mean by either "democracy" or
"liberalism." I should have thought neither term to have
much meaning today which could be taken thus for granted,
except perhaps, '-'something different from either fascism or
communism."
And the failure of leaders of thought to make clear what
they meant by the central term of a book on either of such
themes (for Ascoli's proper title is Intellectuals in a Democ-
racy) is the clearest indication one can have, in a time of
transition, of the essential confusion of thought which has
been at once the curse and the salvation of a certain regime
which I shall not try to label, but which seems in fair part to
maintain still in the United States and Britain. That regime
is characterized by relative freedom to speech together with
relative license to business, by relative universalizing of the
vote together with relative impotence of the voter, by rela-
tive advance in the techniques of production together with
relative retardation in the techniques of dealing with the use
of such techniques (war) or the allocation of the product
(unemployment, poverty). That regime, recognized by both
our authors as in its way a glorious human adventure and a
noble forward step, has none the less carried in itself from
the beginning seeds of its own decay.
Laski sees these seeds in the over-liberation of the bourgeois
alone, and in their over-dominance; he tends, with charac-
teristically superb disregard for either precision of thinking
or bothersome detail, to identify "liberalism" with "bourgeois
capitalism uncontrolled." For such, the future is black, unless
its adherents can both first call forth, and then control, a state
of the fascist order. The virtues of the book, when the
author is saying things, are a style lucid and charming, and
really lovely work when, in detail, he is examining a particu-
lar writer against that writer's background. Its defects lie in
repeated word-jugglery, and in a sad confusion of the inter-
causal relations between events, men, and the ideas abroad.
A good enough book for anyone interested in the rise of
capitalism who has not already read a better book.
Ascoli reaches far beyond his topic. He observes humanity
in action under this regime of more or less letting folk alone.
His chapter on our American Constitution is magnificent:
showing (as I cannot here) how the extra-Constitutional
political parties, nation-wide, had so to diffuse issues that iron
political compulsion of the absolutist type became and remains
rather rarish. (Think that over!) Or how, when ideas
democratize, that must mean their dilution — because only he
who in sweat and labor lives an idea into individual realiza-
FEBRUARY 1937
101
tion to himself can keep it from becoming a worn, a common,
coin. But Ascoli's total theme is harder to grasp. For he
writes as Van Gogh paints, a stroke of scarlet beside a stroke
of blue — neither one of them wholly right, in itself — yet both
justified. Seen both and all together, all the exaggerations,
the partial truths, shape into a true, significant picture. The
difficulty is that whereas a painting is seen, or can be, at
once as one, a book cannot. You read a book in a time
sequence, and pages turn. Thus Ascoli often seems wrong
even where he is wise. Thus, and especially, he is hard to
read. But he is so -well worth thoughtful reading! I say
only this much more: he, too, sees seeds of decay in our
regime. He sees them in that the very diffusion of all ideas,
(parties, for instance) and the resulting political secrecy as
to who really has had freedom to act (business) and of where
real control lies (business and bosses), make so difficult any
intelligent channeling of those wasting floods, which keep
getting out of hand (though water can be so useful!) — to
wit: Those same bourgeois capitalists uncontrolled. One
might add also: certain floods in modern foreign relations.
Ascoli still believes that intelligence, if massed, can work
through to effective control. He does not say how. But he
leaves you, // you have patience to study his implications
sentence by sentence, with a key. His book differs from
Laski's in this: on only fourteen pages of Ascoli's book did 1
find words which did not have real meaning, along with a
style of distinction. This, although our tongue is not that
which he was born to.
I protest against Norton's counting of roman-numbered
pages into an arabic-numbered total. Ascoli's book has no
need of such artificial inflation, and such a practice would be
as indecently misleading as description of reprintings as "new
editions."
Columbia University Law School K. N. LLEWELLYN
Eternal Vigilance
THE FUTURE OF LIBERTY, by George Soule. Macmillan. 187 pp. Price
$2 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY, by Francis P. Miller. University of
North Carolina Press. 105 pp. Price $1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
ONE of the most soberly thoughtful of the younger
American prophets of a better day in The Future of
Liberty adds one more to his noteworthy collection of studies
on how to get into the future safely and wisely. Mr. Soule's
social wisdom grows apace with each new offering. And
here is a most timely analysis of the nature of liberty under
present economic conditions and of how to implement that
liberty into being. Mr. Soule goes beyond the familiar liberal
pattern of thought but he does not swallow whole the Marx-
ian formula. Rather he shows in broad terms the kind of
national approach to problems of economic reorganization
which must prevail if material abundance, large scale pro-
duction and personal integrity are to be reconciled each to
the other.
The issue is sharply joined between Mr. Soule and Walter
Lippmann whose articles currently appearing in the Atlantic
Monthly take a position as to the conditions of modern lib-
erty diametrically opposed to the views of Mr. Soule. Each
reader must decide for himself as between the two divergent
outlooks now vividly before us. But certainly no one can pre-
tend to voice an opinion on this urgent controversy who
does not study carefully the last half of this book. Debate on
the ways and means to personal freedom will not stop with
these two utterances. But Mr. Soule has done our country
a great service in sketching the case for economic and social
planning as a condition of freedom. He is not to be answered
by saying, as Mr. Lippmann does, that planning is practical
only for war. Such a counsel of pessimism and unimagina-
tive forecasting is surely not the last word. Mr. Lippmann
for journalistic reasons may immediately win the wider audi-
ence of the two. But Mr. Soule's position is likely in the long
view to gain wider and wider attention as the logic of plan-
ning looms above the economic anarchies of the oncoming
business boom.
By all means read this book, and by all means recommend
it to those who are sure to find in Mr. Lippmann's forth-
coming volume (of which his artists are presumably a part)
a rationalization of their timidity in the face of the trend
toward a more democratically controlled economy.
Mr. Miller's book is less pretentious although upon a re-
lated theme. And in a broad way it tends to support the same
outlook as does Mr. Soule. In his final chapter, A Bill of
Particulars, he proposes in specific terms some of the items
in a desirable national policy for the immediate future. His
ideas are not, however, specific enough to be a real program.
One senses the right sympathies but a certain hesitancy about
method. It is perhaps not unfair to call Mr. Miller more
wishful than realistic. ORDWAY TEAD
William James: Prometheus
THE THOUGHT AND CHARACTER OF WILLIAM JAMES, by Ralph
Barton Perry. Little. Brown. Two volumes. 1610 pp. Price $12 the set
postpaid of Survey Graphic.
E Pulitzer committee must have been saved all con-
-L fusion and hesitation when its choice fell upon Ralph
Barton Perry's work on William James. No one can doubt
the greatness of this book, and as for myself, I believe that
it will hold its place in American biographical and inter-
pretative literature as a permanent monument. I have read
every word of it; some sections have been read and re-read
many times, and I shall not have done with this book for
years to come;
Professor Perry has told us precisely what we needed to
know about William James as the founder of so-called Amer-
ican philosophy. As we came of age as a nation this philoso-
phy cried . out for a composer, a synthesizer, fames was
without doubt that man. Like the nation itself, he was a
composite character; his thought evolved as a dynamic syn-
thesis derived from British empiricism, German experimental-
ism, and French speculativeness. But, it was in the end
illuminated by a "slant ray of quick American light." As it
grew into definiteness and affirmativeness it developed what
James himself might have called the "American edge." Al-
though James was a scientific and philosophical cosmopolite,
he was at heart as integrally and natively American as was
Emerson or Whitman. Consequently every present and future
interpreter of American thought must come to terms with
William James, and Professor Perry has demonstrated both
why and how this is to be done.
And what does one need to know concerning this modern
Prometheus? Exactly what Professor Perry relates in his study.
Here we discover the extent to which William James was
influenced by that fateful context known as family. In the
case of William fames it becomes peculiarly pertinent to
understand his Calvinisic, philosopher-father and his esthetic
brother Henry. We learn also to understand the relation be-
tween William James as thinker and as organism, as mind
tormented by ill-health and deeply disturbed by emotional
frustrations. We learn how he himself learned; how he made
his choices and preferences, and how his biases were formed.
In short the title which Professor Perry has given his study is
both apt and accurate; he describes the growth of a man in
terms of the evolution of his thought and his character. The
reader sees with great clarity how James was influenced by
the thinkers of his time, how he chose his problems, how he
estimated his contemporaries, and in the end how he was
fulfilled as man^nd thinker. His limitations are not omitted,
but, curiously, tngse very defects seem to add to the lustre
of the man's achievement; they heighten his genius.
Obviously this is a study which cannot be satisfactorily
portrayed in a brief review. This is the story of a representa-
tive man told by the one person most admirably equipped to
102
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Returning Prosperity
by MARTHA GELLHORN
News Item: Thousands of unemployed are to be cut off the
WPA as an economy measure.
TOM STERLING OF CHICAGO CAME BACK FROM THH CCC CAMP;
he had been there thirteen months. His mother said go out
and look for work; every day for five months he went out
and asked for jobs, any kind of jobs, from door to door.
He came back every night and said he could find nothing.
"Well, she got tired of having me say no all the time so
she told me to get out of the house." I've got to eat, don't
I? I've got to have clothes. My name is Tom Sterling and
I want to live. I couldn't get anything from the relief be-
cause I'm not married. I earned |325 from the CCC camp
but I never saw that money, not a cent, it went to my mother;
but she doesn't want me around any more. I'm grown;
when people are starving let each man starve alone, let each
man fight and claw and shout for himself. Do they want me
to go out and hold up a store, says Tom Sterling, who is
sure that's the way he'll end. . . . Bill Morton is fifty;
he wants to live with his sister and her husband in Texas
but they are "half workers" he says, and have six children.
The family income is $6 a week; I can't eat their food, I
want to work, God, I've farmed all my life, why can't I
work; anything, anything. A man without a home or kin is
still alive, still has his hands, still can be hungry and lost and
frightened. What can I do, where can I turn: is there some-
thing wrong with me? ... "I have been thinking of writ-
ing you folks a letter for some time, but thought you might
be too busy to read letters from little boys": Russell Bart is
thirteen and has seven brothers and sisters, only one older —
a sister of fourteen. My daddy has a hard time, says Russell
Bart, making a living for us; he only works one day a week,
and there isn't enough for us all to eat. "Sometimes we get
pretty hungry, but I expect others do too." You know about
it, don't you: it's a strange thing for a child to know so much
about; about hunger and work, and knowing patiently about
all the others who sit down to nothing in the evenings. 1 . .
"My father would rather starve than accept relief; he is a
fruit peddler and he makes practically nothing. Mother is
sick; she has had one operation and she needs two more."
The two other children are too young to work. I am alone
here: I should be taking care of them. I have learned to be
a stenographer. I graduated from highschool three years ago;
in three years I have worked five months. Tell me what to
do: I am nineteen and alone. I am responsible for all of
them, the strongest of them. And I'm tired; I didn't know
growing up would be like this. If you'll only tell me, write
to Sara Golding in Topeka; if you write I'll know I'm still
alive, that perhaps it matters for me to go on. . . . There's
going to be a spring festival in our school; I ride there
every day — it's nine miles — on my horse Beauty and my
name is Myrtle Haines. We had measles, have you ever had
them? I need a light colored dress to wear to the festival
and a pair of white shoes, and of course you'll send them
won't you; before the end of March. Since there is still a
Santa Claus. . . . Could you lend me some money to finish
school with? I'll pay it back when I'm grown, when I've got
a job, when I'm an educated lady and earning a lot of money
in a city and having my hair marcelled every week. Here's
a stamped self-addressed envelope to send the money in,
please, affectionately, Clara Boyd, Texas. . . . Pauline Field
worked hard to get through highschool in three years: but
now, her family have no more money and she can't finish
her course. College, college, the Elysian Fields, the prom-
ised land: I must get to college. I tried borrowing from the
banks but I am sixteen and I have nothing to offer as secu-
rity. I want to go on, learn, be free, work, grow up, breathe.
. . . Max Harden is twenty-two and married, by trade a
painter and paper hanger. He used to work for his rent;
furnished room and a gas ring to cook on. But now there is
no work; the landladies want money, not odd jobs done. "I
am constantly having to move." I want to be quiet for a
month. I want to stay still and not come home from walking
around knocking on doors, to find my own door closed
against me. I want a home. Let me work for a roof; let me
work to get a place for my wife; what kind of a man is it
who can't keep a roof over his wife's head? . . . "Please
keep this letter a secret, because if anyone knew I had writ-
ten it they would think I was a beggar." I don't want to be
a beggar: I'm Sam Howard and fourteen and at school. "I
am shunned and made fun of on account of my clothes."
My father makes 50 cents a day. Even if you don't write me
don't tell anyone: I'm ashamed and frightened, but I want
to have a suit to wear so that I can take part in the oratorical
contest in my school, and grow up and make fine speeches
and be a congressman from Missouri. . . . Lucy Marks is
twenty-three; something has happened to her but she doesn't
know what. An infection; three operations; the wounds don't
heal and now her back is swelling again and she can't move.
The doctor sent me home from the hospital because I should
have healed; and so I lie on my bed and wait. "I am suffer-
ing and don't want to die so won't you have mercy and
help me?" . . . For twenty-five years Mary Cross worked in
a great store in Philadelphia but now she has been laid off.
She is forty years old and alone. She would take anything;
a "place in a private home" which is a slow way of saying
servant. "When a woman gets to be forty, is there no more
work for her? Does she have to kill herself?" . .
perform the task. As I re-read what has been written above it
appears that I may be describing an orthodox biography.
This is far from the fact. Professor Perry has actually invented
a method adapted to his task. The story which he tells is not
really "told" at all in the usual sense: he allows the story to
be told by the deft use of that most revealing sample of all
literatures, namely letters. He uses the method which is called
in cinematography, I believe, the "flash-back" — a method
which allows the reader to follow a subject of interest with-
out being held to strict chronology. Professor Perry's sense of
value, his philosophical and literary proficiency, and his au-
dacity of method have combined to give us the first clear
and penetrating picture of the great American thinker who
gave "seriousness without humbug, rationality without dilet-
tantism, daily courage without rudeness" first to Harvard
University and then to American life. EDUARD C. LINDEMAN
MARK HOPKINS, by J. H. Denison. Scribner's. 327 pp. Price $3 post-
paid of Survey Graphic.
T3 Y emphasizing the social interpretation of Christianity,
-•-' Mark Hopkins tried to bridge the gap which Darwin
opened in ethics and morals. As president of Williams Col-
lege he profoundly affected college teaching and administra-
tion.
FEBRUARY 1937
103
A new approach to the problems
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IT HAPPENED IN WILKES-BARRE
(Continued from page 68)
lln
A JURY FOUND EMERSON JENNINGS GUILTY. HUT NO MATTER
what the overlapping nuances of persuasion, primarily
I think Jennings was found guilty because he was a
Doremus Jessup, "the prime eccentric" of Wilkes-Barre.
His bent for reform; his boldness in attacking the court-
house hierarchy almost singlehanded; his stubborn refusal
to give up his right to free speech; his quoting of fiery
passages from Thomas Jefferson; and his open denuncia-
tion of tyranny of every sort (to people who'd never
exactly thought of county judges or coal companies or
water companies as tyrants) — these facts, and not the
evidence, were certainly what damned him in the minds
of a Luzerne County jury which was selected largely from
a list of veniremen known to the courthouse.
Jennings is not a communist, nor a member of any
organized radical group. He is a lone bourgeois re-
former, perhaps erratic, and sometimes intemperate in
his speech, a self-appointed friend of the inarticulate
foreign population that the anthracite industry encour-
aged to come into the valley when the Irish and Welsh
miners had got up in the world. A paradoxical busi-
ness man, he moved among little shopkeepers, and mining
folk, and the unemployed, and small home owners, and
the puzzled young intelligentsia of the town (far from
the superficial gaiety of the crowd celebrated in John
O'Hara's cynical novel, Appointment in Samarra, a fic-
tional picture of one stratum of life in the anthracite
towns). He was a thorn in the side of the Haves; a
champion of the Havenots.
The courts of Pennsylvania which he mistrusts, and
not without reason, are now his only resort. The defense
is moving for a new trial or, failing that, an appeal.
Francis Biddle, noted attorney of Philadelphia, has
joined the defense. Struck by the plight of the forlorn
Harris, Dudley Field Malone has volunteered to assist
Attorney Ernest Herskowitz of Wilkes-Barre in defend-
ing Harris. I do not know what the future strategy of
the defense will be, but I am convinced that Jennings
cannot have a thoroughly unprejudiced hearing in the
Luzerne County courthouse. Nearly every one in Wilkes-
Barre who told me that he thought Jennings was inno-
cent, refused to be quoted. Life has come to a pretty pass
in a great Commonwealth when decent citizens are thus
afraid to speak out — when Pennsylvania justice, as well
as Emerson Jennings, awaits a new trial. Can the state
encourage repression, condone the building up of evi-
dence after an arrest, tolerate a trial by prejudice?
It happened in Wilkes-Barre, and ironically it hap-
pened to the very man Doremus Jessup might have been.
"Doremus," demanded Tasbrough (in It Can't Happen
Here), "why don't you ta\e a tumble to yourself? All
these years you've had a lot oj fun criticizing — always
being agin' the government — kidding everybody — posing
as such a liberal that you'll stand for all these subversive
elements. Time for you to quit playing tag with crazy
ideas and cotoe in and join the family. These are serious
times — maybe twenty-eight million on relief, and begin-
ning to get ugly. I'll never get over being sore at you for
taking the side of the strikers when those thugs were
trying to ruin my whole business. . . ."
advertistmtnti please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
104
WHO WANTS PEACE?
(Continued from page 62)
love of the status quo; churchgoers are approached through
their desire for the better-than-what-is. And with the labor
unions it emphasizes the probability of the loss of civil rights
and enforced mobilization of labor power in case of war,
drawing attention to the universal draft plan of the army.
All of the peace societies do not agree with this strategy.
The Women's International League does not believe that
the time is ripe to support political candidates. It also pre-
sents their records, but makes its political fights on issues
rather than men, believing the movement must be stronger
before that will be effective. The W.I.L. is also opposed to anti-
war profits legislation, except in a very careful form. They
fear attempts to conscript capital would certainly be used as a
means of conscripting labor. They are against any conscription.
The N.C.P.W., unlike the W.I.L., has no individual mem-
bership, but is composed of delegates from twenty organiza-
tions, and collaborates with some thirteen more. Frederick
Libby, who is certainly one of the most important figures
in the whole peace movement, was its founder and is its ex-
ecutive secretary. He is a small, sweet-voiced, optimistic
man, one of the best money raisers in the peace mo\ement,
and the hero of his associates. His organization has branch
offices in four cities and maintains six field stations and a
permanent representative at Geneva. It has no endowment,
hut raises $160,000 a year from subscriptions, and needs a
quarter of a million. It has sixty persons on its paid staff, but
they work for love more than for money. Opal Gooden,
a young woman who has put on a live-wire political cam-
paign in Wisconsin, gets $85 a month for activities which
apparently engross about fifteen hours a day of her time.
The membership of the organization is very comprehensive.
It includes the American Association of University Women,
the American Federation of Teachers, the American Friends
Service Committee, and many other church groups and
women's organizations. Next to Mr. Libby its most effective
worker is probably Mrs. Florence Brewer Boeckel, who
heads the educational department, and is described by her
colleagues in and out of this particular organization as one
of the best heads in the whole movement.
Dorothy Detzer, the executive secretary of the Women's
International League, is another Washington personality
who is already a legend. She came to the peace movement
from the Society of Friends and from feeding war-starved
children in Vienna. She is attractive, keen, popular, and
enormously well informed. The Nation in 1935 named her
amongst the distinguished Americans of the year for "per-
suading, almost single-handed, the progressive Senate leaders
to demand an inquiry into the arms trade." She knows so
much about treaties, policies, and the background of Europe
and South America that she is continually consulted by
members of Congress. She is a tactful, expert lobbyist.
The Emergency Peace Campaign is unique in that it was
organized for two years only and presumably will end in
1938. The recipient of a few large gifts, totalling $350,000,
its object, like that of the National Peace Conference, has
been to correlate the work of the many peace organizations
and put pep into the peace movement by staging a great
many mass meetings, and in general "waking up the coun-
try." Its object is succinctly expressed as "keeping America
out of war." Meaning a European war which most pacifists
fear is imminent.
The peace societies lock and interlock. The Women's In-
ternational League belongs to the National Peace Confer-
ence, the League Against War and Fascism, and the Emer-
gency Peace Campaign. The National Council for the Pre-
vention of War, composed of delegates from other organiza-
tions, is again affiliated with the E.P.C. and the N.P.C.
Some organizations, like Public Action, use the information
of the more pretentious peace societies to mobilize pressure
on Congress in an emergency when certain legislation af-
fecting defense or neutrality bills is up. World Peaceways,
Inc. is advertising peace with the high pressure salesmanship
of the business world, using the services of experts on public
relations who have previously "put over" rayon and tooth-
pastes. They go out for peace articles in popular publications
and peace advertisements, amongst the most notable of which
were Bruce Barton's series against war, called Advertising
Hell. They again use the services, reports, and work of
other peace societies. The People's Mandate, another
women's group, is the creation of the Women's International
League, outgrew it, and set up for itself, has an impressive
list of prominent names to sponsor it, demands disarmament
here and abroad, and is concentrating on getting up enor-
mous petitions to indicate peace support and exert pressure
on politicians. These organizations work together, occasion-
ally are affiliated, interlock at one point and diverge at an-
other, and are most confusing for the lay student to follow.
And with all this activity, the peace movement is poor.
The total direct expenditures for the cause of national and
international peace will hardly add up to $2 million a year,
and of this income more than half comes from endowments
which support the Carnegie Endowment, the Church Peace
Union, and the American Peace Society, none of which
can be counted as active political propagandists.
The Carnegie Endowment
THE IDEA THAT WARS ARE DUE TO MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND
that better knowledge of other nations will help abolish
war not only dominates the good will groups of the peace
societies but is apparently shared by the Carnegie Endow-
ment, which is the only organization in America with an
impressive annual income to spend promoting peace. Last
year it had $864,491.74.
The activist groups often speak of the endowment with
a certain irritation, accusing it of being "academic." Al-
though they maintain an attitude of decent respect, officials
of the National Council for the Prevention of War, the
Women's International League, the American League Against
War and Fascism, the League of Nations Association, and
the National Peace Conference, which together represent
the bulk of the active peace movement, express the doubt
whether the endowment is really fulfilling the demands of
its founder, who in 1910 earmarked the income from $10
million worth of first mortgage bonds "to hasten the aboli-
tion of war, the foulest blot on our civilization." These critics
are fond of quoting Mr. Carnegie's letter in which he laid
down the functions of the endowment, instructing his
trustees that "when war is abolished, please consider what is
the next most degrading evil." The critics of the foundation
say that this means that Mr. Carnegie believed that war could
be stopped without abolishing all the evil in the world, and
they like to contrast it with the statement of Dr. Nicholas
Murray Butler, the president of the endowment, who said:
"Peace is not an ideal at all; it is a state dependent upon
the achievement of ideals. The ideal itself is human liberty,
justice, and the honorable conduct of an orderly and humane
society . . . without this there is no peace, but only a rule
of force until liberty and justice revolt against it in search
of peace."
To the soldiers of the Lord who are quite sure they know
how to get peace — though they are by no means agreed —
this is interpreted as indicating that the Carnegie Endow-
ment regards itself as an eternal organization to function
until liberty, justice and the honorable conduct of an orderly
and humane society are universally established. And the
active peace societies think that we have to stop war before
that millennium. (Continued on page 106)
105
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(Continued from page 105)
The Carnegie Endowment has three di visions: the divi-
sion of intercourse and education; of international law; and
of economics and history which, together, take the bulk of the
income. The first two divisions are the ones which are the
most criticized by the peace societies organized for political
action. These like to remark that the contribution to world
peace of the first department has consisted of distributing
such books as Hudson's Green Mansions, Sewell's Black
Beauty and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Hamlet,
in non-English-speaking countries, and of cataloguing the
Vatican Library — the assumption being the exploded one,
that wars arise from insufficient appreciation of each other's
cultures. The Carnegie Endowment has appropriated con-
siderable sums for the diffusion of knowledge and under-
standing of legal, cultural and diplomatic problems in Amer-
ica and abroad. It has spent thousands of dollars to have
a history of American-Canadian relations compiled; and an
economic and social history of the World War. It has given
money in sums of from $500 to $5000 to such educational
research organizations as the Foreign Policy Association, the
Library Association, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the In-
stitute of Public Affairs, and various institutes on world
affairs connected with American universities. It has also con-
tributed to the Institute of Pacific Relations and to the
American-Japan Council.
It is a world-wide organization, with contacts with leaders
of opinion in many lands. And despite its critics, its re-
searches have, during the past twenty years, profoundly in-
fluenced public opinion and government action. Dr. Butler
has more than once stood out as one of the few sane and
powerful personalities shaping American policy. Professor
James T. Shotwell has consistently made creative contribu-
tions to American public thinking. Insofar as the United
States is intelligently aware of the problems of other nations,
of the necessities for economic adjustments, of the inadequacy
of international machinery for peaceful adjustments of dis-
putes, of the good points and bad points of existing ap-
paratus, the Carnegie Endowment can justly claim to have
made a distinguished contribution, together with the For-
eign Policy Association and the Council on Foreign Rela-
tions. These organizations have insisted that America
abandon her traditional international timidity and rise to the
responsibilities of her world position. In this they are not
wholly in line with the tendency of the avowedly pacifist
societies who are fundamentally dominated by the desire
to keep out of war.
The National Pence Conference
THE POLITICAL ACTION OF THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT HA'
thus far been limited to a cautious financial support of oth
active peace organizations and particularly of the National
Peace Conference which became active two years ago as a
holding company for some thirty-eight societies. The Na-
tional Peace Conference must, indeed, be regarded as the
most constructive attempt yet made to achieve unity of
program.
It was actually formed five years ago. It received fresh
impetus from the failure of the Disarmament Conference in
Geneva when, as one of its secretaries said, "We felt that
we had failed and must stan again at the A.B.C.'s." Dr.
Butler, returning from Europe, admitted, "We have spent
millions and are still not ahead of 1914. We must change our
tactics somehow." Dr. Butler consulted with the heads of
some of the irRjfe practical right-wing peace organizations, and
in September 1935 the Columbia Conference was held with
a view of showing the Carnegie Endowment what some of
the other peace societies were doing. The Carnegie Endow-
ment agreed then to finance a new National Peace Con-
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
106
ference, thus entering for the first time into active collabora-
tion with other peace organizations.
THE NATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE CANNOT BE DESCRIBED
as a pure pacifist organization. Among its thirty-eight affili-
ated societies are not only the American Friends Service
Committee, the Church Peace Union, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, the Committee on Militarism in Education,
World Peace Foundation, World Peaceways, Inc., and the
two very active associations — the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom and the National Council for
the Prevention of War — but it has been joined by the Na-
tional Board of the Y.M.C.A., the American Association
of University Women, the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, the Peace Commission of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, the National Board of the Y.W.C.A. and other
societies which are devoted to human betterment.
The object of the conference is to consolidate a program
on which the greatest possible number of men of good will
can agree and to use every possible agency to back that pro-
gram. The steering committee was not formed without con-
siderable dissension. Walter Van Kirk was finally agreed
upon as director. He had been for a long time secretary of the
Commission on International Justice and Goodwill of the
Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America; and he
and William Stone of the Foreign Policy Association were
perhaps the only people acceptable to all groups. The Na-
tional Peace Conference, which has an office at 8 West 40
Street, New York, has a full conference of the president and
the secretaries of the thirty-eight organizations, a steering
committee which meets the first Monday in the month in
New York and a strategy committee which meets once a
month in Washington. Its membership, as we have seen, con-
sists of peace societies, fact-finding organizations, and so-
cieties which have peace committees. It has excellent com-
mittees which draw in as experts people not necessarily in
the peace movement.
It has an economic committee which has attempted to re-
duce the findings on the economic causes of war by econom-
ists of every school. It also has a neutrality committee and a
committee on disarmament. Its president is Nevin Sayre.
Obviously the National Peace Conference cannot present
a unanimous program on all points. But it has agreed on a
minimum program acceptable to all its affiliates.
It stands firmly behind Secretary Hull's reciprocal trade
treaties in the belief that war tensions can be alleviated by
lessening the barriers to trade and raising the standards of
living in all countries. Any attempt of interests to change the
reciprocal trade agreements in the new Congress will confront
organized opposition from the considerable membership of
the National Peace Conference, and it is entirely probable that
the universal support which the peace societies have given to
Secretary Hull's policies accounts, in part, for the quite aston-
ishing prestige which the 1936 election campaign revealed
him to hold. The National Peace Conference favors also the
stabilization of international currencies and the final settle-
ment, one way or the other, of war debts.
It demands a defense policy, insisting that there shall be a
single government policy, made by elected representatives of
the people, and not, as there now is, a separate naval policy,
which at many points is in direct contradiction to that of the
State Department. It wishes the army and navy to be deprived
of policy-forming powers. And it wishes to confine the inter-
pretation of defense to the protection of our own soil from
invasion and the fulfillment of our obligations under the Kel-
logg Pact. What the fulfillment of diese obligations implies
is not indicated. Internationally it stands for the reduction of
armaments.
It favors the extension of the Good Neighbor policy to Eu-
rope and the East, the support of non-intervention, and judi-
(Continued on page 108)
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(Continued from page 107)
cial settlements. It reaffirms the maintenance of civil liber
and deplores racial discrimination in immigration.
Peace by Neutrality
THE NATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE H\S AGREED THAT ITS M
bers should support a neutrality law, but they are
agreed as to what kind of law is most desirable. 1
differences between them are chiefly differences of empha
Outstanding spokesmen for the Carnegie Endowmi
the League of Nations Association, and some of
officials of such fact-finding organizations as the Fore
Policy Association, believe that it is chimerical and unrea
tic to encourage faith in the United States maintaining isi
tion and neutrality in a warring world. But the majority
the active peace propagandists are concentrating now 01
mandatory neutrality bill designed to keep America out
war if and when war occurs. The attitude of the left grov
organized in the League Against War and Fascism, of wh
more later, is not at all clear on this issue, for, although tl
would seek to isolate the United States from any internatio
wars, their stand toward civil wars is different, and in Sp
it is already being demonstrated that civil warfare may at ;
moment become international.
The more uncompromisingly pacifist wing of the Natio
Peace Conference wants the neutrality law so written tha
is mandatory on the President to forbid the shipment of an
munitions, basic raw materials, and the extension of cre(
and loans to all belligerents, and the Women's Internatio
League for Peace and Freedom, the National Council for
Prevention of War and practically all of the smaller orga
zations will undoubtedly bring pressure on Congress for si
legislation. They are already mobilizing a very effective pro
ganda, designed to appeal to all possible groups, but es
cially to youth, women, farmers, labor and the churches.
The peace societies pushing for this legislation insist t
the neutrality laws are misnamed. They say that their me
bers are, of course, not in spirit neutral as between an
gressor and his victim. They prefer to call the present 1
and the more radical one which is proposed, embargo lej;
lation. To the argument that you cannot let a fascist nati
overrun the world they reply that the moment that Amer
gets into a war for however holy a purpose, fascism will ij
facto be established in the United States, that is to say, f
speech will be prohibited, conscription introduced and I
whole of industry mobilized on a fascist basis. The industi
mobilization plan of the War Department which foresee;
completely mobilized economy in case of war, is being u;
by these organizations to show the trade unions what v
will mean to them.
The more conservative bodies who favor permissive
trality insist that the world is a single, economic and colic
ive unit and that it is impossible to isolate any country in I
long run. They insist that if a nation adopts the policy of s
pending its major intercourse with any country which is t
victim of aggression — which on the one side is what t
embargo policy might amount to — we begin to disorgani
world trade and foster national autarchy even in time
peace and thus increase the economic strains and dislocatic
which lead to war. They go further and say that an atterr
completely to isolate the United States if the rest of the woi
were at war, would also lead to fascism, that is, to compli
dictatorship over the whole of economic life. The idea of wii
drawal is, they say, defeatist and irresponsible.
In the last annual report of the directors of the Carnej
Endowme%, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler summed up tl
view of the situation thus: "The one certain way for t
United States to keep out of international war is to join
preventing it." Dr. Butler insists that the Pact of Paris oug
to be implemented and that its breach should be consider
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
108
an act of broken faith by the people of the United States
who "cannot be neutral unless they propose at the same time
to be immoral."
"Neutrality with morality," he says, "involves action to
indicate recognition of the fact that an international pledge
has been broken and international confidence to that extent
destroyed. . . . They must require their government to move
forward constructively in cooperation with all other civilized
nations, to protect the peace of all and increase the prosperity
of all."
The opponents of mandatory neutrality insist that the
effect of attempting to "quarantine war" would, if it were uni-
versally accepted, simply mean that the small and unarmed
nations of the earth would become the prey of powerful
aggressors.
They insist further that mandatory neutrality is not a real-
istic program, that it would be circumvented by bootleggers
selling to warring countries via neutrals and if they wished
to do so they might even point out that in the same week
in which public opinion was mobilized against an open ship-
per of airplanes to Spain no attention was paid to other ship-
pers of planes to Le Havre in France, although the destina-
tion of the two shipments was unquestionably the same.
The Effect of the Nye Report
IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT ONE POLICY HAS LED TO ANOTHER.
The campaign for mandatory neutrality grew out of the
revelations of the Nye munitions investigation, and the Nye
munitions investigation was the result of a campaign waged
by the peace societies and most especially by the Women's
International League and its able secretary, Dorothy Detzer.
The Nye investigation convinced most of the peace socie-
ties— and a great many editors, journalists, Congressmen and
Senators — that we got into the last war by our attempt to
maintain a booming war trade and protect our investments.
Ergo, the way to keep out of the next war is to withdraw
trade and credits from belligerents and therefore have noth-
ing to fight for.
Only another war will test whether the experience of one
crisis can be used for formulating a water-tight policy to deal
with another crisis. But it is of profound significance that
this wing of the peace movement which so long fought up-
stream for world cooperation to prevent war now finds some
of its strongest supporters amongst the perennial isolationists,
once their intrepid enemies, in the House and in the Senate.
The Leftist Tendency
ANOTHER IMPORTANT SHIFT IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT HAS BEEN
caused by the emergence of a relatively new organization,
and federation of organizations: The League Against War
and Fascism.
The rise of fascism in Central Europe and the threat of its
expansion, introduced new alignments into the peace move-
ment all over the world and also here. Until 1933 the Ameri-
can peace movement was essentially middle class, and the mid-
dle class mentality still dominates a large part of it. But the
rise of fascism convinced left wing labor and radical groups
everywhere that the immediate war menace was from des-
perate capitalism, which they interpreted fascism to be. "Fas-
cism," they define as "the destruction of the democratic
process by violence for the sake of preserving profits."
In the League Against War and Fascism they have, there-
fore, organized a phase of Popular Front activity agreed upon
as part of the present policy of the Third International. Their
object is to fight every sign of fascism at home, to back every
movement for strengthening the power of the workers and to
identify war as the instrument of a desperate capitalism.
The predominant theory of the league is socialist. But they,
again, in an effort to widen their front, have established a
minimum program to appeal to larger groups than avowed
socialists or communists. (Continued on page 110)
C. B. S. Evans,
M.D., F.A.M.A..
Member White
House Conference
Committee on
Maternal Care,
Washington — I n -
trodiiction by R.
W. Holmes. M.D.,
F.A.C.S., Profes-
sor of Obstetrics, North-
western University Med-
ical School — Prefatory
and other notes by Nor-
man Halre.Ch.M.. M.B.,
Specializing Obstetri-
cian, Gynecologist and
Sexologist, London,
England.
including
charts of sex organs with
detailed explanations
By ROBERT L. DICKINSON, M.D., F.A.C.S., Senior
Gynecologist and Obstetrician, Brooklyn Hospital.
0-WAY
UGUIDE:
CONTENTS
Bride and Groom
Sexual Overtures
First Sexual Contact
Frequency of Sexual Relations
The Sexual Cycle
Sexual Response in Men and Wo-
men: Timing
The Cold Wife— Frigidity
Mental, Psychic and Physical Bar-
riers
Effects of Menstruation
Effects of Physical Development
Effects of Early Parental Training
The Clumsy Husband
Pseudo-Frigidity
Pseudo- Response
Sexual Underde velop men t
The Pleasure -motif in Sex
The Unsatisfied Wife
Effect upon Nerves
Fear of Pregnancy
The Acquiescent Wife
True and Faise Sexual Response
Happily Managing the Sex Act
Problems of Orgasm
The Satisfaction of Normal Sexual
Appetite
The Oversexed Wife
Married Courtship
the
Making Desires Known via
Special Language of Sex
Tactics the Husband Should Use
Tactics the Wife Should Use
Helpful Preliminaries to Sexual
Union
The Sensual Appeal; the Spiritual
Appeal
Secondary Sexual Centers
The Perfect Physical
Expression of Love
Positions in Intercourse : Factors
in Determining Choice
Two Types of Orgasm in Women
Producing Simultaneous Climax
The Mechanical Principles of Sex
Union
Sexual Stimulation
Sexual Adjustment
COMMENTS
"This book is one of the clearest
and most sensible expositions of the
ars amandi. . . . The importance of
the wife's reaching an orgasm and
the technique of insuring that results
are emphasized."
— Quarterly Review of Biology
"Begins with a description of the
nervousness of the young bride on
the first night of marriage, and ends
with an account of the positions in
which coitus may take place."
— Lancet (leading English
medical journal)
"Deals with the physical and psycho-
logical problems of coitus. . . . Can
be freely recommended to patients
who require guidance in their marital
life. ... It would certainly help men
to understand the 'frigid wife'."
— General Practice
"The frank, yet delicate, handling of
the subject makes the manual one
that a physician may safely suggest."
— Amer. Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynecology
"Evans gives all the advice that
anybody needs."
— Journal of the Amer.
Medical Ass'n*
* The membership of the American Medical
Association consists of approximately 100.000
physicians.
THE CHARTS
Female Sex Organs, Side View • Female Genital Parts • Male Sex
The Internal Sex Organs • The Organs. Side View • Male Sex Or-
External Sex Organs • Female Sex gans. Front View • Male Repro-
Organs, Front View • Entrance to ductive Cell, Front and Side Views.
(Detailed explanations accompany charts.)
"From a very
large clinical ex-
perience I have
come to the con-
clusion that prob-
ably not one in
five men knows how
to perform thesex-
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I
I
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Mail coupon to your bookseller or to
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Enclosed please find $1.95 for which please send prepaid
SEX PRACTICE IN MARRIAGE for FREE INSPEC-
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I
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(In answering advertisements please mention STRVKY GRAPHIC)
109
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(Continued from page 109)
It is important to draw the distinction between the philoso-
phies of the left wing organizations and those of the older
societies, even though their programs overlap at certain points.
The national peace movement believes that the world can be
organized for peace without eliminating the profit system.
The left wingers argue that during boom periods profits
increase faster than other forms of income and go largely
to the rich who re-invest them instead of spending them for
consumers' goods. As a result, producer power grows faster
than consumers' income and the producers attempt to find
outlets abroad, thus creating cut throat competition on the
international market, which competition eventually results in
war. The greatest cause of war, therefore, lies in the organiza-
tion of society on a profit basis.
The American Communist Party has joined the League
Against War and Fascism, but it is not dominated by com-
munists. Its secretary, Paul Reid, is a devout Quaker.
The organization grew out of the Amsterdam Anti-War
Congress, called by Henri Barbusse in August 1932. The
American delegates, on their return, set up the American
Committee for Struggle Against War, with sixty members.
It organized a United States Congress Against War in Sep-
tember 1933, called over the signatures of Sherwood Ander-
son, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. 2600 delegates
who attended established the American League Against War
and Fascism. The 1935 Congress, with 2070 delegates claimed
to represent three and a quarter million people. It is an inter-
national organization. Affiliated with it in this country are
200 organizations including lelt wing church bodies and some
trade unions. Its chairman is Harry F. Ward. Earl Browder
is one of the vice-chairmen. Roger Baldwin is on the execu-
tive committee. It has both individual members and affili-
ated organizations and is one of the fastest growing anti-
war organizations in the country. 3000 members have joined
since January 1936, without any membership drive. Its pub-
lication Fight, a pro-labor, anti-fascist magazine, lively, well
written and well edited, has a larger paid circulation than the
periodicals of all other anti-war and peace organizations com-
bined.
It is the only anti-war organization in the United States to
advocate direct economic action such as the labor strike to
prevent preparation for war. Its ten point program demands
the stoppage of the manufacture and shipment of war sup-
plies, the exposure of United States war preparations, the
abolishing of military training of youth, mandatory neutrality,
opposition to American imperialism with all help for colonial
struggles for freedom, the exposure of fascism and potent
fascism, the defense of strikers, fight against racial disc1
ination and the defense of citizenship rights of America1
diers and sailors.
The dilemma of the League Against War and Fascism is
that it does not apparently believe that any existing democracy
is at a stage where it can effectively fight fascism, since it be-
lieves that fascist forces are already active in all the democra-
cies. Only democracies organized along Popular Front lines
will be reliable. Yet a world crisis is likely to come before
America is socially reorganized. Despite its advocacy of man-
datory neutrality in international wars, were an international
war to break out in which, for instance, Germany and Japan
were aligned against Russia, it is very doubtful whether the
organization's neutrality would hold.
Certainly in civil wars, wherever they may occur, the
League Against War and Fascism is unlikely to be neutral.
It is not neutral in the current Spanish war. Its attitude is that
"strict newality in wars between nations is a settled policy
. . . but neutrality in a civil war is another matter. . . . We
oppose the proposed amendments to the neutrality act to pre-
vent the recognized Spanish government . . . from purchas-
ing supplies in the American market . . . ."
please mention SI'RVIY GRAPHIC)
110
But there is much reason to fear that the next international
war may be merely an extension of a civil war. Indeed, the
Spanish struggle is already international warfare. Would
the league assume a neutral position, if it spread outside the
Spanish frontiers? It is difficult to envisage where such neu-
trality would begin or end.
The organization campaigns against Hearst, regarded as
America's Number One fascist agitator; constantly protests
against Italy and Germany; opposes any concessions what-
ever, economic or otherwise, to fascist states; its members
testified against the Vigilantes in California; they fought par-
ticipation of America in the Olympic Games and they tele-
graphed Luther, the German Ambassador in Washington,
demanding the withdrawal of German troops from Spanish
soil. They did not, of course, protest against the International
Legion, which is fighting on the side of the Loyalists.
The Binding Thread
WHAT is THE CONCLUSION? DOES ANYTHING BIND TOGETHER
the big-wigs of the Carnegie Endowment and the communist
members of the League Against War and Fascism, the paci-
fists of the Women's Peace Union and Nicholas Murray But-
ler? Can the National Council for the Prevention of War,
with its "middle of the road" program, see at any point eye
to eye with the League Against War and Fascism, with its
sympathy for some forms of civil strife?
And has anything been achieved?
The answer to both questions is yes. There are points at
which unity has been achieved, not without a considerable
influence on public opinion and public policy. Investigations
which the peace societies, separately and together, have made
into the economic causes of war; the Chatham House report
of the Carnegie Endowment, in which economists of many
colorations agreed that trade stoppages and anarchic curren-
cies were contributing causes of war; revelations that the
Good Neighbor Policy of Mr. Hull is not the policy of the
United States Navy, and that munitions interests play a cyni-
cal game of furnishing fodder to both sides; and the convic-
tion, however confused, that war and social and economic
injustice are companions, have all had repercussions far be-
yond the members of the peace societies and have influenced
demands for a more liberal trade policy, a democratically con-
trolled defense policy, and progressive development toward
a more just society. Peace societies can claim part of the credit
for the change in our attitude towards South America; for
getting the marines out of Haiti and Nicaragua, for the
official enunciation that no longer will our navy be prepared
to follow and fight for our trade on the seven seas.
And if one wants to see more clearly what the peace
movement is, one might perhaps look at what it is not.
Perhaps its greatest contribution has been to curb and offset
the militarism, the hundred percentism, the anti-alien ca-
lamity howling forces who are accustomed to claim for them-
selves a monopoly of patriotism, and who are present in this
civilization as they are in all democracies. The peace move-
ment has been scoffed at by the tough minded for its senti-
mentality and its confused thinking. But it is clearly bent, all
of it, on keeping America to the American dream: a coun-
try set against racial and class discrimination, jealous of its
civil liberties, anti-imperialistic, cooperative, non-aggressive,
proudly free, and robustly civilian. It contains communists
and tories, but none who have cynically abandoned the hope
of orderly progress internally and internationally, by rational,
non-violent means. It has done much to prevent American pa-
triotism from expressing itself importantly in the forms sug-
gested by the D.A.R., the right wing of the American Legion,
the Ku Klux Klan and its spiritual allies. Its spirit is generous.
And it is committed to the belief in human reason, which
is the very basis and justification of democratic government.
In war or in peace, it helps to hold the American temper
in balance. It is civilized.
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by special entertainments in Kingston and Havana.
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from 30 to 40 percent increase in January traffic over last year
Hotel reservations exceed last January by 30 percent. W ilc
railroads report a general gain of 18.5 percent in pass ,ei
revenues for the first ten months of 1936, many roads tl)
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realization of the heavy traffic stimulated by lower fares.
PROMINENT IN THE YEAR'S REVIEW WAS THE TOURIST TREK TC
Mexico, Ireland, Russia, Scandinavia, and the Balkan States
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modations; last minute preparations may no longer be made
up by air flights, as European air lines are already booking
reservations up to June and July, with the heaviest travel pros
pects in the history of aviation. The Graf Zeppelin has com
pleted 139 transatlantic trips and over one million miles oi
flight over land and sea, and American air lines close theii
greatest year — as illustrated by 41,161,000 miles flown in No-
vember, % increase of 130 percent over the corresponding
month of the previous year. 1937 will see planes on regulai
schedules over Egypt, the Sudan, South Africa, India, the
North Cape districts, and on this continent it will be possible
to view the National Parks, Alaska, and Mexico from the air.
please mention SURVHY GRAPHIC)
112
The SPELL OF SOUTH AFRICA
HpHOSE who have felt the spell of South
-*- Africa — the indefinable lure of its
mystery and romance — always want to
return i
The climate is ideal — and there is so much
to see! Matchless Victoria Falls, mysterious
Zimbabwe, African big game in Kruger
Park, the colorful ports of the East Coast,
the primitive blacks with their picturesque
tribal customs, and other wonderful sights
too numerous to mention!
DETAILED INFORMATION FROM ALL
Touring is comfortable in South Africa —
modern railroads, rare scenic motor high-
ways and good hotels. Inclusive tours avail-
able to the high spots of interest, for any
optional number of days, at moderate prices.
The Tourist Department of South African
Railways and Harbours has offices in all the
larger cities to care for your convenience
and insure your travel enjoyment. Come
to South Africa!
LEADING TOURIST AND TRAVEL AGENCIES
S l» H I
X «.
or
S U M M E R
Spring Holidays: 6 day cruise to Bermuda $60.00
6 day cruise to Nassau $70.00
6 day cruise to Havana $65.00
Summer Holidays: Roam through the British Isles.
Tour inexpensively the Continent.
Discover an America.
ASK FOR SUGGESTIONS
to meet your schedule and budget.
Elizabeth Whit more Travel Service
One East 57th Street New York City
PLaza 3-2396
THE OPEN ROAD
in the
SOVIET UNION
—llth Season —
Through its own independent American repre-
sentation in the Soviet Union, and by virtue of
long-established connections with In tourist and
other Soviet institutions. The Open Road affords
the enquiring traveler exceptional opportunities
and advantages.
You may go with a group under the leadership
of an authority on Soviet life — paying a fixed
inclusive price for the trip. Or you may make
your own plans and travel independently.
THE OPEN ROAD
Russian Travel Division
8 West 40th Street
New York
i TRAVEL VENTURES i
of Distinction
Stimulating experiences in foreign lands, not just tours. South
America with Harry Franck, famous author and vagabond traveler;
Brewer Eddy Survey Tour of Europe; Mediterranean Tour in the
Wake of History; (Augustan Pilgrimage and Cruise) led by Dr.
R. V. D. Magoffin, Dr. David Robinson and Dr. Louis E. Lord;
Oriental Seminar with Egbert M. Hays; Russia with Professor
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, Professor J. Frank Copeland
and Brewer Eddy; British Isles by Private motor with Mrs.
William M. Barber; Scandinavia and Central Europe with Royal
Bailey Farnum; Alaska Cruise with Dr. John B. May; Grand
Tour of Europe with Mrs. Helen Jackson Beale; European Art
Schools under the direction of Raymond P. Ensign and Elma
Pratt; Paris World's Fair and Art Congress Tours; also Corona-
tion Tour.
Send /or thirty-two page booklet E
WILLIAM M.
BABSON PARK
11ARBER
MASSACHUSETTS
"A Particularly Nice Place to Live"
Large, light rooms
$7 to $10 Weekly
•
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Swimming Pool
Gymnasium
Dramatics
Dances
Library
GHRISTODORA HOUSE
A Residence Club for Men and Women
601 East Ninth Street, New York
Corner Avenue B — ALgonquin 4-8400
Facing
10-Acre Park
advertisements pirate mention Si'Rvi-.v CRAPHIC)
113
EDUCATIONAL
SCHOOLS AND
DIRECTORY
COLLEGES
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
SUMMER QUARTER - - 1937
TERM A — June 15 - July 23
TERM B — July 26 - August 31
A few of the courses open to experienced social workers
are listed below:
Public Welfare Problems
Public Relief Administration
Government and Social Work
Seminar for Supervisors
Case Studies in Mental Hygiene Problems of Childhood
Medical Social Problems
Social Work with the Foreign Born
Philosophic Interpretations of American Culture
Perspectives in Social Work
For special summer catalogue listing all courses,
admission requirements, etc., write the Registrar.
122 EAST 22nd STREET
New York, N. Y.
SIMMONS COLLEGE
School of Social Work
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
Address :
THE DIRECTOR
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Survey Graphic— Monthly— $3.00
Survey Associates, Inc., 112 East 19th St., New York
Name Address 2-1-37
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Plan A The course leading to the Master's degree consists
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
social agencies in various cities. This course is
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session
and the first winter session, and receive the Mas-
ter's degree upon the completion of the require-
ments of two summer sessions and one winter
session of supervised case work. Limited to forty.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks is open to expe-
rienced social workers. A special course in case
work is offered by Miss Ruth Smalley. Limited to
thirty-five.
Plan D An advanced course of training in the supervision
and teaching of social case work, conducted by
Miss Bertha Capen Reynolds, Associate Director of
the School, and staff. Graduates of schools of social
work with two years' case work experience are
eligible for admission. The course consists of two
summer sessions at Smith College and, in con-
sultation with the School, a winter of supervision
and teaching during which the student may hold
a paid position in a social agency. Limited to
twenty-five.
Seminars of two weeks on the following topics are open to a
liniited number of qualified persons:
1. Application of Mental Hygiene to Present-day
Problems in Case Work with Families. Miss
Grace Marcus and Dr. Evelyn Alpern. July
12-24.
2. Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case
Work. Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss
Beatrice H. Wajdyk, July 26-August 1.
3. The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn
Jackson and Miss Mary Whitehead. August
9-21.
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensiv 1
varied experience through the case study method* leads he
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from ft
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
USED BOOKS
40% Off Regular Price
for books displayed by our field workers. In
good condition, but without that new look!
For complete list write
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
Book Order Department
112 E. 19th Street New York, N. Y.
tin answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
114
THREE YEARS OF PUBLIC HOUSING
(Continued from page 82)
billion dollars annually, total direct appropriation of less than
flOO million annually, is manifestly inadequate to make a
real dent on housing needs among the lower income groups.
Why not in 1937 invest at least the cost of a battleship in
houses for the American people?
Today
THERE WERE MANY LAST YEAR WHO BELIEVED THAT IF A
Presidential "must" had been applied to the Wagner-Ellen-
bogen bill we should be on our way today with a planned
housing program. Under spur of the Henry Street Settle-
ment six hundred tenement mothers sent their photographs
to the President in a big album, and "threw in" 5 cents
apiece to have them taken as an earnest that the signatures
stood for real people. These mothers are only a handful of
the tenants the country over who know what each year's
delay in public housing means in child rearing and home-
making against the odds of ramshackle buildings. Their
homes are of a type that antedates every automobile extant.
In pre-campaign speeches, President Roosevelt came out un-
equivocally for public housing; and in his opening address to
the new Congress he said:
"There are far reaching problems still with us for which
democracy must find solutions if it is to consider itself
successful.
"For example, many millions of Americans still live in
habitations which fail to provide the physical benefits of
modern civilization. . . . The menace exists not only in the
slum areas of the very large cities, but in many smaller cities
as well. It exists on tens of thousands of farms, in varying
degrees, in every part of the country."
This year in line with this strong lead the White House
can count on new forces at work in countless houses. There
is not only the cramp due to the cessation of building during
the hard times, but the stir which comes of recaptured
jobs and renting power. There is an out-of-ordinary increase
in the number of families, resulting torn delayed marriages.
There is the "undoubling" of families as prosperity returns.
[See Ernst Kahn's article in Survey Graphic, May 1935.]
The American standard of living is stretching its muscles
again.
Those who have been close to the problem predicted long
ago that a million new dwelling units will be needed an-
nually for a decade to meet the country's needs. The private
builder is not asleep to his opportunity as the |700 million
loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration in
the one year 1936 would indicate. But there is little indi-
cation that he is as yet able, even though he is becoming
slightly more interested, to meet the poor man's housing
problem.
Hearings which the Housing Authority of New York held
the last part of December on the "poor man's housing short-
age" indicate how serious the situation is. Rents in the worst
tenements are skyrocketing; as a result there is actually a
scramble for the most unsanitary quarters. Those hearings
brought out, too, the inertia and shortsightedness not only
of landlords but of banks and insurance companies as one
after another of their representatives testified.
In New York over two million people are still living in
houses declared unfit thirty-five years ago; every city in the
country has the same malady, if in less virulent form. True
each city can do much to eliminate bad housing by enforcing
existing legislation, but that does not add to the supply of
houses. New York is learning, as other cities will, that
f/n answering advertisements please
115
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Second Semester — February 9-May 3 1
CURRENT HAPPENINGS IN SOCIAL LEGIS-
LATION—WASHINGTON and HARRISBURG
A series of fifteen lectures on the situa-
tion in Washington and Harrisburg by
Mr. Ewan Clague. Open to social work-
ers and other interested persons. Tues-
day evenings, at 7:00, beginning Feb. 9.
Application blank and complete bulletin
of Extension courses sent on request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
INTEGRATION OF PRIVATE
AND
PUBLIC SOCIAL WORK
requires a professionally trained
personnel in both fields.
The Graduate School for Jewish Social Work
offers a graduate curriculum leading to
the Master's and Doctor's degrees, for the
acquisition of the necessary knowledge
and skills.
For information about require-
ments for admission, scholar-
ships and fellowships, write to
DR. M. J. KARPF, Director
The
Graduate
School
For
Jewish
Social Work
7 1 West 47th Street, New York City
mention SURVFY GRAPHIC)
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS
RATES: Display: 30 cents a line, 14 agate lines to the inch. Want ad-
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TEL.: ALGONQUIN 4-7490 SURVEY GRAPHIC
WORKER WANTED
National organization, established, unique,
engaging, seeks field worker to expand mem-
bership in various cities. Should have back-
ground of acquaintance with social work ami
movements. Address 7403 c/o Survey.
SITUATIONS WANTED
Single young man of good habits, desires posi-
tion in private greenhouse, chauffeur, night-
watchman, handyman or caretaker. Will ac-
cept any type of work. Experienced. Can
furnish excellent references. 7401 Survey.
Ex-physician, having had ten years in compen-
sation insurance business, traveled extensively
in United States, Europe and Asia studying
vocational, educational, insurance, recreation-
• al, social practices in each country, and de-
voted last five years to intensive study of
our social-economic-political problems, desires
administrative or research position. 7402
Survey.
SECRETARY - STENOGRAPHER, Southerner,
college education, several years experience,
New York City. Poise, initiative, resourceful-
ness, excellent correspondent, executive ability,
wishes connection business or social organiza-
tion. 7405 Survey.
Young woman, secretary-stenographer, eight
years experience social organizations (mental
hygiene, psychiatry) ; unusually well-equipped
by education and experience for connection
with social service or progressive organization
7406 Survey.
SITUATION WANTED
CAMP DIRECTOR — Outstanding expert and
authority on children's camps available this
summer. Top-notch progressive organizer.
Unexcelled successful experience. Corres-
pondence confidential. Box 7407 Survey.
Have you property to
sell or rent?
— Cottages to rent — or for sale
for next season?
ADVERTISE IN THE CLASSIFIED
SECTION OF SURVEY GRAPHIC
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SURVEY GRAPHIC
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to EMPLOYERS
Who Are Planning to Increase Their Stan's
We Supply:
Executives
Case Workers
Recreation Workeri
Psychiatric Social Workers
Occupational Therapists
Dietitians
Housekeepers
Matrons
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Sec'y-Stenotfs.
Stenographers
Bookkeepers
Typists
Telephone Operators
HOLMES EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL
One East 42nd Street New York City
Agency Tel.: MU 2-7575 Gertrude D. Holmei. Director
IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE
ADELPHI THEATRE, 54th Street, East of 7th Avenue Eves. 8:30
FEDERAL
THEATRE
Evenings Only
t at Bo» office
or 701-eth »ve.
25* to 55«
HO HIGHER
MEd. 3-5961
891
Presents
DR. FAUSTUS ""SS^T"
MAXINE ELLIOTT'S THEATRE, 39th STREET. EAST OF BROADWAY
NIGERIAN R A C C A M ft ft M A MAJESTIC THEATRE
Dance Drama DM33M HHWPIM Brooklyn
IO LANTH E
Brooklyn
New Production
GILBERT & SULLIVAN Unit
DALY'S THEATRE, 63rd STREET, EAST OF BROADWAY
S\A7 C* f T I A Kl f\ LAFAYETTE THEATRE
TO C. t. I l_ M HI LS 131st Street and 7th Ave.
A New Play by the Nettro Youth Unit
Your Own Agency
This is the counseling and placement agency
sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
I tion of Social Workers and the National
i Organization for Public Health Nursing,
National, Non-profit making.
122 East 22nd Street, 7th floor. New York
GERTRUDE R. STEIN, INC.
Vocational Service Agency
11 East 44th Street NEW YORK
MUrray Hill 2-4784
A professional employment bureau specializing
in social service, institutional, dietetic, medical,
publicity, advertising and secretarial positions.
PAMPHLETS AND PERIODICALS
Rates : 75c per line for 4 insertions
The American Journal of Nursing? shows the part
which professional nurses take in the better-
ment of the world. Put it in your library. $3.00
a year. 60 West 50 Street. New York. N. Y.
LITERARY SERVICES
Special articles, theses, speeches, papers. Re-
search, revision, bibliographies, etc. Over
twenty years' experience serving busy pro-
fessional persons. Prompt service extended.
AUTHORS RESEARCH BUREAU, 616
Fifth Avenue. New York, N. Y.
Plays, Books, Stories, etc., revised and typed to
meet editorial requirements, witb placing infor-
mation. Carl Brown, 1H1 Lenox Ave., N. Y.
MULTIGRAPHING
MIMEOGRAPHING
ADDRESSING
FILLING-IN
FOLDING
COMPLETE MAILINL
• • •
QUICK SERVICE LETTER COMPANY
INCORPORATED
53 PARK PLACE - NEW YORK
• • •
SALES CAMPAIGNS
PLANNED AND WRITTEN
THREE YEARS OF PUBLIC HOUSING
(Continued from page 115)
drastic steps are needed to wake up the conscience of the
country. To elicit mass demand for good houses is our best
assurance that they will be provided.
The United States Conference of Mayors reports, "Housing
for persons with low income is even more acute in many
cities than it was at the time of our last annual conference."
It has again petitioned for enactment of "the Wagner Bill or
legislation similar thereto in order that we, as cities, may meet
our responsibility for providing decent, cheap and healthful
houses for those unable to secure such housing where housing
is needed, as well as enabling the cities to eliminate the slum
areas, with all their disgraceful conditions, where they exist."
Speaking o?fche Wagner bill last year, Herbert W. Morri-
son, British housing expert and member of the London
County Council, is reported to have said, "This bill is some-
what milder in form than the British Act of 1890." — A
challenge indeed to all who call themselves Americans!
(In ansu'ering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
116
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Club, and we make this offer to dem-
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we propose is this: mail the postcard
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No Compulsion to
Buy Any Book
Study this booklet at your leisure.
You may be surprised, for instance,
to learn that belonging to the Club
does not mean you have to pay any
fixed sum each year. Nor does it mean
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every month, twelve a year (you
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Books You May
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The principal one is that you really
obtain and read the new books you
promise yourself to read. Time and
again (is it not true?) you miss not-
able new books through pure procras-
tination. Have you as yet read Gone
With The Wind, by Margaret Mit-
chell ; or An American Doctor's Odyssey
by Victor Heiser; or Drums Along the
Mohawk, by Walter D. Edmonds, or
The Last Puritan by George Santa-
yana — to mention only a few out-
standing books, which were dis-
tributed widely by the Club in the
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there have undoubtedly been dozens
of new books which you were very
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ually assures you against missing the
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One Book Free for
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In addition, there arc also very
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chased, on the average they received one
book free. Book-dividends alone (which
represent a form of profit sharing)
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worth last year.
Here is a remarkable fact: of the
tens of thousands of families which
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induced to join by a salesman. Every one
of them joined upon their own intia-
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If you are interested, simply mail
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NINE PLAYS will be reserved in your
name, pending your reading of the
booklet we shall send you.
EUGENE O'NEILL'S plays in recent years
have marked him as the most significant
figure in the contemporary American
drama. The recent award to him of the
Nobel Prize for Literature puts a foreign
stamp of approval upon our own native
appraisal. One by one, as his plays have
appeared, they have been the dramatic
sensation of their day. At the same time it
has been evident to every discerning person
that they have none of that ephemeral
quality which is the usual characteristic
of the popular play. Serious and deep-
reaching in their intent, certainly they
belong upon the shelves of every person
absorbed in following the turbulent current
of modern American thought. This volume
of representative plays, selected by Mr.
O'Neill himself, was a past "book-divi-
dend" distributed, free, among Book-of-
thc-Month Club members. What the Club's
book-dividends arc, and why a free copy
of this volume is now offered to you, is
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of a volume containing nine complete plays by the 1936 winner
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NINE PLAYS
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MARCH 193;
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATIOI
THAT WHITE HOUSE JOB
New Ways To Make Democracy Work
By Luther Gulick
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT STRIKES?
After the Auto and Maritime Disputes
By William M. Leiserson
LISTENING IN ON THE SUPREME COUR
The Justices and the Labor Case
By Beulah Amide
FLOODS AND DROUGHTS AND MORRIS L. COOKE
30 CENTS A COPY
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WITH THE SPEED OF LIGHT
BECAUSE Elias Howe could not
tell enough people, quickly, about
the benefits of his invention, the women
of a whole generation were deprived
of the sewing machine, and wearily
continued their toil with thread and
needle.
Today, with the speed of light, the
story of new methods and new prod-
ucts is carried to a million homes. The
time between invention and utilization
is shortened amazingly.
Sometimes we say it with music — as
in THE HOUR OF CHARM, which
presents, at four o'clock every Mondav
afternoon, the unusual entertainment of
Phil Spitalny's ALL-GIRL SINGING
ORCHESTRA. We also tell how elec-
tric servants for the home can bring
benefits not attainable in any other
way.
Increased demand and new and better
designs and manufacturing methods
have both lowered costs and improved
quality. More and better products,
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within the reach of more people. This
means less drudgery in an increasing
number of homes — more freedom, a
richer chance for life.
G-E research has saved the public from ten to one hundred dollars
Jor every dollar it has earned for General Electric
GENERAL A ELECTRIC
2
BOOKS
INDISPENSABLE
TO YOUR
Pursuit of Happiness
UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF
The Mental Hygiene of Personality
By Ernest R. Groves, Professor of Sociology, University of
North Carolina. 288 pages, $2.50.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
— William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote this before the days of psycho-analysis.
Yet, in these two lines he becomes the founder of modern
psychiatry. Today we know that the fault lies in ourselves
if we are weak, wavering and incapable of mastering pur-
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banish cankerous complexes and to build up your
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288 pages, $2.50.
A book with intimate appeal to every man or woman who is
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countless pitfalls in his search for happiness by listening
to the experienced advice of these understanding writers.
The Married Woman probes deeply into the baffling ques-
tion of sex adjustment and presents a common-sense plan-
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HERE ARE A FEW OF THE MANY SUBJECTS COVERED:
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What the Critics say about
UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF THE MARRIED WOMAN
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC REVIEW— "We welcome this book as an out-
standing contribution to the popular understanding of mental func-
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JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HYGIENE— "the author gives an authentic and
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the mind, adolesence, the emotions and other factors which make
up the personality . . . The author presents his scientific facts
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the manner of a well-written novel. The book is singularly free
from technicalities yet written in a language which will appeal to
the adult of college level education."
SOCIAL SCIENCE — "Professor Groves has taught sociology in the
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the family. In that field he is at home and makes his readers feel
the same . . . This, his latest book, deals with the mental hygiene
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things and issues unhesitatingly."
HERE ARE A FEW OF THE MANY SUBJECTS COVERED :
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your sex impulse • your love hunger • creative powers of your mind
• body management • the psychic power plant • discovering your
subconscious • the will to power • sex maladjustments • your brain
as an instrument of yourself • the hazards in making the most of
yourself.
JOURNAL AMERICAN MEDICAL ASS'N.— "The book deals with prob-
lems of marriage frankly and openly, with a good deal of emphasis
on the intimate relationships of marriage. . . The question of »ex
in marriage is taken up in detail . . . The placing of the responsi-
bility for sex adjustment on the woman is a rather new note in
books of this type, being obviously a welcome change."
M. A. BIGELOW IN THE JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HYGIENE— "I
recommend 'The Married Woman' to thoughtful women who are
making scientific preparation for imminent married life, and to any
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SCIENTIFIC BOOK CLUB REVIEW — "Their words of wisdom and
advice can be highly recommended not only to women but to men as
THE NEW YORK PHYSICIAN— "A practical, intelligent and frank dis-
cussion of a subject which should be better understood."
well."
PARENTS MAGAZINE — "Combining as it does, the viewpoints of «
successful wife and mother and an experienced physician. 'The
Married Woman' provides practical information of value to those
contemplating marriage as well as to those already married."
GREENBERG, Publisher
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Yourself and copies of The Married Woman
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SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SUBVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn,
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INCONSPICUOUS but important is the
name "Western Electric" on your
telephone.
You may never have noticed it, yet
it has been there for years. And it has
a great deal to do with the quality and
low cost of telephone service.
Western Electric has been making
Bell System equipment for over half a
century. Its specialized production and
purchasing have enabled the operat-
ing companies in the Bell System to
buy equipment and supplies of the
highest quality at reasonable prices.
Western Electric serves further by
maintaining a nation-wide system for
the rapid delivery of material and ap-
paratus. This is an important factor
in providing good telephone service
from day to day and speeding its res-
toration in time of fire, flood or other
emergency.
Western Electric is an integral part
of the Bell System and has the same
objectives as the rest of the organiza-
tion. It plays its part in making tele-
phone service dependable,
efficient and inexpensive.
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
118
The Gist of It
As A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL MEDIA-
tion Board, William M. Leiserson is uniquely
qualified to use the strike-settlement machin-
ery in the field of transportation as a yard-
stick by which to measure the kind of medi-
ation facilities that the United States should
have had before the costly maritime and auto-
mobile strikes dragged on to belated armi-
stices. (Page 121) His article, very appropri-
ately, was written while he was in the midst
of halting an incipient railroad strike in the
West.
THE THEME OF LUTHER GULICK'S ARTICLE
(page 126) interpreting the report of the
President's Committee on Administrative
Management (and we recommend that you
send 15 cents to the Government Printing
Office at once for the complete document) is
equipping democracy for action. With Pro-
fessor Charles E. Merriam and Chairman
Louis Brownlow (this year's speaker at the
annual meeting of Survey Associates), Dr.
Gulick was a member of the committee. Di-
rector of the Institute of Public Administra-
tion and Eaton Professor of Municipal
Science and Administation at Columbia Uni-
versity, he has for twenty years been the
consultant of legislative commissions, charter
commissions, governors and mayors.
AN UNPREDICTABLE ELEMENT IN THE FU-
ture of British democracy is Sir Oswald Mos-
ley, erstwhile Socialist who donned a black
shirt and turned Fascist. Recently his pri-
vate army was forbidden by law to wear
military uniforms, a parliamentary step which
reveals his ominous threat to democratic
complacency. The portrait of him (page
129) is written by Julian S. Bach, Jr., a
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SURVEY GRAPHIC— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
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Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors;
RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD, RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPER, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers: MARY R. ANDF.RSON, adver-
tising manager.
MARCH 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 3
Cover Design PICTORIAL STATI
What Can We Do About Strikes ? WILLIAM M. LEISERSON
Making Democracy Work LUTHER GULICK
Little Hitler JULIAN s. BACH, JR.
Listening In on the Supreme Court BEULAH AMIDON
Measuring the Cooperatives CLARK KERR
"Your Hospital Bill Is Paid" KATHERINE w. WHIPPLE
These Men Might Sing POEM BY LOUISE BURTON LAIDLAW
The Valleys and the Plains VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
Social Security and Congress GLEN LEET
Through Neighbors' Doorways
Report of Progress — a la Hitler JOHN PALMER GAVIT
While Spain Smolders POEM BY STANTON A. COBLENTZ
Letters and Life
Volume 1, Number 1 LEON WHIPPLE
King's Move POEM BY PEGGY POND CHURCH
Reviews by TONI STOLPER, LINDSAY ROGERS, EDWARD CORWIN and others
We Enter Our 25th Year — 1936 Reviewed — Prospects 1937 . . PAUL KELLOGG
© Survey Associates, Inc.
young Harvard graduate now studying at the
London School of Econornics, who has had
an opportunity to observe Mosley in action.
LAST MONTH IN HIS WIDELY QUOTED ARTI-
cle on the Supreme Court Irving Dilliard said,
"My own conviction is that the American
citizen is entitled to every material fact about
the Supreme Court and its work." These
words fortified an assignment which already
had been planned for Beulah Amidon, as-
sociate editor — to listen in ' on tht Supreme
Court during the hearings on the cases in-
volving the constitutionality of the National
Labor Relations Act. At the time we had no
inkling that the President's message on the
judiciary would give an added timeliness and
sense of social drama to the story which
Miss Amidon brings us from the Supreme
Court Building. (Page 133)
CLARK KERR, FORMERLY AT THE UNI-
versity of California and now on the faculty
of Antioch College gathered his material
on cooperatives and the cooperative move-
ment (page 137) during the past year when
he was a graduate student at the London
School of Economics and in Europe on a
fellowship of the Friends' Service Commit-
tee. Before leaving Berkeley, Mr. Kerr made
a survey of the cooperative movement in
California for FERA, which gave him insight
into co-ops in relation to the American
scheme of things.
A QUARTER MILLION NEW YORKERS WILL
never have to pay a hospital bill. They have
insured themselves against it on the "three-
cents-a-day" plan. Here is an experiment
that worked, a group venture in cooperation
that can be adopted everywhere, and is
spreading rapidly. Katherine Whipple, typi-
cal patient, who tells how the plan affected
her during an illness last summer, (page
142) is the wife of Leon Whipple, of the
Survey Graphic staff.
WHEN MORRIS L. COOKE RESIGNED AS
Rural Electrification Administrator to take a
long-earned holiday abroad, Victor Wey-
bright, managing editor, diverted his space
which was to be devoted entirely to consid-
eration of the recent disastrous floods, to a
glimpse of Cooke, the conservationist, and
three recent chapters in American history
with which Cooke has been prominently
identified — the Mississippi Valley Report, the
Report of the Great Plains Drought Area,
and the latest report of the National Re-
sources Committee recommending a non-
emergency public works program flexible
enough to constitute genuine planning in the
field of land-water resources. (Page 145)
IN A CHANGING WORLD LEGISLATION CAN
never catch up with the ideal. The Social
Security Act is no exception. Now that it is
on the statute books, its best friends are
considering immediate and long range
changes to improve its coverage and its ad-
ministration. Glen Leet, who summarizes the
changes now being discussed in terms of
Congressional action, (page 150) is on the
Washington staff of the American Public
Welfare Association.
As we enter our 25th year the editor re-
views our past and explores our future
(Page 171).
119
PICKETS AND SIT-DOWNERS
••PHlHiini
International Photo
MARCH 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 3
SURVEY GRAPHIC
What Can We Do About Strikes?
by WILLIAM M. LEISERSON
The American people are confused, and no wonder, by the failure of the
federal government to mediate labor disputes, yet no agency exists to do it.
Here is outlined a set-up for all industry like that which preserves peace
between railroads and men
TlIE AUTOMOBILE STRIKE, LIKE THE MARITIME STRIKE, HAS
now been temporarily settled. But the long and costly stale-
mates have demonstrated to the country that the labor re-
lations policies of the federal government and its methods
of intervention in industrial disputes are still entirely un-
settled. When the Wagner Labor Relations Act was adop-
ted in 1935, it was thought that Congress had laid down a
policy and provided the necessary administrative agencies
for orderly settlement of labor disputes. Now all appears
confusion again.
The Labor Relations Act declared it to be the policy
of the United States to prevent and mitigate interruptions
of commerce "by encouraging the practice and procedure
of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by
workers of full freedom of association, self-organization,
and designation of representatives of their own choos-
ing. . . ." Most people thought that the National Labor
Relations Board would enforce and administer the policy,
but the events of the motor and maritime strikes, as well
as the strikes in the plate glass and other industries,
showed this to be a misapprehension. The board and the
Wagner Act were not invoked in these strikes. Instead
the governor of Michigan and the Department of Labor
tried to handle the disputes, and the President was drawn
into them. When the Secretary of Labor called the parties
in the General Motors strike to Washington she acted,
not under the recent labor relations legislation, but under
the broad powers of the act of 1913 establishing the De-
partment of Labor. In the shipping strike the Maritime
Commission asserted jurisdiction under the policies of the
maritime law, but later withdrew and left the field to
the Assistant Secretary of Labor.
Why didn't the National Labor Relations Board inter-
vene in these strikes? Why does the Secretary of Labor
handle them? Why did the Maritime Commission inter-
vene, assert authority and then withdraw from the ship-
ping strike? Why does the Conciliation Service of the
121
Department of Labor mediate some disputes, while others
are referred to special boards appointed from time to
time? Why was the National Labor Relations Board able
to settle a dispute at the General Electric Company by
holding an election, and why did it not do the same in
the General Motors dispute?
In the midst of the automobile strike, Dorothy Thomp-
son wrote in the New Yorf^ Herald-Tribune: "The Labor
Relations Board, if I read the act correctly, had all the
powers necessary to intervene drastically, and at the out-
set." Arthur Krock in the New Yor^ Times more guard-
edly explained: "For several reasons this law [National
Labor Relations Act] has not been invoked in the
strikes. . . ." But neither these nor the other commenta-
tors who wondered at the inaction of the National Labor
Relations Board called attention to the statement of the
President on signing the Labor Relations Act. He then
said:
The National Labor Relations Board will be an inde-
pendent quasi-judicial body. It should be clearly understood
that it will not act as mediator or conciliator in labor dis-
putes. The function of mediation remains under this act
the duty of the Secretary of Labor and of the Conciliation
Service of the Department of Labor. It is important that the
judicial function and the mediation funcion should not be
confused. Compromise, the essence of mediation, has no
place in interpretation and enforcement of the law.
When such usually well informed writers as Krock
and Thompson are confused about the authority and the
procedures of governmental agencies for settlement of
labor disputes, it is small wonder that people generally
are uninformed and disturbed about the government's
methods of dealing with labor disputes.
II
To UNDERSTAND THE PART THE GOVERNMENT HAS PLAYED IN
the recent strikes and its seemingly ineffective efforts, it is
necessary to know the nature of the labor adjustment
agencies that are its arms for promoting and maintaining
industrial peace, and the extent and limits of their au-
thority. And if orderly and effective methods of govern-
ment intervention are to be substituted for confused and
conflicting efforts, the experience of the various agencies
will have to be reviewed, and their policies and pro-
cedures integrated into a consistent system defining the
different methods to be used in different kinds of disputes.
Existing or new agencies will have to be implemented
with powers and policies appropriate for each kind of
dispute, and all coordinated in a series of orderly pro-
cedures to enable different agencies to function as various
issues in labor disputes succeed each other in accordance
with common experience.
The distinction between the judicial function of en-
forcing legal rights in labor relationships and mediation
of ordinary labor controversies must be maintained, as
the President has clearly explained. But so must arbitra-
tion be kept distinct from mediation; and conciliation by
joint conference of the parties without intervention of
mediators is also desirable as a distinct and separate step.
Yet any important single labor controversy is likely to
develop all these issues and methods, and the distinctions
can only be maintained, in practice, by careful and co-
ordinated administration. Rigid legislative declarations
will not settle complicated labor disputes.
There are four main agencies of the federal government
for adjusting labor relations and settling labor disputes.
These are the National Labor Relations Board, the Con-
ciliation Service of the Department of Labor, the Na-
tion Mediation Board and the National Railroad Adjust-
ment Board. In addition there are the special emergency
boards which the President may appoint under the Rail-
way Labor Act as occasion requires, and similar boards
he sometimes appoints under his general executive
powers.*
The first of these was established by the Wagner Labor
Relations Act in 1935 to succeed another board of the
same name created by a resolution of Congress in 1934,
which in turn took the place of the National Labor Board
that had been operating under the National Industrial
Recovery Act by an order of the President. The second
is a division of the Department of Labor, and the only
legislative authority for its existence is a clause in the act
creating the department reading: "The Secretary of Labor
shall have power to act as mediator and to appoint com-
missioners of conciliation in labor disputes whenever in
his judgment the interests of industrial peace may require
it to be done. . . ." Under this authority the Secretary
also occasionally appoints special boards for handling par-
ticular disputes. The third and fourth were created in
1934 by amendments to the Railway Labor Act as succes-
sors to the United States Board of Mediation which had
been operating since 1926.
The jurisdiction of the United States Conciliation Ser-
vice is theoretically unlimited. The Secretary of Labor or
* Other labor adjustment agencies for special purposes with which we
shall not be concerned in this article, arc: (1) A labor service which the
Secretary of the Interior has organized to assist him in the administration
of the PWA. This deals with labor disputes on public works projects,
and the Resettlement Administration has a similar set of labor advisors.
(2) The Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation in the Department
of Commerce, which supervises hiring halls for seamen, whose shipping
commissioners must be present when men are paid off after a vovage and
who are authorized to hear and adjust or decide complaints of seamen
regarding their pay or treatment. (3) The Maritime Commission which
by law has authority to set wage schedules and rules governing working
conditions.
122
designated commissioners of conciliation may intervene in
any labor dispute in any industry, local or interstate, in the
interests of industrial peace. But the parties to any dispute
are free to disregard the Secretary's friendly efforts, as
they might the intervention of any other well-meaning
person. Neither is the Secretary nor the Conciliation Ser-
vice required to mediate all disputes or any particular
disputes however serious, whether their services are ap-
plied for or not. They may, and necessarily do, disregard
many disputes, both those that are of minor importance
and some that are major controversies. In fact it can not
really be said that the Department of Labor has jurisdic-
tion over any disputes. The clause from the act of 1913
quoted above merely grants the Secretary authority to act
as mediator and to designate mediators.
In contrast with this all-inclusive authorization to
mediate anywhere in the public interest, the National
Labor Relations Board is given no direct authority to
mediate or conciliate any labor disputes. Certain mediatory
and conciliatory functions may be found to be necessarily
implied in the duties of the board insofar as it may ar-
range settlements by agreement of the parties to dispose
of cases brought before the board, but such settlements,
as the President pointed out, could not compromise law
enforcement.
As the first annual report of the National Labor Re-
lations Board clearly states: "The board is given no
blanket authority over all employers and all employes
in all industries, even in the restricted field of labor re-
lations in which the act operates. Jurisdiction is limited
to the investigation of questions 'affecting commerce' con-
cerning the representation of employes, and to the preven-
tion of unfair labor practices 'affecting commerce'. . . .
It is thus assured that the board's authority is co-extensive
with federal power under the Constitution." (i.e., over
interstate and foreign commerce.)
Of quite a different character are the functions and
jurisdiction of the National Mediation Be rd and the
National Railroad Adjustment Board, < ering both
from those of the United States Conciliat' Service and
the National Labor Relations Board. Ti^ duties of the
National Railroad Adjustment Board are confined strictly
to hearing disputes involving interpretation or applica-
tion of existing collective bargaining agreements on the
railroads, and its decisions are by law made final and
binding on the parties, except in certain cases of money
awards. This board is organized in four divisions, each
of which serves for certain classes of railroad employes.
The divisions are not authorized to mediate; they must
render awards. In a sense this provides for compulsory
arbitration, but more properly it is adjudication of col-
lective labor contracts by an industrial court composed
of laymen and operating informally.
Mediation of railway labor disputes is the duty of the
National Mediation Board, and by amendment of the
Railway Labor Act in 1936 this board's jurisdiction was
extended to include air transportation. Its mediation
activities are restricted to these two industries. They are
also limited to disputes involving changes in agreements
covering rates of pay, r<des, and working conditions and
to such other disputes as are not referable to the National
Railroad Adjustment Board or to a similar board in the
air transportation industry which is to be established
when development of labor agreements in this industry
make it necessary. Prior to the enactment of the 1934
SURVEY GRAPHIC
amendments to the Railway Labor Act, disputes as to the
meaning or application of labor agreements were also
subject to mediation. Now that they must be adjudicated
after the manner of disputes about ordinary commercial
contracts, the authority of the mediation board does not
extend to them.
But in addition to its mediation functions, the Na-
ional Mediation Board is given certain quasi-judicial and
fact finding duties in connection with investigation of dis-
putes among employes as to who are their duly designated
and authorized representatives, similar to the duties of the
National Labor Relations Board in representation dis-
putes. The discretionary authority of the National Media-
tion Board is, however, limited to determining who may
participate in elections, which must be conducted sep-
arately for each class or craft of employes; whereas the
Labor Relations Board determines also the unit appro-
priate for collective bargaining and elections, whether this
shall be the employe unit, craft unit, plant unit, or sub-
division thereof.
Ill
TURNING NOW TO THE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES OF THE
four governmental labor rela-
tions agencies, it is to be noted
that two of them are really
labor courts, not designed for
settlement of strikes or con-
ciliation of differences in labor
disputes, while the other two
are essentially mediating agen-
cies.
The National Labor Rela-
tions Board gets jurisdiction
over a case involving unfair
labor practices only when a
charge is made that someone
has engaged in or is engaging
in such unfair practice. Then
the board or any of its agents
is authorized to serve a com-
plaint against such a person,
a hearing is held and a finding
of fact made as to whether the
defendant has been guilty of
any of the five unfair labor
practices listed in the Labor
Relations Act. The practices
that are declared unfair are
for employers:
1. To interfere with, restrain or coerce employes in the
exercise of their rights guaranteed by the law to organize
and to bargain collectively through representatives of their
own choosing.
2. To dominate or to interfere with any labor organiza-
tion or to contribute financially or otherwise to its support.
3. By discrimination in hiring or employment to encour-
age or discourage membership in any labor organization.
(But closed shop agreements with trade unions are expressly
legalized.)
4. To discharge or otherwise discriminate against any
employes who file charge or give testimony under the Act.
5. To refuse to bargain collectively with representatives
of employes as provided in the Act.
When the board has made a finding that an employer
MARCH 1937
Herblock for NEA Service
One department that doesn't need to be renamed
is guilty of one of these practices, it issues an order to cease
and desist from the practice and to take such other action,
including reinstatement of employes with or without pay,
as will effectuate the policies of the Act. No penalties are
provided for non-compliance with cease and desist orders,
or for refusal to testify or to produce records or to answer
subpoenas. But the board is authorized to petition Fed-
eral Circuit Courts of Appeal for decrees to enforce its
orders, and these courts may then punish for contempt.
In representation disputes, the board does not have to
wait for a charge to be made. Whenever such a dispute
arises it may investigate, and after a hearing, hold an elec-
tion and certify the representatives designated and selected
by a majority of the employes.
Plainly these are judicial procedures, and the National
Labor Relations Board is apparently designed as a sub-
stitute for the United States District Courts to enforce the
labor relations policies and labor rights established by
Congress from which appeals go to the Circuit Courts.
The board therefore could not intervene to settle the
automobile strike or any other strike, although it might
hear charges of unfair practices if any were submitted
to it. Also, it might intervene to hold an election and
certify the representative
chosen by a majority of the
employes, if a question of
representation were involved
in a strike, but it is not au-
thorized either to settle or to
mediate any other issues.
The Conciliation Service
acting under the authority of
the Secretary of Labor was
therefore the only govern-
mental agency that could in-
tervene in the recent strikes;
but the Secretary has no more
authority than had the gover-
nor of Michigan, who inter-
vened in the General Motors
strike because of the public
interest involved. While they
worked together, they had no
statutory policies to guide
them, and no established pro-
cedures by which the govern-
ment's position could be elab-
orated to effect a settlement.
Neither were the parties ob-
ligated in any way by law to
deal with the mediators or to confer with
meet or to
each other.
There is no prescribed procedure for invoking the
services of this agency, or conditions to be met as a basis
for mediation; there is not even a requirement that dis-
putes shall be reported to the Department of Labor.
Presidential pressure has to be used frequently to bring
the principal representatives of the parties into mediation
conferences. Obviously this is a weakness that can only
be remedied by Congress. As it is, the only federal agency
for the settlement of disputes by mediation, outsid€xthe
railroad and air transportation industries, exists withoijt,
benefit of statutory organization, without legally
lished relationships between it and the parties with
it must deal, and without policies and procedure.
123
formulated by Congress for its guidance or assistance.
Mediators or commissioners of conciliation appointed
by the Secretary of Labor are not subject to the Federal
Civil Service Act and their salaries are fixed at a level
appropriate for men who can adjust the ordinary routine
of minor disputes. Although many of the thirty-five or
forty mediators in the Conciliation Service are experienced
and skilled negotiators and adjusters, they are not the type
of men that can deal on the
basis of equality with chief ex-
ecutives of large corporations
and strong labor unions who
appear in the major contro-
versies and who must be influ-
enced to reach agreements.
To meet the need in such
cases the Secretary of Labor
usually designates Edward F.
McGrady, the First Assistant
Secretary, or acts herself, or ap-
points temporary boards or in-
dividuals for the special pur-
pose. The Assistant Secretary
is skilled and experienced in
mediation and fully equipped
to handle such situations. But
he has many other duties and
responsibilities, as is the case
with the Secretary herself. The
same difficulty appears in the
use of temporary special boards
or individuals, with the added
weakness that such temporary
appointees are not as well-in-
formed about issues in labor
disputes or skilled in the techniques of mediation as is
the Assistant Secretary or the regular staff of mediators
in the Conciliation Service. They are usually better qual-
ified to arbitrate than to mediate and bring the parties to
agreement. Mediation, to be effective, can not be an in-
cidental, temporary duty of people busy with other things.
IV
IT IS INDEED STRANGE THAT THE VAST FIELD OF INTERSTATE
commerce over which the federal government has juris-
diction (outside of railroad and air transportation) should
be without systematic labor adjustment machinery to pre-
vent the long and repeated interruptions of service, when
in the limited transportation field there is a complete and
effective system of conciliation, mediation, arbitration,
investigation and adjudication, that has been developed
by Congress in half a century of experience in regulating
railway labor relations. Losses in wages, employment, and
business mount to hundreds of millions of dollars; dis-
order and class feeling are developed, while peace has
been maintained in the railroad industry since the adop-
tion of the Railway Labor Act in 1926, with hardly a
serious strike in more than ten years of operation.
There have been plenty of serious labor disputes on
the railroads in these years, imminent strikes have ap-
peared every year; but for every type of dispute that devel-
oped the special policies and procedures provided in the
Act were able to accomplish their purposes of securing
settlements by mutual agreement, or by acceptance of
arbitration awards.
Next time why not
The Railway Labor Act also guarantees the rights of
employes to organize and to select representatives for
collective bargaining, but the National Mediation Board
which administers the Railway Act is not intrusted with
the duty of acting as a court to enforce these rights, as is
the case with the National Labor Relations Board. Instead,
violation of the rights of employes by employers is made
a misdemeanor punishable by fines or imprisonment, and
enforcement of these provi-
sions is left to the United
States district attorneys and
the federal courts on com-
plaint of representatives of
employes, without cost to
them.
That the enforcement of
such rights must be kept sep-
arate and distinct from the
duties of the mediation au-
thorities is well established by
experience, and both acts
provide for keeping them
separate. But whether it is
better to leave such enforce-
ment to the ordinary courts
and prosecuting authorities,
or to intrust it to a special
quasi-judicial body, such as
the National Labor Relations
Board, the experience with
both these acts has yet been
insufficient to determine. It
may be that neither the meth-
ods of criminal prosecution
nor of issuing cease and
desist orders enforceable through the courts, will prove
as effective as provisions for civil suits to collect damages
for infringement of labor rights.
As for the duties of the National Mediation Boar e-
lating to the settlement of labor disputes, the R- ay
Labor Act provides that main reliance shall be on n.edi-
ation and the securing of voluntary agreements between
carriers and labor organizations. Congress, in its experi-
mentation with railway labor legislation over a period
of almost fifty years, attempted to use other basic prin-
ciples of government intervention, such as arbitration,
compulsory investigation, and judicial determination of
controversies with enforcement left to pressure of public
opinion. All of these proved unsuccessful, however, and
it was found necessary to revert to mediation as the basic
method for the adjustment of labor disputes.
But as we have seen in the case of the United States
Conciliation Service, merely conferring authority to medi-
ate on government officers without imposing duties and
obligations on disputing parties with respect to mediation
is not very effective. And specific duties in connection
with the handling of different kinds of labor disputes
must also be imposed upon the mediators, as well as
policies and procedures for their guidance.
The Nation^Mediation Board is implemented by the
Railway Labor Act with all this paraphernalia for suc-
cessful mediation.
The act also provides for the protection and integrity of
the representatives chosen by the employes and for guar-
anteeing freedom from interference or coercion in the
Herblock for NEA Service
have the sit-down first?
124
SURVEY GRAPHIC
formation and operation of labor organizations. The right
to bargain collectively is guaranteed and the majority of
any craft or class of employes is given the right to deter-
mine who shall be the representative of the whole craft
or class for collective bargaining purposes. If a dispute
arises among the employes as to who is the representative,
the National Mediation Board investigates, takes a secret
ballot, and certifies those who are duly accredited.
With these rights established and recognized, collective
bargaining and the making and maintaining of agree-
ments between duly accredited representatives of the em-
ployers and the employes has become the prevailing meth-
od of organizing and defining labor relations on the rail-
roads. There are now upwards of 3500 such agreements
in effect and filed with the National Mediation Board.
The act provides that no changes shall be made in rates
of pay, rules, or working conditions covered by agree-
ments without thirty days' notice being given in writing,
and without conferences being held between representa-
tives of the parties for the purpose of agreeing on the
changes within the thirty days. While the joint confer-
ences are going on, even though they may extend beyond
the thirty days, the status quo must be maintained. Car-
riers may not change terms and conditions of employment
and employes may not strike to force changes while the
negotiations are going on.
If the parties cannot settle their differences with respect
to changes in agreements, or if the duly authorized repre-
sentatives are unable to resolve differences when they are
negotiating a new agreement, then either party, or both
of them together, may invoke the services of the National
Mediation Board to mediate the dispute. In cases of emer-
gencies the board is authorized to proffer its services.
The work of mediation is done by a board of three
members and a staff of nine mediators, all of whom must
be neutrals as between employers and employes. The me-
diators are subject to the provisions of the Civil Service
Act. They are selected for knowledge and experience in
labor relations and for skill in mediation. They are pro-
vided with a career in the service by being appointed as
junior mediators with opportunities for promotion to me-
diators and senior mediators at increased salaries.
To these mediators are assigned the ordinary run of
routine cases and most of them they succeed in adjusting.
Those that are not thus settled are usually assigned to a
member of the board, whose greater prestige sometimes
succeeds where the efforts of the mediator may have
failed. Most major disputes are handled by the senior me-
diators or individual board members, or by the board as
a whole. By their permanent tenure those engaged in the
work become acquainted with the responsible personali-
ties, both on the management and on the labor side, and
this greatly facilitates the settlement of disputes by me-
diation agreements.
But all settlements are on a voluntary basis and some-
times agreements can not be secured. When this happens,
there is a provision that the "board shall at once endeavor
as its final required action to induce the parties to submit
their controversy to arbitration in accordance with the
provisions of this Act." Many of the cases that cannot be
settled by mediation are thus submitted to a board of arbi-
tration by voluntary agreement. The act goes into great
detail as to the specific provisions that shall be embodied
in such an agreement in order to make sure that the
awards are final and binding.
If either party refuses to agree to arbitration, then the
case is closed so far as the National Mediation Board is
concerned. The parties are then free to force changes by
the exercise of their economic strength through strikes and
lockouts. By the time this stage of the proceedings has
been reached, however, all issues have been analyzed and
clarified, and some of the questions in dispute may have
been adjusted and cleared away. Unless the remaining
issues are extremely important, neither party is willing to
jeopardize by a strike or lockout the established relation-
ships that have developed out of the joint agreements over
a period of years. In many such cases, therefore, the con-
troversies are dropped after a refusal to arbitrate.
Where the issues are very important the employes, by a
ballot taken by their labor organization, decide whether
they will withdraw their services or not. If they vote to
strike and there is danger of a serious interruption of com-
merce, the Railway Labor Act provides another effort to
settle the controversy by peaceable means. The National
Mediation Board is authorized to notify the President of
the threatened strike. He may thereupon appoint an emer-
gency board to investigate the issues in the dispute and to
submit a report within thirty days. From the creation of
such a board, and for thirty days after it submits the re-
port, the status quo must again be maintained and the
strike is suspended. With very rare exceptions, the recom-
mendations contained in the reports of such emergency
boards have served as the basis for peaceful settlements of
such controversies.
V
HERE THEN is A COMPLETE SYSTEM OF CONCILIATION, MEDI-
ation, arbitration and emergency action for the adjust-
ment of all manner of labor disputes that has demonstra-
ted its effectiveness over a long period of years. With the
creation of the National Railroad Adjustment Board in
1934, by amendment to the Railway Labor Act, the last
gap in the system was closed. This board, composed of an
equal number of representatives of carriers and labor or-
ganizations has the responsibility to decide all disputes
arising out of interpretation or application of agreements.
If these members of the board deadlock and can not agree
on an award, they attempt to agree on a referee. If unable
to do so, the Mediation Board appoints the referee.
There can of course be no absolute guarantee against
strikes. Even compulsory arbitration has failed to abolish
strikes, but this system covering rail and air transportation
has demonstrated that agencies relying mainly on volun-
tary action may be effective in maintaining peace and ami-
cable labor relations. Provision is made for preventive
action by attending to disputes before they break out in
strikes, whereas the mediation activities of the United
States Conciliation Service are carried on usually after
the strikes have occurred. In this sense the Conciliation
Service of the Department of Labor may be said to be a
strike settlement agency as distinguished from the medi-
ation and arbitration agencies established by the Railway
Labor Act for the avoidance of strikes. The tie-ups in the
shipping and motor industries and the misunderstandings
that developed as to the government's methods of inter-
vention, as well as the disputes foreshadowed in the min-
ing and steel industries, make it high time that mediation
and arbitration agencies with clearly defined policies and
procedures for strike prevention be provided for all inter-
state industries not covered by the Railway Labor Act.
MARCH 1937
125
Making Democracy Work
by LUTHER GULICK
TORKAD SILL'S GOVER'MENT Cow KICKED
over the whole blamed government in
the December Survey Graphic and
started — but that's a long story. Sarah
was the cow's name, after the SERA
which was looking after the Sill fam-
ily, who lived in the house built without
"jack" on Star Route 3. This is the milk-
less cow with the crumpled hide that
tangled up in red tape: the RRA, the
SERA, the DD of the RRD of the
SRA, the CERA, and the SSD to say
nothing of the President of the USA.
Tangled in red tape; buried in memoran-
da; yellow carbons, blue carbons, white
carbons — the cow of the carbon age!
But right there was American gov-
ernment. Look underneath and this is
what you see:
A great dream, a grand, daring, intel-
ligent dream — buying and moving starv-
ing cattle from drought areas, placing
them elsewhere with families in distress,
meeting other types of need with special-
ized social service through a far-flung
organization, incidentally preserving
meat supplies for cities and rebuilding
buying power on the farm — the whole
thing directed toward great social ends
under the leadership of the President, as
the responsible chief executive of the
people's own government. That was the
dream; but here was the cow.
"Will it be said, 'Democracy was a
great dream, but it could not do the
job'?" — those are the words of President
Roosevelt in his epoch-making message
to Congress of January 12, outlining a
broad plan for the reorganization of the
executive branch of the federal govern-
ment. And he continues: "Or shall we
here and now without further delay
make it our business to see that our
American democracy is made efficient so
that it will do the job that is required
of it by the events of our time?"
The events of our time? What are
they?
In the President's message and even
more, perhaps, in the report of his
Committee on Administrative Manage-
ment* which he has incorporated in his
program, reference is made to some of
the outstanding events. Among these one
may find:
The going down of self-government,
liberty, free opportunity, and human dig-
nity all over the world in many lands;
The threat to American democracy
* ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT IN THE GOVERN-
MENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Jan. 1937. (Super-
intendent of Documents. Washington, D. C.
Price 15 cents.)
"The forward march of American democracy at this point of our history depends
more upon effective management than upon any other single factor. The times demand
better governmental organization, staffed with more competent public servants, more
free to do their best, and coordinated by an executive accountable to the Congress and
fully equipped with modern tools of management."
Thus concludes the report of the President's Committee on Administrative Man-
agement, here interpreted by Luther Gulick, who with Charles E. Merriam of the
University of Chicago and Louis Brownlow, composed the expert committee of three.
In 1933, Survey Graphic published a special issue interpreting President Hoover's
Research Committee on Social Trends, of which Professor Merriam was vice-chairman.
Then Professor Merriam posed the question: "How shall we blend the skills of gov-
ernment, industrial and financial management, labor and science in a new synthesis
of authority, uniting power and responsibility . . . able to deal effectively with the
revolutionary developments of our social, economic and scientific life, yet without
stifling liberty, justice and progress?" In part an answer to that question, the Admin-
istrative Management report is an attempt to blueprint an efficient future for the
executive branch of the government which, with new functions in new times, has
"grown like a weed in a wet springtime. . . ."
In having Louis Brownlow, chairman of the committee, as guest speaker at the
Annual Meeting of Survey Associates in New York on February 18, we have given
our readers a unique glimpse of the united minds and different personalities of all
three of the President's experts.
arising from its own administrative in-
adequacy;
The extraordinary waste of national
resources without attention to their equi-
table award, and of human resources
without appreciation of the conse-
quences;
The increasing discrepancy between
the ideals of American democracy and
the achievements of American life;
The growing gap between scientific in-
vention and industrial efficiency on one
side, and social invention and govern-
mental effectiveness on the other;
The anachronism of the spoils system
in an age of technology, and the inap-
propriateness of a planless governmental
structure in days of strenuous activity;
The extension of the task of govern-
ment into new areas of human life in
response to national needs and public
will.
No one can deny or ignore these
facts. They are a new challenge to our
generation. And not one of them can be
dealt with effectively without good ad-
ministrative machinery.
The Committee's Assignment
To TRACK DOWN BAD MANAGEMENT IN
our government, and to work out the
ways and means of starting good man-
agement, were the tasks assigned by the
President to Louis Brownlow, Charles
E. Merriam, and Luther Gulick. The
work was commenced in March 1936,
though it had been the subject of ad-
vance planning and negotiation by the
President for many onths. Immedi-
ately the committee /ught to its aid a
staff of specialist : government and
administration fro.n the leading re-
search and academic centers, and pro-
ceeded to talk with scores of men and
women intimately participating in the
work of the federal government. Busi-
ness practice was reexamined and the re-
cent governmental experience of Eng-
land and France was studied at first
hand.
After the November elections, but not
before, the committee conferred exten-
sively with the members of the Cabinet,
with the heads of independent establish-
ments, and with the President. On Jack-
son Day, January 8, 1937, one hundred
years after President Jackson, the reputed
father of the spoils system, left the White
House, the committee walked past his
rampant statue into the same White
House to deliver their report on admin-
istrative management with its construct-
ive modern substitute for spoils.
Diagr&teis
BAD MANAGEMENT WAS TRACKED DOWN.
It was identified, and described.
"The normal managerial agencies de-
signed to assist the Executive in think-
ing, planning, and managing, which
126
SURVEY GRAPHIC
one would expect to find in any large
scale organization, are either undevel-
oped or lacking.
"For purposes of management, boards
and commissions have turned out to be
failures. Their mechanism is inevitably
slow, cumbersome, wasteful, and inef-
fective, and does not lend itself readily
to cooperation with other agencies. Even
strong men on the boards find that
their individual opinions are watered
down in reaching board decisions.
"Owing to the multiplicity of agen-
cies and the lack of administrative man-
agement there is waste, overlapping,
and duplication, which may be elimina-
ted through coordination, consolidation,
and proper managerial control."
Prescription
BEFORE OUTLINING A CURE FOR UNCLE
Sam, the committee stated in three para-
graphs how governmental efficiency is
achieved:
"The efficiency of government rests
upon two factors: the consent of the
governed and good management. In a
democracy consent may be achieved
readily, though not without some effort,
as it is the cornerstone of the constitu-
tion. Efficient management in a democ-
racy is thus a factor of peculiar signifi-
cance.
"Administrative efficiency is not mere-
ly a matter of paper clips, time clocks,
and standardized economies of motion.
These are but minor gadgets. Real effi-
ciency goes much deeper down. It must
be built into the structure of a govern-
ment just as it is built into a piece of
machinery.
"Fortunately the foundation of effect-
ive management in public affairs, no less
than in private, are well known . . .
the establishment of a responsible and
effective chief executive as the center of
energy, direction, and administrative
management; the systematic organiza-
tion of all activities in the hands of
qualified personnel under the direction
of the chief executive; and to aid him in
this, the establishment of appropriate
managerial and staff agencies. There
must also be provision for planning, a
complete fiscal system, and means for
holding the Executive accountable for
his program.
Treatment
THE METHOD OF APPLYING THESE PRIN-
ciples to the government of the United
States as recommended by the President
and by the committee, is as follows:
1. Expand the White House staff so
that the President may have a sufficient
group of able assistants in his own office
to keep him in closer and easier touch
with the widespread affairs of adminis-
tration and to make a speedier clearance
of the knowledge needed for executive
decision;
2. Strengthen and develop the man-
agerial agencies of the government, par-
ticularly those dealing with the budget,
efficiency research, personnel, and plan-
ning, as management arms of the Chief
Executive;
3. Extend the merit system upward,
outward, and downward to cover all
non-policy-determining posts; reorganize
the civil service system as a part of man-
agement under a single responsible ad-
ministrator, strengthening the Civil Ser-
vice Commission as a citizen Civil Ser-
vice Board to serve as the watchdog of
the merit system; and increase the sal-
aries of key posts throughout the service
so that the government may attract and
hold in a career service men and women
of the highest ability and character;
4. Overhaul the 134 independent
agencies, administrations, authorities,
boards, and commissions, and place them
by executive order within one or the
other of the following twelve major ex-
ecutive departments: State, Treasury,
War, Justice, Post Office, Navy, Con-
servation, Agriculture, Commerce, La-
bor, Social Welfare, and Public Works;
and place upon the Executive continu-
ing responsibility for the maintenance
of effective organization;
5. Establish accountability of the Ex-
ecutive to the Congress by providing a
genuine independent post-audit of all
fiscal transactions by an auditor general,
and restore to the Executive complete
responsibility for accounts and current
financial transactions.
Significance of the Program
IT IS A STRANGE FACT THAT THIS IS A "REV-
olutionary program" though not a single
element of it is original or revolutionary!
The Hearst Washington Evening Times
under three page-wide headlines called
it, "the most sweeping rearrangement of
executive functions of government ever
drafted since the founding of the Re-
public"; while at the other extreme,
Walter Lippmann observed: "This is a
radical scheme which seeks to cure the
organic political defects of the federal
government. The President spoke of the
report which he transmitted as 'a great
document.' It is a great document, not
because all of its specific proposals are
necessarily great or wise or even well-
considered, but because the report has
raised with such understanding, and
would begin to remedy with such cour-
age, the really great difficulties which
have developed in the operation of the
government over a period of a hundred
years."
But every element in the program is
well known and tested. The world is full
of executives with able anonymous ex-
ecutive assistants, though some editors
and reporters, who themselves live in a
world of unmatched anonymity, ask,
"Where can you find a first rate man
who would be willing to remain un-
known?" There are scores of them in
Washington now.
The budget isn't new; nor is efficiency
research. Personal administration is an
old story. Some of the departments, all
too few, are doing now almost what is
recommended, though on a narrow base.
The type of planning suggested has been
going on for three years with increas-
ing effectiveness and the use of long
known technique of economic, social,
and engineering research and interdis-
ciplinary and interdepartmental coopera-
tion.
The wiping out of spoils and patron-
age already achieved in some local gov-
ernments and abroad, has been promised
on a national scale before, and was much
discussed by both parties during the last
campaign. The whole program of "ca-
reer service" has been understood and
endorsed at least since 1935 when all
groups contributed in formulating the
program of the Commission of Inquiry
on Public Service Personnel.
Similarly, the rationalization of gov-
ernment activities by gathering into
logical working relationships all of the
departments, bureaus, boards, commis-
sions, committees, administration, au-
thorities, and scattered activities, is not
a new proposal. Presidents Theodore
Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and
Hoover have all dealt with the problem,
and the strong and able governors of a
score of states have done the job in
varying degrees.
The reformation of the office of the
comptroller general, and the establish-
ment of a true independent audit in or-
der to establish fiscal accountability,
come directly out of American private
business and semi-public business, and
are the recognized standard for most
local governments. It follows the plan
operating satisfactorily in several states,
notably Maine and Virginia. Though
problems of fiscal control are technical,
and at times beyond the grasp of the
layman, it does not require an expert to
see that an auditor who participates in
management by making advance de-
cisions, as does the comptroller general
now, disqualifies himself as an auditor
of the completed process, just as would
the inspector of woolen goods, if he
stood by the loom and gave advice to
the weaver in laying on the threads.
Audit and management don't mix.
If none of these elements is new,
wherein lies the "novelty" and the "sig-
nificance" of the President's Five Point
Program? In these factors:
1. The President is in earnest. He
means business. He has delivered four
great messages to Congress and to the
nation since the election. In every one
he has dealt either broadly or specific-
ally with the reorganization of admin-
istration.
MARCH 1937
127
2. It is a thoroughly nonpartisan pro-
gram. Its most significant endorsement
has come from national leaders not pri-
marily in politics, and from the great
citizen organizations. Though it is put
forward by the Democratic Party leader,
it has received hearty support from Re-
publicans.
3. The time is ripe. The need is great
and universally recognized, the power
to act is there, leadership is informed,
public opinion is aroused;
4. The program is geared to the tem-
per of these times and the desires of the
nation. It embodies the genius of Amer-
ica, the traditions of our Constitution
and our people; and
5. The program is an integrated
whole, dealing with fundamental prob-
lems, and is not just a bundle of effi-
ciency gadgets or a patch here and a
patch there. You can see in it woven
together the best thinking of the Taft
Efficiency and Economy Commission,
the Commission of Inquiry on Public
Service Personnel, the National Civil
Service Reform League, the National
Federation of Federal Employes, the
League of Women Voters, the United
States Chamber of Commerce, the
Brookings Institution, the Institute of
Public Administration, the American
Council on Education, the American
Public Health Association, the Ameri-
can Public Welfare Association, the
American Association of Social Work-
ers, American Federation of Government
Employes, and every other group that
has devoted itself to governmental ad-
ministration. As such the program is a
translation in terms of modern man-
agement of the basic purposes and de-
sires of American democracy.
Leadership and Democracy
No ONE CAN DISAGREE WITH THE UNDER-
lying notion that powerful responsible
leadership is the key to effective democ-
racy. In these days government must
get on with the job if whole nations are
not to be engulfed in social, economic,
and political chaos. This calls for strong
executive power. Let there be no mis-
take about this.
Fortunately the American Constitution
was written by men who knew this and
whose capacity for social invention gave
us in the President a powerful and at
the same time a responsible executive.
Back to the Constitution
THE PROGRAM OF THE COMMITTEE IS DE-
signed to take us back to the Constitu-
tion, and to make the power of the Pres-
idency for action commensurate with his
responsibilities under the Constitution.
Funneling all the executive work of the
government through twelve departments,
each under a Cabinet officer is the first
step in this direction. How can any
executive pretend to coordinate and su-
pervise the 134 independent agencies and
activities of the present Washington set-
up and deal directly with the hundreds
of individuals who come to see him dur-
ing a week concerning important mat-
ters of administration? How can action
be intelligent which is rushed and based
often on part of the facts? Yet there
must be this supervision because the
Presidency is the link to democracy. If
that link is broken, you have conflicting
policy and jealousy, and irresponsible
little bureaucracies each going its own
way, substituting its judgment for the
popular will. The job has to be made
manageable.
The Departmental Plan
THE NEW DEPARTMENTAL SET-UP SUC-
gested is one essential step in this direc-
tion. Other steps are the expansion of
the White House staff by the addition of
six executive assistants, the development
of the managerial arms of the executive
(budget, personnel, and planning), the
introduction of complete career service,
and the improvement of the fiscal
system.
In reorganizing the government you
do not start with a clean slate. You start
with 1,122,059* men and women who are
already at work in organizations which
have for the most part grown up over
the years. The great mass of these men
and women are proud of their work.
They don't want to be disturbed any
more than you or I. This is partly a nat-
ural human reaction and partly loyalty
OF, BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE
The first paragraph of the Administrative
Management Report.
"The government of the United States it
the largest and most difficult task under-
taken by the American people, and at the
same time the most important and the
noblest. Our government does more for
more men, women, and children than any
other institution; it employs more persons
in its work than any other employer. It
covers a wider range of aims and activities
than any other enterprise; it sustains the
frame of our national and our community
life, our economic system, our individual
rights and liberties. Moreover, it is a gov-
ernment of, by, and for the people — a
democracy that has survived for a century
and a half and flourished among compet-
ing forms of government of many different
types and colors, old and new. . . . Our
goal is the constant raising of the level of
the happiness and dignity of human life, the
steady sharing of the gains of our Nation,
whether material or spiritual, among those
who make the Nation what it is."
to their work. To quote the report:
"Government is not a machine, which
can be taken apart, redesigned, and put
together again on the basis of mechan-
ical laws. It is more akin to a living or-
ganism."
The plan of the committee, therefore,
accepts the present departments without
great change and adds two new depart-
ments to house the two great new
"thrusts of American purpose" for which
there is no suitable departmental home.
The new departments recommended are
social welfare and public works.
Human Betterment
THE PROPOSED NEW DEPARTMENT OF
social welfare is in reality a department
of human betterment, and as such will
bring together those activities of the gov-
ernment which deal with the develop-
ment and life of the individual as a
human being and as a consumer, freed
from his interests as owner and producer.
With this as a guiding idea, the de-
partment might include public health,
public education, public welfare, federal
public institutions, consumer activities,
and that part of social security which
deals with benefits on the basis of need,
the remainder going to the Department
of Labor, where it may be handled better
in connection with payrolls.
The report does not spell out pre-
cisely just what will be done with each
activity because it is felt that this must
be worked out by the Executive after
research and conference with those most
directly involved. But the committee
does recommend that all activities be tied
into some departmental home in due
course so that the whole government
may be made manageable and answer-
able to the public will.
Over-Centralization
"GOVERNMENT SHOULD, OF COURSE," SAYS
the committee, "be carried to the people
through the decentralization of the
Washington departments, partly to make
it fit their needs, and partly to keep it
from becoming distant and bureaucratic,
but this decentralization need not be cha-
otic and conflicting, provided it is prop-
erly integrated at the center and subject
to overall management."
Right here the "Gover'ment Cow" puts
in her appearance again. With better
organization in Washington, greater
decentralization to the field, and a ca-
reer personnel competent to exercise dis
cretion and to cooperate with state and
local institutions, Torkad Sill's cow
would never have been heard of out-
side cSL Cooper County. When the cow
goes over the fence, the administrator
must be able at least to crawl under
without carrying the matter for approval
to the President.
'June 30, 1936, including military and naval
forces.
128
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Little Hitler
by JULIAN S. BACH, JR.
A portrait of Sir Oswald Mosley, who, wearing Mussolini's shirt
and borrowing Hitler's anti-Jewish tactics, has created an unpre-
dictable fascist undercurrent in Great Britain
LAST OCTOBER THERE WERE BARRICADES IN LONDON FOR THE
first time within living memory; today there is Jew-baiting
on the streets of the East End ; and a new British law for-
bids the Blackshirt private army to wear military trap-
pings. Thus English fascism, once a souring movement,
has ripened. While it may be "blarney" to the patrons of
the Savoy and meaningless to the crowds at Saturday's
rugger match, political circles know that, bury their heads
as they will, a revivified opponent may eventually have
to be looked in the face. Sir Oswald Mosley 's German
operatics have resulted in a genuine anti-Semitic con-
sciousness in many British minds. With a typically Eng-
lish background Mosley leads a distinctly un-English
movement. Bearing the ancient family motto — Custom
rules the Law — he has defied custom. His background is
top drawer England. Educated at Winchester and Sand-
hurst, he comes from an old and wealthy family — an an-
cestor having fallen at Naseby, and his father, the physical
replica of John Bull, having been commonly known as
"The Ideal Squire." Typically, Mosley entered Parliament
in 1918, at the age of 22, as a Conservative. On the open-
ing day he got a shock from which he never recovered —
the first sight of his colleagues. They were old. Thence-
forth he began his immediate and constant campaign
against "hard-faced men" and "entrenched old age."
Youth must be served — that is the chief theme of his
strangely orchestrated history. It is the sharp recoil of a
generation that knew "liquid fire for mother's milk and
bombs for cricket balls."
A born fighter, he was not a great observer of parlia-
mentary punctilios. Persuasive and dexterous, it was not
long before he was spotted as "a star of no common bright-
ness," a future prime minister perhaps. A happy alliance
made this even more probable. In 1920 he married charm-
ing, intelligent and wealthy Cynthia Curzon, Lord Cur-
zon's daughter. They were married in the Royal Chapel,
by special permission of the King. The kings and queens
of Great Britain and of Belgium attended. Mosley 's future
seemed assured.
But the prophets forgot the one thing that could change
it — Mosley himself. His chief trait (and greatest fault) is
an overwhelming ambition. His ego is profound. What is
today his fascist "Leader principle" was then the tremen-
dous desire of a young politician to get places. His marked
intellectual promiscuity made him an impossible subordi-
nate. Convinced that "the war destroyed the old party
issues, and with them the old parties," he lacked the nec-
essary patience for climbing the slow and arduous rungs
of the party ladder. In 1920, Mosley declared himself an
Independent.
Four years later the second drastic step into rebellion
International
Sir Oswald Mosley
was taken when Sir Oswald
and Lady Cynthia an-
nounced that they were now
Socialists. This was too
much for his father, who
described him as a man who
"has never done a day's
work in his life." At that
time the Mosleys saw Eng-
land's salvation in the reju-
venation of her masses
through a gradual and con-
stitutional socialist revolu-
tion. But having thus salved
their consciences, they did
not hesitate to continue stuff-
ing their pockets with a for-
tune perpetuating itself on
unearned increment. For if
one inherits $1,235,555 worth
of land and another $1,535,000 outright, and if one's wife
inherits an annual income of $140,000 life can, if one is
clever, become quite enjoyable. With the agility of two
ghosts the Mosleys moved about in their slum constitu-
encies in an old broken-down car, to their society life
in their 250 h.p. Mercedes. In the former one masquerades
in workingman's clothes and "personally prefers beer to
any other drink," while, on the other side of Hyde Park,
one buys two adjoining houses, turns them into one solid
"comrade's mansion" of sixteen rooms, and spends the
evening in Mayfair or at White's, London's swankiest
men's club. Not enough, the Red Squire bought a fine
country estate and, after Parliament recessed, vacationed
at Cap d'Antibes. With consistent inconsistency the Mos-
leys preached socialism and gave the finest party of the
Riviera season at their Villa Garup, where Elsie de Wolfe,
now Lady Mendl, once lived. There, between swims, they
saw a good deal of such colorful international celebrities
as George Bernard Shaw and H. L. Mencken.
The hosannas which greeted Mosley when he joined
Labor were due to the obvious truth that, at the time, he
was quite a catch. Unlike politicians of the old school, Sir
Oswald was "full of beans and bounce." And he could
finance his own campaigns. Campaigning vigorously, he
cut Neville Chamberlain's traditional Conservative ma-
jority in his Birmingham stronghold to a paltry seventy-
seven votes. Ironically, when some of the Labor meetings
of the present fascist leader were broken up by earlier
fascists, he called them "black-shirted buffoons making a
cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers . . . slavishly, but inef-
fectually (imitating) the latest frenzy of continental
MARCH 1937
129
hysterics." As a Socialist he liked to be called "Tom" and
Lady Cynthia was just "plain Missus." Ramsay MacDon-
ald, seeing an up-and-coming protege in Mosley and find-
ing the gracious Lady Cynthia an invaluable social hostess,
spent a vacation with the Mosleys in Vienna. In 1927, Sir
Oswald was elected to the party's Executive, and when
Labor won office in 1929, he received a ministerial sine-
cure. As assistant to J. H. Thomas, the Minister of Labor,
Mosley was closely associated with the government's relief
program. Putting himself before his party again, and
standing on brittle ground with his senior minister, Mos-
ley started his second bolt in 1930 by denouncing the gov-
ernment's relief policy and issuing the Mosley Memoran-
dum, which sought pensions for all over sixty and a $1,-
250,000,000 public works scheme. This appealed tremen-
dously to the left-wing faction of the party. But to Mac-
Donald and Snowden it was anathema. Challenged, Labor
finally agreed to disagree, and in a party vote the Mosley
faction proved to be an unexpectedly large minority. Nev-
ertheless this was defeat. Speaking brilliantly for seventy-
two minutes without a note, he resigned from the govern-
ment, and soon afterward from the Labor Party itself.
Along with seventeen leading secessionists, he issued the
Mosley Manifesto proposing a policy of economic nation-
alism as opposed to the free trade and internationalist
policy of the Socialists, and calling for a dictatorial council
of five to replace the Cabinet. On such a basis, Mosley,
together with the seven renegades who still followed him,
founded the New Party. Its first campaign met dismal
defeat.
I recollect [wrote John Strachey, at whose wedding Mosley
was best man] the figure of Mosley standing on the town hall
steps at Ashton-under-Lyne, facing the enormous crowd.
. . . The result of the election had just been announced, and
it was seen that the intervention of the New Party had de-
feated the Labor candidate and elected the Conservative. The
crowd consisted of most of the keenest workers in the Labor
Party. . . . The crowd was violently hostile to Mosley and
the New Party. It roared at him, and, as he stood facing it, he
said to me: "That is the crowd that has prevented anyone
doing anything in England since the war." At that moment
British fascism was born.
That was 1931. Mosley had turned a large political som-
ersault. A conservative had turned revolutionist. As his
book had argued it was to be "Revolution by Reason;"
his program was strongly protectionist in economics,
strongly nationalist in politics. What the Communists had
perceived a long while back, his more radical associates
now realized: his socialism was essentially anemic. From
this it was an easy step to fascism. Progressively he turned
from economics to politics, from an intellectual exercise to
an emotional appeal — from revolution by reason to revo-
lution by instinct. In private he began talking about a cor-
porate state, dictatorship, nationalism and imperialism. In
1932 he visited Mussolini. In the fall of that year what
had long been implicit became explicit. His British Union
of Fascists was organized.
THERE HAD BEEN FASCISTS BEFORE IN GREAT BRITAIN. IN
1923 Miss Linton-Orman, an amazing Amazon of a wo-
man who had fought in the trenches with the Serbian
Army, organized the British Fascisti. After its highwater
mark during the General Strike, one of its members, ex-
Major Arnold S. Leese, set up the Imperial Fascist League.
Linton-Orman's and Leese's movements were inconse-
quential. Mosley soon swallowed up most of their follow-
ing and whatever limelight the general press begrudgingly
gave. Today he may have 200,000 organized followers.
(The official claim is five hundred thousand dues-paying
members and perhaps four million sympathizers; but no
outside observer would agree.) It is a fact, though, that the
B.U.F. has four to five hundred headquarters in the Brit-
ish Isles, and that it may run one hundred candidates at
the next election.
Originally Mussolini served as Mosley 's model. While
he has never advocated Mussolini's theories in regard to
population and women, he has always favored: the cor-
porate state; the nationalization of finance capital; pro-
tectionism, nationalism, and imperialism; a dictatorship
functioning through a reorganized Parliament based on
"occupational" representation. With due regard to Eng-
lish idiosyncrasies, he definitely believes that much of the
violence and repression connected with continental fas-
cism can be avoided. Ultimately these mundane aspects of
Fascist rule will be "in very exact proportion to the de-
gree of chaos which precedes it."
The organization of the B.U.F. has always been mili-
tary, its central core being composed of a well-disciplined
private army of Blackshirts, men and women, and a youth
movement of Greyshirts. Military terms such as G.H.Q.,
"leave," "canteen," and "Defence Force" are employed.
At the beginning there was no official anti-Semitism.
The result of this rather academic policy was that at the
end of two years the B.U.F. was getting nowhere. Mosley 's
leading statement of policy, "The Greater Britain," was
dull. And nobody cared. So Mosley 's time started to be
punctuated by trips to Berlin. The new model became
Nazi. On Goebbel's advice, tactics were changed. (This was
also due partly to the fact that Lady Cynthia, who was a
restraining influence, died in 1933.) The B.U.F. became
violently anti-Semitic, extremely provocative. Nazi poli-
tics were thus added to Italian economics.
Although there are only between 300,000 and 350,000
Jews in England, it has been found that the organized
Fascist movement cannot achieve the publicity so neces-
sary to it without broadcasting the Jewish bugaboo. What
better than to collect all the class hatreds, the political, cul-
tural, religious and racial differences into one embracing
mass and call it the Jewish menace? Fascist economics are
every phrase as dull as capitalist or communist economics.
Masses can be reached through their emotions, not their
intellects.
Jew-baiting is the core of today's English fascism. With-
out it Mosley's movement would have stagnated. "The
yids, the yids, we must get rid of the yids." To do this
Mosley demands that their citizenship rights be taken
away, and that those Jews who are Communists be
shipped to Russia.
Hitler's brownshirted attack on the heart of Red Ber-
lin in 1928 is consciously copied in the new Mosley policy.
More than anything else English fascism needs a martyr.
An English Horst Wessel would be a great boon. By hold-
ing a demonstration in the very heart of the enemy's
camp you create a sensation, maybe provoke a counter-
demonstration which lea$fc to violence. All the merrier if
the exasperated anti-Fascists strike the first blow. If your
opponent lies low, you have won a moral victory on his
own ground. Such tactics led to "Bloody Sunday" last
October in London's East End, and to previous disturb-
ances in the Jewish areas of Manchester and Leeds. The
130
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Wide World
At the new Blackshirt headquarters in Sloane Square, London
East End has a large Jewish and also a large Communist
population. When the Blackshirts decided to parade
through the district, an estimated 100,000 anti-Fascists
poured into the streets to prevent their passage. Barricades
were erected. And though the police called off Mosley's
march at the last minute, the day ended with hundreds
of arrests on both sides. If, as a result, public opinion was
aroused against the Fascists, they cared little; for the issue
was raised, the publicity gained. That is their strategy.
FOLLOWING THE EXAMPLES OF SCANDINAVIA AND THE MAN-
chester Town Council, Parliament recently passed a Gov-
ernment Public Order Bill prohibiting the wearing of uni-
forms in connection with political objects and the mainte-
nance by private persons or associations of military or
similar character, and further providing for the preserva-
tion of public order, especially in London. While the law
is as stringent as the most sanguinary anti-Fascists had
ever hoped for, and though these proposals represent defin-
ite cures to certain observers, the writer entertains no such
optimistic view. Admitting that the party uniform is the
most provocative and effectual method of propaganda, it
is still obvious that organized English fascism, both in
its economic and anti-Semitic appeal, rises from depths
which mere legislation on the surface cannot plug. At
heart, it is a youth movement politically and a middle
class one economically, springing, as it does, out of deep
economic depression and an intangible but very real feel-
ing that the established and traditional ways of doing
things are no longer valid. The majority of Mosley's fol-
lowers are young people who are so constituted psycholog-
ically that they must have a Cause with a capital "C."
Many of them were formerly radicals or Tory imperialists,
brothers under the skin, since both are militant extremes.
As the title of Mosley's weekly manifests, they want action.
Among the older men who follow the "Leader" are a
staggering lot of retired officers who enjoy the military
discipline and organization and who would like to hear
the British lion roar. The B.U.F. also enjoys what H. N.
Brailsford has called "a decorative fringe of aristocratic
patrons." In 1934 the wealthy and aristocratic January
Club Was formed to provide "a platform for leaders of
fascism and corporate state thought." Although the club
only lasted a year (Mosley got too hot to play ball with
when the Jew-baiting started), sympathy and quite prob-
ably financial aid has come from very important men.
The persistent rumor, vehemently denied in Fascist cir-
cles, that Mosley receives money from Germany and may-
be Italy came much nearer verification not long ago when
Sir John Simon created a sensation by telling Parliament
that, although he could not divulge details, he had infor-
mation showing that both the Communists and the Fas-
cists were having their funds "supplemented from abroad."
Mosley countered that "this is part of the Parliamentary
frame-up." Yet he has friends in Parliament, who, like
Arnold Wilson, are "the honest type of Tory die-hard."
Journalistic help came for a time from Lord Rothermere's
great chain of papers, one of whose former editors, Sir
John Squire, was chairman of. the January Club. Octogen-
arian and eccentric Lady Houston, who died only recently,
contributed enthusiastic journalistic support through the
Saturday Review and from her $50 million shipping in-
heritance, some financial assistance. The rear guard is
made up of such anti-Semitic groups as Colonel Boulton's
Unity Band, and the Militant Christians.
OPTIMISTS COMMONLY CLAIM THAT THE CURRENT TREND
toward recovery will destroy Mosley's organization. True,
prosperity will hamper its growth. But he is waiting for
the next depression. History may then repeat itself, and
should another Labor Government take office the Con-
servatives will find ready allies in the Fascists. The subtle
history of Mosley's organization consists in the gradual
whittling down of its socialist fibers. If Labor is again
opportunistic, its disillusioned adherents may turn to fas-
cism. If, on the other hand, it tries to socialize industry, a
new Red scare will frighten the land, except that this
time the choice will be made to appear either fascism or
communism, not, as in 1931, democratic Labor or demo-
cratic conservatism. For it is the peculiarity of fascism as
opposed to other political techniques, that, growing mostly
at the expense of its rivals, it is not positive, but negative.
Forgetting individual exceptions, especially in the earlier
stages, the basic motive for becoming an out-and-out
Fascist is not because one favors something, but because
one fears something. It is a hymn, not an argument; and
to argue against it logically is unavailing. "It is faith,"
said Mussolini, "that moves mountains; not reason." That
is precisely what Mosley has learned. Whether he himself
will ever remain at the helm should fascism become wide-
spread is a bit doubtful. He is the best orator in England,
an able administrator, a crafty opportunist, a very brave
person. But he is too aristocratic, too vacillating, and fun-
damentally, too intellectual for his own advantage. He
cannot inspire. Nor would any of his present subordinates
fill the role. Some of them, in fact, are dubious followers.
But time will decide that, as it will also tell to just what
stature England's Little Hitler matures. He is, after all,
still in the adolescent stage of unrestrained irresponsibility.
MARCH 1937
131
Treasury Department Art Projects
TVA — SYMBOLS OF JUSTICE — GOLD CASE
Fresco murals in the Department of Justice Building BY HENRY VARNUM POOR
Listening In on the Supreme Court
by BEULAH AMIDON
The drama, the arguments, the briefs and the men that will shape the forth-
coming decisions on the constitutionality of the Labor Acts, as seen by a
Survey Graphic editor at the historic Supreme Court hearings in February
THE SCENE HAS OFTEN BEEN DESCRIBED — THE LOFTY ROOM
with its great marble columns and crimson hangings,
the nine black robed judges in their higl. place, the
hurrying pages, the picturesque ritual of the Court's
entrance, the array of "learned Counsel," the drone of
legal phrase and argument. From the vantage point of a
seat almost within arm's reach of the bench, the chamber
of the Supreme Court of the United States was an im-
pressive spectacle during the second week in February,
when the Justices were hearing arguments in the six
"labor cases." Every one of the red-cushioned seats in the
spectators' section was occupied, and a long queue of
visitors stood two abreast in the marble corridor outside,
waiting a turn to enter the courtroom, where standees
are not permitted. But the spectators during those tense
days, as they strained to hear and understand, seemed to
be trying to reach the realities that underlie this colorful
surface. And, because of the current agitation about the
Court, it might be useful for one visitor to try to set
down some impressions of those days — not the details of
the cases (see page 134) but the kind of materials the
nine Justices took into the conference room as the basis
for whatever decision they may render.
In these, as in most cases, the Supreme Court was twice
removed from the hurly-burly of the trial. Except in those
unusual cases "affecting Ambassadors, other public Min-
isters and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be
a Party," the highest court has no original jurisdiction.
The examination of witnesses and determination of facts
take place in the lower court, or, in the five Wagner Act
cases, before the Labor Board. In presenting their cause
to the Court, attorneys therefore have a two-fold task.
They must try to give as background the situation out of
which the case arose, and they must put forward the con-
siderations of law and of precedent on which they rely
for a favorable verdict.
But in this highest appellate court, the issue of life and
death for a law creates a sense of drama, and there was a
quickening stir in the courtroom when the stately Chief
Justice started the Railway Labor Act on its way to con-
stitutionality or oblivion by leaning forward and an-
nouncing conversationally, "The Virginian Railway
Company versus System Federation No. 40, Railway
Employes Department of the American Federation of
Labor, et al."
As the case was called, a page placed on each Justice's
desk a copy of the record and of the briefs for both sides.
The record includes copies of the complaint and plead-
ings, a transcript of all the evidence, decisions and orders
of lower courts, certifications that all these are "true
copies" of the originals. This printed record is often a
MARCH 1937
bulky volume. That in the Jones and Laughlin case, for
instance, runs close to a thousand pages.
WHEN ORATORY WAS IN ITS HEYDAY, ARGUMENT AT THE BAR
was long (nine days in the McCardle case) and eloquent.
The Supreme Court calendar now includes more than a
thousand cases a year, and, since the 1925 Judiciary Act
and the "speed up" program initiated by Chief Justice
Taft and continued by Chief Justice Hughes, the Court
has managed to keep abreast of this crowded docket.
There is no time, today, for such forensic marathons as
the Court used to hear. The lawyers now depend on logic,
clarity and a good brief rather than on emotion and fine
language to make their case. When a fire-eating Vir-
ginian went in for passion and gestures on behalf of the
Friedman-Harry Marks Clothing Company, the Court
was frankly restless. Unlike the spectators, a Justice in
such moments can refresh himself with a drink of water.
In addition to getting law reports and carrying papers
and documents, one of the duties of the pages is to water
the Court, presenting the glass correctly on a silver tray
over the left shoulder. Some of the Justices seem to have
a chronic thirst, but in moments of real boredom, all ex-
cept the Chief Justice usually want water. It is of all their
privileges the one spectators are most likely to envy as
the session moves along toward mid-afternoon.
Promptly at 4:30, the day's work ends. Even though
counsel at the bar is in the middle of a sentence, when
the hands of the big gold clock reach that moment, the
Chief Justice leans forward, says, "We will hear you
further tomorrow, Sir." The clerk gives the signal, every-
one stands up, the Honorable Court files out. A seasoned
lawyer will sometimes take advantage of this arbitrary
custom. John W. Davis, arguing for the Associated Press,
seemed deliberately to cut short his peroration at 4:20, so
that the government's spokesman would have to make an
awkward ten-minute opening, and resume in mid-
flight the following noon.
The Justices themselves often participate in the discus-
sion. Thus in the case of the Washington, Virginia and
Maryland Bus Company, Mr. Justice Brandeis interrupted
a summary of facts by the employer's lawyer with the
quiet question, "How do the findings of the lower court
agree with your statement?" Sometimes students of the
Court see in the questions from the bench an indication
of how the judicial mind is "taking" the argument. There
was, for instance, a lot of head wagging when the solicitor
general was interrupted in the course of his argument as
to the effect of labor disturbances on the "flow of com-
merce." Two of the "conservatives," gentle, affable Justice
Sutherland and irascible Justice McReynolds asked ques-
133
TRIUMPH OF IUSTICK
Mural designs by Leon Kroll
DEFEAT OF JUSTICE
The Six Labor Cases
IN THE FIRST FOUR CASES, THE COMPANIES HOLD THAT THEY
are engaged in manufacturing, which the U. S. Su-
preme Court has declared to be intrastate commerce,
and that the National Labor Relations Act therefore
does not apply to them. They also hold that the Act
is unconstitutional in its entirety under the "due proc-
ess" clause of the Fifth Amendment; and under the
Seventh Amendment guaranteeing the right to trial
by jury.
1. The Associated Press v. National Labor Relations
Board: The board ordered AP to reinstate a discharged
employe, holding that evidence produced at the hearings
showed he was dismissed solely because of his membership
and activity in the American Newspaper Guild, a labor
organization. The order was affirmed by the U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, and AP carried the case to the U.S.
Supreme Court. In addition to the questions raised in the
other cases, AP maintains that, as here applied the Labor
Relations Act violates the free speech and free press guar-
antees of the Constitution.
2. N.L.R.B. v. Fruehauf Trailer Co.: The board ordered
the company to "cease and desist" from its anti-union
activities which, according to the record, included some
spectacular espionage, and to reinstate seven discharged
workers with compensation for time lost. The U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals upheld the Fruehauf Trailer Co., ques-
tioning the constitutionality of the Labor Relations Act,
and the board appealed from that decision.
3. N.L.R.B. v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation:
Beaver Valley Lodge No. 200 of the Almagamated Asso-
ciation of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers complained to a
regional labor board that Jones and Laughlin, a large steel
corporation with some 22,000 employes, was violating the
Labor Relations Act. After holding hearings, the board
found the complaint justified, and ordered Jones and
Laughlin to "cease and desist" from interfering with the
organization of its workers, and to reinstate "with all
rights and privileges previously enjoyed" ten active union
leaders dismissed from the Aliquippa Works. The U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Jones and Laughlin and
the Labor Board appealed.
4. N.L.R.B. v. Friedman-Harry Marks Clothing Co.,
Inc.: This is a consolidation of two cases, both based on
complaints by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America against a Richmond, Va. garment firm. In both
cases, the board found that the concern had "interfered
with, restrained and coerced its employes in the exercise of
the rights guaranteed" under the Labor Relations Act.
The board ordered the firm to change its ways, and to rein-
state the dismissed workers on whose behalf the complaints
were filed. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found for
the company, and the board appealed.
THE FIFTH CASE ADMITTEDLY CONCERNS INTERSTATE COM-
merce, but the company attacks the law as a violation
of the "due process" clause, as unlawfully delegating
judicial authority to the National Labor Relations
Board and as depriving it of the right to trial by jury.
5. Washington, Virginia and Maryland Coach Co. v.
N.L.R.B.: The bus company was found by the board to
have interfered with the right of its employes to organize,
and to have dismissed eighteen of them because of their
union activity. It was ordered to change its personnel prac-
tices and to reinstate the discharged workers. The lower
court upheld the board, and the company appealed.
THE SIXTH CASE IS A TEST OF THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF
the 1934 amendment of the Railway Labor Act.
6. The Virginia Railway Company v. System Federa-
tion No. 40, Railway Employes Deft., American Federation
of Labor: The railway appealed from an order of the U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals affirming a decree of the U.S.
District Court directing the company to recognize the AF
of L union as the representative for collective bargaining
purposes of five shop crafts in the mechanical repair de-
partment; and forbidding the railroad to contract with any
other group of representatives of its workers. The trial court
made this ruling in line with an order issued by the Na-
tional Mediation Board under the Railway Labor Act, after
the board had conducted an election in which the two
company unions were decllively voted down. The railway
holds not only that its shop workers are not engaged in
interstate commerce, but that the entire Railway Labor
Act is unconstitutional under the "due process" clause.
tions which seemed to indicate a belief that the effect is
"remote" rather than "direct," as the solicitor general
was trying to show. But in general, questions from the
bench in these cases were fewer than usual and less search-
ing. The attentive silence in which the Justices heard most
of the arguments may have been the result of a desire not
to reveal personal views and attitudes at this stormy time.
THE FACTS OF ANY ONE OF THESE SIX CASES WOULD MAKE
a long story. In general, the five Labor Board cases spring
from similar situations: the dismissal of one or more em-
ployes after they became active in an American Federa-
tion of Labor union. Before the Supreme Court, as well
as in testimony before the Board, the contention of one
side was that, while some other cause was alleged at the
time, the employe was in fact dismissed because of his
union affiliation. The employer, on the other hand, main-
tained that the cause of discharge was a failure of the
worker properly to discharge his duties. Counsel for the
Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation urged:
If these men, the employes of this company, can be dis-
charged solely for reasons satisfactory to the National Labor
Relations Board, then all freedom of contract and all em-
ployer control of labor is gone. This would raise every
worker in the country to a civil service status.
But the Labor Board found that each of the workers,
before being discharged, had had a long and satisfactory
employment record. The local union in Aliquippa was
chartered on August 4, 1934. The Labor Board brief in
the Jones and Laughlin case points out:
Thereafter the union sought to organize the men in the
Aliquippa works. Respondent countered by systematic
coercive efforts to prevent such organization. Officers and or-
ganizers of the union were followed about by respondent's
police ... a house in which a union meeting had been held
was surrounded by respondent's private police, and respond-
ent's employment agent sat near its door, noting who en-
tered; some persons coming out of the house were questioned
and even beaten.
The conflict as to what the fact means is the fabric of
the case as it is presented to the Court in argument and
record. Upon it, the pattern of the law must be stitched.
UNDER THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT, "THE BOARD
is empowered ... to prevent any person from engaging
in any unfair labor practice (listed in Section 8) affecting
commerce." Since the board found the employer guilty
of the "unfair practices" of which his workers complained,
two questions of interpretation were presented on appeal:
do the "unfair labor practices" specified in the Act "affect
commerce" within the meaning of the clause of the Con-
stitution granting Congress power "to regulate com-
merce . . . among the several states?" Does the business
of the employer constitute "interstate commerce?"
On this second point, the chairman of the National
Labor Relations Board, arguing the Jones and Laughlin
case for the government, described in detail the "in-
tegrated" handling of raw material and finished materials
by this great steel corporation. Similarly, in the Associated
Press case, the Court was told how the association by
mail, telephone, telegraph and radio gathers and dis-
tributes the news of the world. These facts were not
questioned by employers, who held, however, that the
picture presented does not represent "commerce among
the states" within the meaning of the Constitution.
Evidence as to whether or not industrial conflict inter-
feres with commerce or may "reasonably" be expected to
do so brought into the Labor Act cases a great deal of
what in the medical or engineering field would be called
"expert testimony." The record contains statements by
economists, public officials, business leaders and others
as to the far reaching influence of strikes and the increas-
ing percentage of industrial conflicts due not to "sub-
stantive conditions, but to denial of the employes' right to
self-organization." Here again employers in these cases
did not challenge the facts. But, they said, to bring any
such situation within the power of Congress to regulate
commerce, "Your Honors are asked to suppose" that dis-
missing a dozen workers in a force of 800 or 1300 or 22,000
' >ay lead to dissatisfaction, which may result in a strike
which may "affect commerce." And this sort of "House-
That-Jack-Built argument" by the government "admits
the remoteness of the connection between the discharge of
workers and the movement of interstate commerce."
It is of course the province of the Court to decide be-
tween these conflicting interpretations of fact and law.
For its guide it has its own precedents. Congress and the
Chief Executive are in the main concerned with the pres-
ent and the future. The eyes of the Supreme Court are
fixed on its precedents from the past.
MUCH OF THE ARGUMENT PRESENTED IN THE BRIEFS AND
summarized orally was made up of citation and discus-
sion of previous decisions of the Court and of attempts
on the part of the lawyers to draw a parallel between the
case at bar and these precedents or to "distinguish" it
from them. At this stage of his argument, a resourceful
lawyer may be expected to "put on a show" as fascinating
to a layman as the performance of an acrobat deftly bal-
ancing his way across a long, swaying tight-rope high
overhead. For example, in arguing that the Jones and
Laughlin Steel Corporation, the Associated Press, and,
less convincingly, a garment factory in Richmond, Va.,
and a trailer plant in Michigan are engaged in "interstate
commerce," the lawyers upholding the Labor Act placed
great reliance on three opinions which embody the "flow
of commerce" theory. Leaning on these precedents,
counsel for the government reasoned that a manufactur-
ing enterprise which brings in raw materials from other
states, supplies a nation-wide market, maintains offices
or salesrooms in other states, is operating "in the stream
of commerce," and that manufacture, interrupting "the
physical movement," does not cause "a break in the
'stream' or 'current' in the constitutional sense." In sup-
port of its point, the government, in the Jones and
Laughlin brief, quotes from the opinion in the Stafford
case, which applied the principle to the packing industry:
The application of the commerce clause in the Swift case
was the result of the natural development of interstate com-
merce under modern conditions. It was the inevitable rec-
ognition of the great central fact that such streams of com-
merce from one part of the country to another which are
ever flowing are in their very essence the commerce among
the states and with foreign nations which historically it was
one of the chief purposes of the Constitution to bring under
national protection and control.
Not at all, argued lawyers on the other side. This may
apply to little pigs shipped from Iowa to Chicago, turned
into sausages and distributed to retailers of many states,
135
but not to traffic in the raw materials and the finished
product of steel, news, men's suits or truck trailers. And
they proceeded to "distinguish," holding that "raw ma-
terials delivered to the plant" leave the "current of com-
merce," and that during the manufacturing process they
cannot be considered to be "in the flow." They in turn
were able to cite a supporting line of opinions, including
the cases of a milling company, an iron company, a trunk
manufacturer, and the decision holding the Guffey Coal
Act unconstitutional.
In addition to the application of the statute to the facts
of the case, the Supreme Court must interpret the provi-
sions of the law in relation to the Constitution. If the
Court finds that the statute "invades" or "infringes" pro-
visions of the Constitution, then the law is an invalid
enactment. Most of the current controversy over the Su-
preme Court is directed toward this authority of the
Court over state and federal legislation. Many of the
Court's critics hold that the highest court has gradually
taken a place it was never meant to occupy in the Amer-
ican scheme of things. Mr. Hughes' mot, "We are under
a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say
it is," seems to them a none-too-free translation of that
more famous declaration, "L'etat, c'est mot."
Though other constitutional issues were raised in these
cases, the chief question argued was whether the Wagner
Act and the Railway Labor Act infringe the "due process
clause" of the Fifth Amendment: "No persons shall be
. . . deprived of life, liberty or property without due proc-
ess of law." This clause, originally covering only legal
procedure, has been broadened by successive interpreta-
tions until it has become the chief obstacle to public reg-
ulation of hours of work, minimum wages, child labor,
industrial relations, utility rates, private employment of-
fices, ticket scalpers, and many other complexities of
modern life unknown to the Founding Fathers. Mr.
Justice Brandeis once wrote:
To stay experimentation in things social and economic is
a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may
be fraught with grave consequences to the nation. . . . The
Court has the power to prevent an experiment. We may
strike down the statute which embodies it on the ground
that, in our opinion, the measure is arbitrary, capricious or
unreasonable. We have power to do this, because the due
process clause has been held by the Court applicable to mat-
ters of substantive law as well as matters of procedure. But
in the exercise of this high power, we must be ever on our
guard, lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles.
If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our
minds be bold.
But this is from the notable dissenting opinion in the
"Oklahoma Ice Case," in which only Mr. Justice Stone
concurred. It does not express the views of the Court.
WHEN THE COURT ADJOURNS FOR CONFERENCE AND DECISION,
the Justices have the record, the briefs, the transcripts of
the argument and their own profound knowledge of the
law. But probably more important than this data and
learning is the background and experience of each man.
These shape his views and in the end are written into
the decisions of the Court.
The Court is under fire because, among other things,
so large a proportion of the Justices are now old men, six
of them past seventy. But age seems less significant, at
least to this spectator, than experience, and Mr. Justice
Brandeis, at eighty, gives an impression of younger spirit
and fresher outlook than Mr. Justice Butler, for example,
who is ten years his junior, or Mr. Justice Roberts, who
is only sixty-one. In these cases from the troubled area of
industrial relations, lawyers were arguing before nine
judges only one of whom — Brandeis — has had first hand
experience in the field. With the exception of Mr. Justice
Cardozo, all the members of the Court had successful
careers as corporation lawyers before they went on the
bench. Mr. Justice Hughes, after he resigned from the
Court to run for the presidency against Wilson in 1916,
became the most famous and one of the highest paid
corporation lawyers of the day. Mr. Justice Roberts had
among his clients the Pennsylvania Railroad, Philadelphia
Rapid Transit, Bell Telephone, Equitable Life, Drexel and
Co. Mr. Justice Butler represented the railroads of his
great friend James J. Hill and other western lines in the
valuation hearings before the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission. Mr. Justice Van Devanter, who grew up with
the young state of Wyoming, was counsel for a number
of the famous land grabbing cattle companies and rail-
roads, including the Union Pacific. When his confirma-
tion as Supreme Court Justice was under discussion,
William J. Bryan called attention to the fact that this was
"the man who [as judge of the U. S. Circuit Court of
Appeals] held that two railroads running parallel to each
other for two thousand miles were not competing lines,
one of these roads being the Union Pacific." Such back-
grounds mean that these men originally made their mark
as successful fighters on behalf of Big Business.
AT THIS WRITING, THE COURT HAS ADJOURNED FOR TWO
weeks. During that time, the Justices will study the rec-
ords and briefs in the cases heard since the last adjourn-
ment— thousands of pages of fact and close reasoning.
Before coming to a decision on a case, the members of
the Court discuss it in conference. The effort to reconcile
the view of a divided court is often lengthy and, report
has it, occasionally heated. When the Court — or a ma-
jority of its members— is in agreement, one Justice is as-
signed by the Chief Justice to write the opinion. If the
Court is divided, those in disagreement with the majority
may, and often do, write dissenting opinions. Decisions
are handed down only at the Monday session, the Chief
Justice calling on the associate who has prepared it to
read the opinion of the Court. In some cases decisions are
ready within a few weeks after the case is heard; some-
times the public is kept in suspense for months.
The Court will convene again on March 1. On that
day, or on some succeeding Monday, will occur the next
scene in the drama of this country's effort to bring order
into chaotic industrial relations. The white curtains be-
hind the bench will part. At the clerk's signal all those
in the courtroom will come to their feet : "The Honorable,
the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme
Court." The court crier will intone the mediaeval "Oyez,
oyez, oyez," summoning all those who have business
with the Court to draw near and be heard — "God save
the United States of America and this Honorable Court."
And when the Justices ant then the lawyers and specta-
tors have seated themselves, the appointed members will
read the opinions in the "labor cases," informing the na-
tion whether the Railway Labor Act and the National
Labor Relations Act, passed by Congress, signed by the
Chief Executive, are or are not the law of the land.
136
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Measuring the Cooperatives
by CLARK KERR
Cooperatives provide millions of English, Scandinavian, Finnish and French
families with better and cheaper food, homes, clothing, gasoline, books. In
the light of European experience this investigator tells why America today
is fertile soil for cooperation, and what competition co-ops here must meet
THE AMERICAN CONSUMERS' COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT is
today at much the same stage of development as the Euro-
pean consumers' cooperatives fifty years ago. Many people
are now hailing consumers' cooperation as "America's
Way Out," an important part of the "Middle Way." A
wave of interest and of new organization is sweeping
across the country. What can America expect to gain from
this movement that now affects one out of every four
families in western Europe? Have consumers' cooperatives
there proved to be "just like any other business," as was
stated by an Italian fascist, or merely "a union of penny
savers and dividend hunters wanting to put us out of busi-
ness," as viewed by a private merchant. Or have they been
"a vital force in reshaping the economic system to con-
form with social justice," as believed by their proponents?
This same desire for a new and improved society, com-
bined with a desire for immediate economic benefits is in-
spiring thousands of Americans to organize consumers'
cooperatives today. The contemporary movement is in-
creasing rapidly with a million members in retail societies
alone, and another million in credit unions, insurance
societies, and other associations. Forty-five years ago Brit-
ish cooperatives had reached about this same stage. Early
failures under Robert Owen and other leaders had brought
experience which led to the development of principles
of operation fitting the English scene. Membership
had reached a million and central federations had
been functioning for twenty years. If the future
growth of the movement in America should
follow the English pattern since 1890 and
increase roughly 50 percent in membership
every ten years, then in 1985 half the
families in the United States would be
affiliated with cooperative societies doing
10 percent of all retail trade and em-
ploying one member in twenty-five.
However, if we project the Ameri-
can movement into the future on
the basis of Swedish cooperative
history, by 1985 every family in the United States would
be affiliated with a consumers' cooperative, since the
Swedish movement has been increasing its membership
50 percent every five years for the past twenty years.
American conditions, however, are not parallel with those
of any European country. Contributing to the advance-
ment of the European movement is the fact of its origin
before the development of large scale capitalistic business
which in retail trade has never become as important
abroad as in the United States. In addition, the United
States falls short of the older nations in racial homogeniety,
stability and geographical proximity of the people, a spirit
of thrift, appreciation of small savings, and the class con-
sciousness which underlies the European cooperatives. The
cooperative movement has been hindered, however, in
some foreign countries by the existence of sharply defined
religious, political and racial minorities as in Belgium and
central Europe; by staunch individualism and localism as
among the French; by the meager resources of members
which have often prevented capital accumulation sufficient
to meet expanding requirements. Recently state interfer-
ence in economic life has presented the cooperatives with
new problems, whether they have been absorbed by the
state as in Russia, placed under state supervision as in
Italy, partially liquidated and completely dominated by
the "economic front" as in Germany, or their freedom
to expand freely in productive enterprises limited, as
it has always been in Great Britain, by legislation.
While consumers' cooperatives in the United
States do not face control or liquidation by
the government, they have their own spe-
cial problems. Free land and relative free-
dom of opportunity have offered the
working class until recent years
other "ways out" than through trade
unions, cooperatives and political or-
ganization. Relatively high wage
K«K ;•; ;
. 'F ',^~, FT ii iJii', Wl| i ' ' I 1 i 'TJ
The acorn, the lit-
tle Rochdale itore,
and the oak, a com-
posite picture of
25 of the 150 busi-
nesses owned by
the English co-ops.
From a booklet pub-
lished by the Con-
sumers Cooperative
Association, North
Kansas City, Mo.
MARCH 1937
CONSUMERS' COOPERATIVE MEMBERSHIP
NUMBER OF FAMILIES
GREAT BRITAIN
GERMANY
fRANCE
UNITED STATES
ITALY
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
HOLLAND
HUNGARY
SWEDEN
FINLAND
BELGIUM
DENMARK
SWITZERLAND
AUSTRIA
NORWAY
ft
ft
s
EACH
REPRESENTS 500.000 FAMILIES
COOPERATIVES IN GERMANY WITH 40 PERCENT OF' THE TOTAL MEMBER5HI
Statistics on qenerolly for 1935 US. Fiqurcs are arouqh estimate.
S Of DISSOLUTION.
importance than in Europe. The geographical isolation of
individual communities has been an obstacle to association
of societies into federations. Moreover, our population has
been extremely mobile, both geographically and socially.
People move from house to house and community to com-
munity as well as from job to job. In addition, Americans
have developed certain philosophies antagonistic to co-
operative association, typified by such phrases as "get-
rich-quick." Lack of homogeneity in race, religion and
tradition has been another barrier. Finns form Finnish co-
operatives in Minnesota, Danes organize in Wisconsin,
Negroes have their own associations in Gary and Pitts-
burgh; in other urban centers there are Jewish societies.
An added difficulty has been the early and expansive de-
velopment of large scale capitalistic distribution systems
in this country. Cooperatives in England competed with
small independent traders, while in America today, com-
petition with economic Gargantuans is their lot.
Despite these obstacles, cooperatives have been organized
time and again, not only singly, but hundreds at once.
Depressions and "reform waves" have been the most fre-
quent causes. Unsuccessful strikes and liberal political
campaigns have been followed quite often by recourse to
cooperative action. In general, the cooperatives have been
the children of hardship; their cycle of rise and decline has
roughly followed that of the business cycle, but in the
opposite direction. However, the contemporary American
movement, dating from the World War but
rooted in the past, appears to be more stable and
more firmly established than previous ones.
There have been two post-War depressions to
give impetus to cooperative activity. Improve-
ments in methods of organization have enabled
stores established during this period to get on a
firm foundation. In addition, the present move-
ment is not tied, as the tail to a kite, to any other
political, social or economic organization which
can drag it down to failure, as were the coopera-
tives organized by the Grange and the Knights
of Labor in the eighteen-eighties. The fact that
America is becoming a middle aged nation has
brought a correspondingly mature philosophy to
the people and one which is more conducive to
cooperation.
WITH THIS LIVELY AMERICAN MOVEMENT BEFORE
us, let us review the European development in
the light of the three questions with which we
began. Although it has been nearly a century
since a group of Rochdale weavers opened a
grocery store to free themselves from the tyranny
of private merchants and company stores with
high prices and dishonest weights, it was not
until fifty years ago that the movement inaugu-
rated by these English workers spread success-
fully to the continent of Europe, or was even
well established in England; while substantial
American development dates from theWorld War.
The movement was the offspring of the in-
dustrial revolution and first came into existence
when factory production supplanted domestic
hand labor and a system of laissez-faire replaced
one of controlled mercantilism. The workers
then cooperated as consumers to get a larger
share of the riches from the new methods of production.
In France and Belgium the first organizations arose as
bakeries in answer to exhorbitant prices for the "staff of
life"; in Sweden they drew popular support as foes of the
monopolies with their strangle-hold on prices; in Italy
they were formed by laborers who wished to work for
themselves at living wages. In all parts of the world con-
sumers' cooperatives have sprung out of abuses and have
sought to overcome them. Their purpose has been to se-
cure some social change peacefully and constructively.
They planned first to establish stores, later to produce their
PERCENTAGE OF RETAIL TRADE DONE BY CONSUMERS' COOPERATIVES
Stotufici art qenfolly for 1935
138
SURVEY GRAPHIC
own goods and build their own houses, thus
employing their members, and finally to create
a cooperative commonwealth. This final Utopia
has been variously interpreted by theorists, but
consumers' cooperatives have been important in
history not for their end, but for the means they
have employed in seeking this goal. It has been
upon the cooperative method rather than the
Utopian goal that most effort has been expended
and to which most criticism and opposition have
been directed.
The cooperative method is a democratic or-
ganization operating economic enterprise for the
benefit of its members as consumers, not as
owners. The purpose has been to place em-
phasis upon men and not capital, upon use and
not profits. This raison d'etre explains the fervor
and sacrifices of members and leaders, but it has
been only by beating the shopkeeper at his own
game that cooperatives have been able to make
their principles effective. The generally accepted
basic principles are: one vote per member re-
gardless of amount of ownership in the organi-
zation; voluntary and open membership;
division of surplus on the basis of amount pur-
chased; fixed rate of interest on stock; no
absentee or proxy voting. Throughout the his-
tory of the movement these principles have
formed, almost without exception, the founda-
tion for successful development regardless of
country or locality.
The perfection of these principles and their
general adoption was the result of years of ex-
perience and of repeated failure. There were
numerous cooperative attempts, not only in
England but in other countries as well, previous
to the foundation of the Rochdale society in
1844. These early groups universally failed,
however, either because of bad business management or
because their methods of organization permitted individ-
uals to secure ownership and control of the cooperatives.
Consequently the growing working class population be-
came wary of cooperatives. It was not until the success of
the Rochdale store seemed well assured that other new
societies ventured to follow its principles.
LOCAL SOCIETIES DEVELOPED WITH SOME RAPIDITY IN ENGLAND
during the eighteen-sixties. Their success and that of the
Rochdale store upon which they were modeled stimulated
the formation of local associations on the continent and by
1890 a cooperative movement was under way in all the
principal countries of western Europe.
The movement in each country started with the forma-
tion of independent local organizations, often centering
around the distribution of a single commodity, bread. As
their membership grew and their functions expanded, the
local cooperatives came into conflict with each other. This
competition at times even led to the physical destruction
of stores, but eventually the weaker cooperatives were
absorbed by the stronger ones, or the local organizations
agreed to merge peacefully. This marked the first step in
a continued trend toward amalgamation into larger and
larger societies. Side by side with this development has
gone the federation of local and regional societies into
national organizations thus facilitating large scale purchas-
CONSUMERS' COOPERATIVE MEMBERSHIP
PERCENTAGE OF FAMILIES
fc
fefe
GREAT BRITAIN
FINLAND
DENMARK.
SWITZERLAND
SWEDEN
HOLLAND
HUNGARY
FRANCE
BELGIUM
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
GERMANY
AUSTRIA
NORWAY
ITALY
UNITED STATES
REPRESENTS 10 PERCENT MEMBERSHIP
JflL MS. MS. JR.
JH. MS. ML MS.
fc&
im i&
J&E. JB9L
JBL
^BC.
JOL
fa.
M. j
A
rtn />. A, /*k *V /V /V
M A S. M w. m. m.
Am fi"- " *^
r»
U^
StotiVics orsqcnerolly for 1935
SOF OliSOtUTION.
ing and production, as well as providing an effective edu-
cational and propaganda center.
The national federations, in turn, have formed an Inter-
national Cooperative Alliance which functions as an
informative body. The I.C.A. prides itself on having main-
tained contact between cooperative movements on both
sides during the World War and on the fact that its
international conference in Basle in 1919 was the first
conference of any association after the War at which Ger-
many was represented. Today the alliance has affiliated
associations in forty countries. It has a declared interna-
tional policy of peace and democracy. It refuses to recog-
nize cooperative movements in Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany. It was instrumental in securing greater freedom
for the cooperatives in Austria, and recently raised a fund
for the support of the consumers' cooperatives in war-torn
Spain. Paralleling this organization there is an Interna-
tional Cooperative Wholesale Society which combines the
purchases for many national cooperatives of such com-
modities as tea and citrus fruit; the Scandinavian coopera-
tives have an additional international wholesale.
During the last fifty years the consumers' cooperative
movement has progressed most steadily in western Europe
where in fourteen countries today one family in four
participates in a consumers' society, and where is found 90
percent of the world membership of twenty million fam-
ilies. This world total, representing a population two
MARCH 1937
139
thirds that of the United States, may be greatly augmented
by letting down the bars of strict definition. Seventy mil-
lion members might be added by including the member-
ship of consumers' "cooperative" societies in Russia, most
of them under rigid state control. Expanding the term
beyond retail sales societies to take in housing cooperatives,
another five million members would swell the total; while
urban credit societies, chiefly of small artisans financing
their trade, would bring in another three and a half mil-
lion; public utility cooperatives principally in Germany,
Czechoslovakia and Italy, another half million; and urban
insurance societies of a fully cooperative nature, a small
additional group. To cap the total, a portion of the forty-
five million members of agricultural cooperative societies
throughout the world might be thrown in. It is the first
twenty million, however, and their retail stores, that we
are considering.
Although an average of 25 percent of all families in
this western European territory belong to consumers'
cooperatives, the various national movements arc not
uniformly strong. If the fourteen countries of principal
cooperative growth were graded according to the per-
centage of their families enrolled in consumers' societies,
Great Britain and Finland would head the list, each hav-
ing over 50 percent or twice the general average for all.
Not far behind would come Denmark, famous in addition
for its agricultural cooperatives, with 40 percent; Switzer-
land, Sweden and Holland would follow with 30 percent.
Thus, the six leading nations are nordic countries. Next
in order, however, would be Hungary, France and Bel-
gium with more than 20 percent; followed by Czecho-
slovakia, Austria and Norway where more than one family
in eight, or 15 percent, are affiliated with a consumers'
society. Along with this group ranked Germany until
last year, when by order of the government, cooperatives
with 40 percent of the national membership were dis-
solved. Finally, among these fourteen countries of greatest
consumer cooperative development comes Italy with one
family in twelve, or 8 percent. If included, the United
States would be at the bottom of this group with less than
3 percent in company with Spain, Poland and Japan.
A SUBSTANTIAL MEMBERSHIP DOES NOT NECESSARILY INDICATE
that the consumers' cooperatives have exerted important
influence on the economic and social life of a nation. Just
as stockholders in a railroad do not always travel on that
railroad, so cooperative members do not always buy at a
cooperative store. It is sometimes more convenient or less
expensive to buy elsewhere. As a result, cooperatives have
not controlled national trade to the extent their member-
ship might indicate at first glance. The most successful,
from this point of view have been the Finnish cooperatives
which today supply 40 percent of all national retail pur-
chases, partly because a large part of their sales is to non-
members. This is well above the percentages for such
countries as Sweden, Denmark, England, Switzerland
and Belgium which vary from 10 to 20 percent, and it is
probable that no other countries have as high figures as
these. Specific figures for Germany (1934) indicate 5 per-
cent, and for the United States about one percent. Although
10 percent of the national trade is a far cry from the domi-
nation of distribution of which cooperators dream, it is
ample to mark the cooperatives as the leading distributive
agencies in their countries, and often they are the largest
business enterprise of any type. These figures compare
140
with 10 percent of retail business for the combined total ot
all chain stores in Belgium, 5 percent in Sweden, 4 percent
in Switzerland, and less than one percent in England,
Germany and most of the other countries. From this it is
apparent that the greatest opposition and competition to
cooperatives in Europe still come from independent
retailers, rather than chain stores. Such would not be
the case in the United States where chain stores account
for over a fourth of all retail sales and for nearly half of
grocery and meat sales.
Consumers' cooperatives throughout the years have con-
sidered retailing as only their first step toward the coopera-
tive commonwealth. The second step is production of the
goods they sell; not only to save cost, but to employ their
members and extend their control over the economic sys-
tem. This second stage has gone farthest in England where
50 percent of all cooperative sales are of products made by
the cooperatives. These products are not merely processed
by the cooperatives; control extends back to the initial
processes. The Cooperative Wholesale Society, business
federation of British societies, has acquired tea plantations
in Ceylon, and a fishing fleet in the North Sea. It cans
vegetables and fruits raised on its own farms, bakes bread
from flour received from its own flour mills with the heat
of coal from its own coal mines. The recent Swedish rec-
ord is more impressive. Although the central federation,
Kooperativa Forbundet, produces only one fourth of all
cooperative sales, it is the principal manufacturer in
Sweden, making 10 percent of all Swedish products and
selling to private companies there and abroad, as well as
to its member societies. It broke such monopolies as those
in lamp bulbs, galoshes and oleomargarine. Cooperatives
in Switzerland, Denmark and Austria produce roughly
one fifth of their sales; but in France only 3 percent of
goods sold by consumers' cooperatives are produced by
them. Despite these productive functions, European con-
sumers' cooperatives have not yet been able to employ a
substantial percentage of their members. In England the
ratio of employes in retailing and productive enterprises
combined is 4 percent of the number of members, and but
3 percent in such countries as Switzerland and Sweden.
The growth and present strength of the consumers' co-
operative movement is important because it has brought
economic and social benefits to its members and society in
general. One immediate advantage has been secured in the
form of better products at lower cost. Reductions in cost are
generally given to the member as a dividend which repre-
sents his share in the surplus or profit of the society dis-
tributed to him on the basis of the amount he purchased.
Dividends in Europe vary from 5 to 15 percent. In Eng-
land the dividends average 12 percent of purchases, in
Switzerland where competition is stronger from well or-
ganized private merchants and chain enterprises, they
are only 5 percent. In addition to this benefit to the mem-
ber, market prices in communities with cooperative stores
tend to be lower than in other communities by as much
as 10 to 12 percent, according to a study made by the
International Labour Office. In Sweden cooperative lead-
ers estimate that the combined dividend and general low-
ering of market prices thauigh competition has brought a
saving of 15 to 20 percent to members; and of 5 to 10
percent to those non-members who live where coopera-
tives compete with private stores.
While quality is difficult to measure, cooperatives claim
to produce and buy only superior products. They maintain
SURVEY GRAPHIC
laboratories to test their own and purchased goods. In dis-
tributing for use, and not for profit, cooperatives are not
likely to sell poor quality goods to their members. In east-
ern Belgium, cooperative leaders proudly exhibit the only
machinery in their province to clean the flour before bak-
ing bread. A pile of string and dirt is mute evidence of the
superior quality of cooperatively made bread.
To what exent these benefits of quality and cost result
from the fact that cooperatives were the first large scale
distributive systems in their countries, and remain the
largest even today, it is impossible to estimate. Certainly
some of the benefits of large scale distribution introduced
into Europe by the cooperatives have been given to
America by the chain stores. To assume, however, that all
cooperative savings in cost of distribution have been due
to large scale methods is erroneous. Cooperatives have
business advantages such as a large and stable clientele,
negligible advertising costs, low costs of capital, distribu-
tion of profits to purchasers; further, stores are not opened
until there is a large, assured membership to support them.
In addition to decreasing costs to the consumer, the
cooperatives have universally paid better wages to their
employes. They not only allow their workers to join trade
unions, but usually expect them to do so. In England the
union of distributive employes is almost entirely composed
of cooperative employes while other employes are almost
completely unorganized. The average weekly wage in
Britain for retail workers is thirty shillings, or about $7.50.
This salary, however, is the minimum paid to women by
the cooperatives and the average for men is 75 percent
higher. It is not surprising therefore, that the trade unions
advise their members to buy at cooperative stores.
Courtesy Cooperative League U.S.
Large department store in Stockholm owned by the cooperatives
The educational and social activities conducted by
European cooperatives have resulted in benefits not only
to the membership but to the community. In addition to
social functions such as lectures or dances, many groups
have camps and rest homes; others run excursions to
historic and scenic points. This social function has been
most intensively developed in Belgium, with "Peoples'
Houses" of the cooperatives which are social centers where
a member can exercise in the gymnasium, read in the
library or drink at the bar. Members are also insured
against sickness, old age, accident and unemployment.
THE EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES OF THE COOPERATIVES ARE
numerous. They include courses for employes, managers,
members of the boards of directors and others upon
whose leadership the success of the cooperative rests. To
promote the cooperative ideal there are study groups,
newspapers, women's guilds and even a cooperative col-
lege in England and an annual international summer
school which was held last year at Stockholm. In Sweden
the cooperatives have expanded their educational func-
tion to take in the entire population. They have the
largest correspondence courses in the country on subjects
from engineering to etiquette; and are important pub-
lishers of economic treatises by leading Swedish authori-
ties. Cooperators say, "Education is the corner-stone of
our system, as successful cooperation is based on rational
thinking, not emotion." Because of this education in
democracy, the cooperatives have stood resolutely
against dictatorship. They were the last line of defense
against encroaching authoritarian parties in Russia and
in Italy, and they supported the Social Democrats in their
losing battle against Nazism in Germany.
While pursuing the functions and activities of today,
the consumers' cooperatives continue to advocate the
cooperative commonwealth of tomorrow. This future
social order has been symbolized by Swiss cooperators in
the village of Freidorf (Free City), inhabited by em-
ployes of the central cooperative federation in Basle.
Not only are housing, food and public utilities provided
cooperatively but even such services as schooling and
government. The development of Freidorfs on a national
scale is the hope of cooperators in many lands.
However much changing American social conditions
may favor increased cooperative development, large scale
distribution by private enterprise remains a vast and
powerful competitor to the budding movement. This
competition may force the consumers' cooperatives in
the United States into different, although not necessarily
less effective, channels than in Europe where distribu-
tion of food products has been the basis of the move-
ment.
The ability of the American cooperatives to develop
and employ successful methods of competition with chain
grocery stores, or to find another outlet for expression of
consumers' cooperation, will largely determine whether
the American movement in the next fifty years will ad-
vance as rapidly as the European movement in the last
half century. It will largely determine whether in 1985
the American movement will be able to count one out of
every four families as members, do 10 percent of the total
retail trade, and provide benefits for its members in the
form of price reductions of from 5 to 20 percent with im-
provement of quality and service, as does the European
movement today.
MARCH 1937
141
"Your Hospital Bill Is Paid"
by KATHERINE W. WHIPPLE
If you have insured yourself against hospital bills, like these 250,000
New Yorkers, the doctor's dreaded words, "You'd be better off in a
hospital," will not make your fever mount
ON A HOT SUMMER DAY ON OUR MOUNTAIN-TOP IN THE
Catskills my doctor told me I had better take my throat
and temperature to a hospital in New York. After some
long distance calls and a weird, blanket-wrapped ride in
the car for 120 miles, I was safely tucked into a hospital
bed, signing my Associated Hospital Service acknowl-
edgment. Ten days later when I went to the dreaded
office to "settle," the girl smiled. "There is no charge.
Your bill is paid." Those are good words to hasten con-
valescence.
I am one of 250,000 New Yorkers who have taken out
insurance against hospital bills by subscribing to the
Associated Hospital Service of New York. Since May
1935, when it was started, the hospital bills of 12,500 of us
have been paid thus painlessly, in part or whole. The cost
of my annual subscription was just ten dollars. But the
service I enjoyed totted up to over $45. And between now
and May 1937 (when I am certain to renew my subscrip-
tion) I am entitled to eleven days' additional care on my
physician's recommendation. If I am a typical member,
I shall not need them. Frank Van Dyk, executive director
of the Associated Hospital Service, says that the average
number of days' care received by patients is 10.6, and that
repeated admissions are comparatively few.
The Associated Hospital Service is a non-profit corpo-
ration, organized under the provisions of a special act of
the New York state legislature. Its membership accounts
for about a third of the people now enrolled in plans for
group hospitalization in some sixty American cities. In
New York it is called "the three-cents-a-day plan." Sub-
scribers enroll in groups as individual members at ten
dollars a year, or under the family plan at eighteen dol-
lars for husband and wife, or twenty-four dollars for hus-
band, wife, and all unmarried children under nineteen.
The subscriber is entitled to the following services,
simply on his doctor's statement that he needs them, and
the arrangement of admission to a hospital where the
doctor is privileged to practice: Hospital care in one or
more admissions for twenty-one days, with semi-private
accommodations (that means two to four beds in a room,
not a ward) ; use of an operating room (or, after a year's
membership, a maternity delivery-room) ; necessary X-
ray and laboratory examinations for bed patients requir-
ing hospital care; anesthesia if administered by a salaried
employe of the institution; general nursing care; routine
medications and dressings. One may have a private room
by paying the difference between S4.50 per day and the
daily rate for the room; if the illness lasts more than
twenty-one days, a discount is allowed of 25 percent off
the usual charges for semi-private care. Certain illnesses
are excepted: pulmonary tuberculosis, venereal diseases,
illnesses and injuries provided for under the workmen's
compensation laws of any state, quarantinable diseases,
142
mental disorders. Financial arrangements with the physi-
cian remain entirely separate and personal and are in no
way covered by the plan.
From the day the subscriber's application is accepted
he can secure service in case of accident or emergency
illness. After ten days of membership he is entitled to
care for other illness or injury. The service does not in-
clude treatment for conditions known by the subscriber
to require hospital care at the date of the application, and
each subscriber signs a statement that he understands
this. Subscribers must be residents of the area regularly
served by the 247 hospitals now participating. He must
be not more than sixty-five years of age and in good
health, though once an application is accepted it may be
renewed indefinitely. Subscriptions are accepted only in
groups because there is no physical examination and the
group, representing a normal cross section of the commu-
nity, offers an averaging that prevents abuses and equal-
izes risks.
I feel that my experience has been typical in other ways
besides the length of my stay in the hospital. My hus-
band and I had been members for a year and a half, hav-
ing joined with a group made up of members of the staff
of The Survey and their families. We had had no direct
contact with any representative of the service, although
one would have been sent to the group if required. We
had not expected to need hospital care; we had savings
for emergencies. But we believed in insurance, and
thought the cost so reasonable we could not afford to
stay out. We also wanted to associate ourselves with this
needed community enterprise.
IF MY DOCTOR HAD ADVISED AGAINST THE DRIVE OR I HAD
wanted to stay in the country, my subscription would
have covered payment to any hospital up to the amount
paid per day to member hospitals. In fact the excellent
hospital nearest our summer place is now a member hos-
pital in the Mid-Hudson division.
The care given seemed to be exactly the same as my
husband had received in the same hospital, when he was
paying the bill out of his own pocket, and just as good
as I had received in my one previous hospital experience.
None of the nurses knew anything about my financial
arrangements, except that I was a "private" patient.
When I tried to find out what the extra charges were,
if any, the nurse brought back word that the financial
office preferred to give the information directly to me.
There were no records jto fill out; and the only ques-
tions to answer were those the doctors asked, none of
which referred to finances!
While in the hospital, I received word from the service
that my care had been "OK'd". The hospital received
similar word on sending my blue card to the service.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
N9 S6i(5 New York, JANUARY..
23 193 7
— an •tfttMMMWWXA*' N-v-
TO _. iun^OTr^ ^»«*«O«B-»
Hospital Dr.
For Room. Meals and Service* Rendered to ABOVE
From JANUARY 12, 1937 To JANUARY 28. 1237
—
W»rd for _ weeks days at $ per day
Room 7.3.6. for weeks }..§ days M $_..{?.: ?.P.....per d»y
96
00
Room (or weeks days ac $ per day
Fee and Board of Special Nurse days at $ per day
Fee and Board of Special Nurse days at $ per day
Operating Room Service ..
15
00
X-Ray _ _
Laboratory _
6
00
Medical or Surgical Supplies
Anesthetist, Dr... I,OCAL
7
so
Telephone „
m
Sundries __ _ _
PAID Toul
BYlSSCTTEDimPimStllVICEDflUJM - .
lilt TEMS OF HIE HOSPiTM. SEIIVICE PLM
Balance Due
134
60
10
124
sn
Account! payable ufceJJy in advance and sotted in fuD before patient leaves the Initiation. r^m 7 7.14 OIOBE
When I was home again, the service sent me a statement
of the amount paid out, and a form on which I could
make comments and criticisms. If the hospital had made
extra charges to me, those would have been reported to
the service, and in turn included in its statement to me,
thus affording a double check and an opportunity to
clear up errors.
Who are these people who have hurried to provide for
possible hospital bills though well? I have been looking
over several hundred letters, picked at random from the
Associated Hospital Service files. They indicate that we
are self-supporting people, in professions, business and
industry, low salaried in the main, with small reserves
outside of insurance, and heavy responsibilities. Some are
alone in the world; and as one woman writes, "I am a
person who has no family or resources and being ill is
ghastly." Handwriting, spelling, composition, addresses,
the information volunteered in the letters, suggest a wide
range of social and cultural backgrounds. The common
denominator appears to be made up of intelligence, in-
dependence, and close margins.
Sixty out of every hundred of us are women; forty,
men. Sixty-eight out of every hundred are employed;
the others are wives or other dependent relatives. In the
25,000 families so far enrolled under the family plan,
there are 3.6 members each, including 13,000 male de-
pendent subscribers (of all ages), 29,000 female depend-
ent subscribers, and 3000 employed women.
As to earnings, a check of a representative cross sec-
tion of the groups, made by the service with employer
cooperation, indicates that 79 percent earn less than fifty
dollars a week, and 21 percent earn fifty dollars or more
a week. Only 13 percent earn less than twenty dollars a
week. A committee of the board is making a study to
ascertain whether the service can find a way to meet the
needs of the lower income
groups, especially those earning
under twenty dollars a week.
Figures on extra payments for
private rooms, in Mr. Van
Dyk's opinion, support the evi-
dence as to income levels. Only
30 percent paid for private
rooms. Yet only 1.3 percent re-
ceived ward service because
they could not afford a private
physician.
The plans were based on
yearly service not to exceed 11
percent but only 9.5 percent
have needed it ; 8 percent of the
men and 12 percent of the
women. Very few patients
have needed care more than
once in a year. Only 6 percent
stayed over three weeks. For
those who required longer
care, the subscription has
proved, as their letters repeated-
ly phrase it, "a godsend." For at
least one patient, whose subscrip-
tion came due and was renewed
while he was in the hospital,
twenty dollars paid in annual
subscriptions had brought a
return of $600 worth of hospitalization paid by the ser-
vice, and the patient, still in the hospital after a year's care,
has the benefit of the 25 percent off the usual semi-private
charges. Another patient, who entered the hospital twenty-
five days before his first year's dues ran out, received twen-
ty-one days' care on that year's dues, 25 percent off for the
intervening four or five days, and an additional twenty-
one days' care on the second year's dues, a total of fifty-
six days' care.
MOST OF THE PATIENTS — 83 PERCENT — HAVE GONE TO THE
hospital for "non-emergency" care — operations that could
be planned for in advance, illness that developed gradu-
ally. Accidents or acute illnesses, in which the patient had
to be rushed to the hospital, account for only 17 percent of
the cases. Three hundred and eleven of those whose bills
came due up to December 31, 1936, became ill while away
from New York on vacation or business. One was in
Nome, Alaska. Bills have been paid to hospitals in Alberta,
Bermuda, Porto Rico, in Indiana, Michigan, Georgia,
North Carolina, Florida, California, and in most if not all
the New England states. For the Hospital Service extends
payment up to the amount paid per day to member hos-
pitals to hospitals outside the New York area in cases of
emergency illness and accident.
There have been 773 Associated Hospital Service babies.
In the beginning maternity care was covered after ten
months' membership, but tbe bargain was appreciated so
much that a year's membership is now required.
Some bills have been for only a day or two, others have
been very substantial. A mother writes: "Our member-
ship saved us in actual cash $266.70 and many times that
in peace of mind. It was a great help when our baby only
two and a half was seriously ill not to have to worry about
the hospital to be paid. And when she was first taken to
MARCH 1937
143
the hospital there was no scurrying around to get money
to pay the first two weeks' board. She was in the hospital
two months and the 25 percent discount allowed after the
first twenty-one days was of the greatest help." A thirteen-
year-old child, whose mother had paid the first instalment
of $2.60, became ill and received care for bronchial pneu-
monia, including eight X-rays, laboratory tests, necessary
nursing.
SUBSCRIBERS' LETTERS POINT OUT OTHER GAINS IN HEALTH
and peace of mind. They write: "It is a great boon to us
who are not poor enough to get free care nor rich enough
to otherwise afford necessary hospitalization." . . . "It
enables those who could not otherwise afford it to attend
to their health and arrest illness and disease which in time
through lack of attention would become incurable and
fatal." . . . "How unhesitatingly we will go for a dreaded
operation when we haven't the worry of the burdensome
expense." . . . "The plan enabled me to be operated upon
before my health had become impaired by my condition.
I got well much quicker than I would have if I had to
wait until I could save enough for the hospital bill."
How do people go about becoming members? Regula-
tions are slightly varied, according to the size of the or-
ganization in which prospective members work. At least
ten of the group, in any case, must be employed. If one's
place of business has less than twenty-five, or if one is self-
employed or self-supporting, he may form a group made
up of employed workers and their families from other
small establishments. The rate for such subscription is ten
dollars a year, slightly higher if paid in instalments. No
additions may be made once the group is formed. In or-
ganizations with twenty-five or more employes the size
of the group depends upon the total number and the num-
ber who have already joined. A representative group is re-
quired. Employer cooperation is necessary to assure the
adequate presentation of the plan to all workers. Addi-
tions to the group, once it is organized, can be made only
by special arrangements. The rate of subscription for the
individual subscriber is the same, ten dollars a year, but
the family membership, mentioned earlier, is available
only to workers in the larger establishments.
This family membership, offered on the basis of expe-
rience with the first 125,000 subscribers, has been in effect
only three months. In one business house alone, where
there were 3000 members, 1800 families were added. The
experience to date has been more favorable with the family
plan than with the individual, the average number of days'
care required for patients under the family plan having
been only 8.7 as compared with 10.6 for all patients.
Those enrolled in the service are fans for it. My hus-
band, "let down" after the anxiety of driving his patient
carefully to the hospital, failed to notice the red traffic
light as he left its doors. Stopped by the policeman, he be-
gan to explain the presence of blankets and towels in the
car on a hot night — he had just left his wife at the hospi-
tal. At that point the policeman glimpsed in the wallet
from which the driving license was being pulled, a little
blue Hospital Service card. He pulled out his own card.
His speech on safe driving that followed was that of one
lodge member to another.
Subscribers show their sentiments by renewing their
subscriptions. Ninety-four percent renewed after the first
year. There is a particular incentive to renew because of
the difficulty of finding a new group with whi;h to re-
join if a subscription lapses, but the only pressure brought
is the regular notice by mail from the service.
Without making any pretense of discussing in any thor-
oughgoing manner the future or possible problems of the
service, it may be said that both its safety and its success
seem to be firmly established. The number of subscribers
needing the service has been well within the anticipated
quota. The present reserve fund is four times the amount
the service is required to set aside, which is 4 percent of
the earned premium. The number of member hospitals
and of subscribers has constantly increased. The family
plan is proving an added factor of safety in two ways.
The relatively high cost of individual memberships, for
a whole family, previously tended to enforce adverse selec-
tion of risks; the child insured was the one who had not
had his tonsils out, or was puny. With the cost reduced, it
is believed that more families, with average child risks,
are including their children. Economies in administration
have resulted from the family plan, since there is only one
billing, one notice, and one record for the family, as com-
pared with the previous individual notices to husband and
wife. Formal assurance of safety is provided through the
free access which the New York state superintendent of
insurance has to the books, and by the establishment of
rates subject to his supervision.
The Associated Hospital Service is really a social agency
on a business and self-sustaining basis. It has given people
a chance to join together voluntarily to do something for
their health as a group which as individuals they could not
afford or could have only by sacrificing other essentials. It
does not pretend to meet all the problems of all the people.
The subscriber still has the doctor's bills, but these are
easier to meet with hospital bills provided for in whole
or in part. Experience with the plan should prove the best
kind of education as to the values of early medical care,
and the resources available through hospitals. Judged by
renewals, the vote of the members seems to be ninety-four
to six for its continuance. As one beneficiary says, he will
offer his criticisms when the service is disbanded!
THESE MEN MIGHT SING by Louise Burton Laidlaw
I've often watched the working throng at five
Trudge home, heads hung, unheedful of the sun
Flinging its gold. They scarcely seem alive
Now that their daily labor has been done.
I've watched the pallid idle of mankind
Haunting the highway like strange carrion,
With starving body and with starving mind,
Eating their heart out in oblivion.
Strong men who labor, were they granted scope,
Might find the rhythm in the hammer's swing;
Forgotten men might, if they had the hope,
Draw forth an epic from their suffering.
144
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Valleys and the Plains
FLOODS, DROUGHTS AND MORRIS L. COOKE
by VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
As CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE FROM PlTTS-
burgh to the Delta mop up after the
flood and leading citizens attend the in-
evitable emergency flood control confer-
ences, my mind turns to Morris L. Cooke,
the pleasant and practical engineer who
handed to the President the other day his
resignation as Rural Electrification Ad-
ministrator. For the time being the
American people have lost the talent and
enthusiasm of this engineer who would
domesticate, instead of cage, the wild
waters. In 1934, Morris Cooke presided
over the first comprehensive study of the
Mississippi's waters, high and low, of the
land of! which the waters run, of the
people, animals, plants and machines
that flourish on the land. Although along
the Delta the main problem is the dis-
posal of surplus flood waters, of the larger
problem Cooke says: "There is no use in
talking about building more levees and
dams, planting more trees, or even
changing our method of agriculture. We
must do all these things and everything
else we can think of. As matters stand to-
day we are defeated. Our country as a
vital force in human affairs will disap-
pear in, say, three generations. We can
have a comprehensive conservation set-
up in full operation in ten years, and
have the problem licked in forty. But it
will be no pink tea."
Theodore Roosevelt once said, "When
soil is gone, men must go, and the
process doesn't take long." That was in
the early days of the conservation move-
ment, when a new breed of patriot was
painting the map green with forests. Out
of that movement came Gifford Pinchot,
first as Chief U.S. Forester, and ultimate-
ly as Governor of Pennsylvania. For Gov-
ernor Pinchot, Morris Cooke, already
famous as a Philadelphia water engineer,
made the Giant Power Survey of Penn-
sylvania, relating the power resources of
the state to a new level of life.
MORRIS COOKE is, OF COURSE, NOT THE
only man of our time who has seen land-
water-and-man as a whole. The TVA is
a synthesis of planning in terms of a new
and social kind of geography. The De-
partment of Agriculture, particularly its
Soil Conservation Service, reflects a social
attack upon erosion. The Civilian Con-
servation Corps was created to conserve
forests as well as unemployed young
men. Agencies devoted to preservation of
wild life are a part of the picture.
But Cooke 's contribution to our knowl-
edge of "the thin crust of this planet,"
from which we derive all that makes
blood and wheels go round, has been the
most dramatic.
A modern De Soto on the Mississippi,
he is also a new kind of Lewis or Clarke
in his exploration of the Great Plains.
In the wake of last year's drought, as
chairman of the committee appointed by
the President, he prepared the report on
the epic tragedy of men and women
driven to become desert arabs, and out-
lined ways to prevent future desolation.
Cooke is a paradox — an optimistic
Jeremiah, a prophet of doom unless —
The unless is the way out. If you want
the country to be saved, you have to
preach a little hellfire and brimstone, to
portray floods and dust storms, and erod-
ed hillsides, and the constant waste of
irreplacable resources, as object lessons
in unwitting or avaricious sin. The way
out is to put into practice comprehensive
plans, from the Soil Conservation Act to
giant power dams.
THE RECENT REPORT OF THE NATIONAL
Resources Committee recommends the
creation of a permanent public works
organization cooperating with the federal
employment stabilization office. The com-
mittee has already prepared a reservoir
of selected projects which can be under-
taken according to national need in terms
of employment and of natural resources.
Its Water Resources Committee cooper-
ated with state planning hoards and a
dozen federal agencies; and its report is
the first attempt by joint action of state
and federal agencies to consider the na-
tion's water problems as a whole. It
offers a coordinated program of public
works, planned on a six-year basis, with
annual revision, by a body like the
Planning Board recommended in the
Brownlow Report (see page 126), cov-
ering every drainage basin in the country.
^ ^
sflfc?'
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
THE MEAN ANNUAL FLOW OF THE RIVER AND ITS TRIBUTARIES
COST OF A POSSIBLE TWENTY YEAR PROGRAM
FLOOD CONTROL
THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY REPORT TRANSLATED THE MEAN
annual flow of the streams of half a continent into terms
of flood control, navigation, power development, agri-
culture, city waterfront, power, anti-pollution and
forestry programs. A tentative twenty-year program was
outlined. It has since been amplified, especially by the
Water Resources Committee of the National Resources
Committee, in a report just sent to Congress by the
President. This winter's floods emphasize the need of
continued public works, based on the studies that have
been made, and the success of projects that have been
undertaken.
The Miami River Conservancy District, whose dams
held Dayton, Ohio, high and dry through the winter
floods, demonstrates the place of local projects, coordi-
nated with federal plaS% In federal water control proj-
ects a portion of the expense, usually for right of way,
or maintenance, or land to be covered by impounded
water, is allotted to the states to pay. That insures against
local pressure for unnecessary federal projects.
REGIONS OF PREDOMINANTLY LOW RAINFALL
WHITE AREAS SHOW AVERAGE YEARLY RAINFALL OF SO" OR LESS
THE REPORT OH THE GREAT PLAINS COMMITTEE HAS BEEN SENT
to Congress. It makes recommendations to counties and com-
munities as well as to the federal government. These maps tell
why. Low rainfall and high wind velocity are a bad combina-
tion. "For the good of all concerned," agricultural practices
which have destroyed the sod and dessicated the soil must be
changed or abandoned. But that is only a beginning. Land
tenure, tax systems, relief, health, and the kind of aimless
migration which constantly upsets schools, courts, policing
and other public activities, must be dealt with.
The report recommends that the drought area should be
divided into sub-areas, and that farming practices should be
adapted to the nature of the land. The states are keenly aware
of the problem, and welcome the federal government as ad-
viser. "A precedent may conceivably be found in the zoning
ordinances by which most American cities protect themselves
against uses of the land which are held to be harmful to the
public interest. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, for example,
rural zoning has already been undertaken." The Great Plains
should not be depopulated, but made permanently habitable
by the conservation of land and water, primarily through a
revision of agricultural and grazing practices. The reclamation
of tax-delinquent land through unemployment work relief
programs in a period of depression, can serve as a post-drought
stop gap. There are nearly three million people now living in
the Great Plains. We endanger the prosperity of the whole
nation if we allow the area to become an economic desert.
REGIONS OF HIGH WIND VELOCITY
DARK AREAS SHOW AN AVERAGE VELOCITY OF 10 MILES OR OVER PER HOUR
In attempting to stabilize the economy of the region, and to
restore the income of each family, and to spread the shock or.
inevitable drought, the federal government makes amends for
damage caused by a mistaken homesteading policy and the
wartime stimulation of over cropping and over grazing.
EROSION
Jtrious Jtrornn
•W Formar//
Areas.
Harmful Km>enrtfJ*jpr*aa' B*/of-i\r*Jy Wat-Lane1}. PrtJominanHy Boiling
o<«v Culf-imfaJ ond Ortrgrantd frosian (3tna>~a//ynotJ&r* /o flounroinous. £?ro}ion
Araes Much 3&riovs trot ion iour, a/though •Locally Qts>»ra//y no/- Joriout
Loea/ty.
IF THE UNITED STATES is TO BE A PERMANENT COUNTRY, LIKE
northern Europe — and not go the way of flooded China and
the windswept Sahara — conservation of land and water must
be recognized as essential to the conservation of our people,
our culture, our security. H. H. Bennett, director of the Soil
Conservation Service, has made Jbold beginning. A hundred
agencies, public and private, are beginning to even up the
balances between nature and our social organization.
"There is no stream, no rivulet that is not a matter of some
concern to all the people of the United States. The individual
IE UNITED STATES
^ueh Jtrious Wind Erosion PntJominenHy.-falFlounf-ainouj Country
vhan Cu/f-irahJ Contit/ankk fbntth andft) f/ah h> Bflling Dry
Landf anJ DaJtrtr Much Ortryro*/ry and
Exe«tding/y Jarious JtroJiert f/ieJ- separ-
ately Mopp&d.)
By H. H. Bennell
Director
Soil Conservation Service
and local interest builds up, almost imperceptibly, into the
general and national. In the interest of the national welfare
there must be national control of all the running waters of the
United States, from the desert trickle that may make an acre
or two productive to the rushing waters of the Mississippi."
These challenging words of Morris Cooke's reckon with the
hilltops as well as the river valleys. To arrest the avenues of
deterioration shown on the map above calls for continued
action — as urgent on a wide front as the immediate campaigns
in the Mississippi Valley and the Great Plains.
Social Security and Congress
by GLEN LEET
Not for experts only, but for the public that has a responsibility to
make the Social Security Act constantly more effective, Mr. Leet
discusses changes in the law, to prevent political manipulation, to lift
standards and to remove inconsistencies
"THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW" is A FAMILIAR AMERICAN SOLU-
tion for everything from street noise to "trusts in restraint
of trade." And once there is a law, Americans are apt to
relax, feeling that the job is done. However, the experi-
ence of other nations shows clearly that the enactment of
social security legislation is not a completed achievement
but only a first step, and we already begin to see that this
is also to be the story of our Social Security Act. When
the federal measure was passed in June 1935, it started the
United States on the way along which other industrial
nations have been progressing since the turn of the cen-
tury. But on the basis of only an eighteen months' experi-
ence, there is widespread demand for change in the Social
Security Act to bring it closer to the conditions and the
needs of the day. Though the new Congress is, as this is
written, just getting into its stride, it is possible to canvass
some of the major changes which will be pressed, and,
with somewhat less certainty, those which will be seri-
ously considered at this session.
The section of the Act which has probably been most
widely discussed is that which "will give about 26 million
working people something to live on when they are old
and have stopped working." Employers and employes are
already making their wage and payroll contributions to
the old age benefit reserve and "the biggest ledger on
earth" has been set up by the Social Security Board, with
a separate account for every wage earner covered by this
section of the Act. The board itself is making studies to
serve as the basis for changes it feels would strengthen
the old age benefit provisions or simplify their adminis-
tration. Specific amendments have also been proposed by
organizations and individuals.
Under the present Social Security Act benefit payments
begin in January 1942, although the tax provisions went
into effect on January 1, 1937. Five years is a long time
to make deductions from the income of wage earners be-
fore they become eligible for benefits. There are sound
social and economic reasons for advancing the benefit pay-
ment date to January 1, 1938 or 1939, and political consid-
erations also favor such action. Informed observers of the
Washington scene believe the benefit payment date will
be advanced, probably at this session of Congress. But if it
is, the formula for the payment of benefits must be
changed also, because as it stands very few persons would
be eligible for even a minimum benefit of $10 per month
during the first few years. Something will have to be done
to bridge this gap or a lot of people will discover with
resentment that the payments which they receive as a
right are lower than those given gratuitously as old age
assistance to their needy neighbors.
The death benefits as now provided will be very meager
150
during the first few years, in some cases amounting to less
than the cost of administration. A change in the law to
assure a minimum death benefit of $50 or $100 seems
reasonable and desirable. The law also permits a lump
sum benefit at the age of sixty-five for those whose con-
tributions to the fund do not qualify them for old age
income. This has already caused so many administrative
difficulties that it will probably be eliminated in time,
though hardly by this Congress.
When the social security bill was before Congress one
of the most hotly contested subjects was the Clark amend-
ment which proposed that corporations with existing old
age pension systems should be exempt from the payroll
tax. After bitter controversy the measure passed without
this amendment. A number of large concerns including
Eastman Kodak and Bell Telephone have found that
their private systems can be adjusted to the provisions of
the Social Security Act, so that company benefits will sup-
plement employe benefits under the Act. Further, some
competent actuaries contend that few companies would
find it administratively feasible to take advantage of the
Clark proposal. Though this amendment will again be
urged upon Congress, it seems unlikely to pass.
The Reserve Fund Controversy
THE RESERVE FUND FOR OLD AGE BENEFITS IS ANOTHER STORM
center. "Taxes with respect to employment," levied under
the Social Security Act, are expected to provide the old
age benefits contemplated by the program, and to that
end to build up a reserve which will eventually total $46
billion. This vast backlog would support the program in
perpetuity without increasing the tax beyond the 1949
rate. Among economists, however, it is pretty generally
agreed that this country needs a distribution of income
which will increase the spending power of the consumer.
If the contemplated reserve is built up, the amount of sav-
ings available for capital investment will be out of line
with the demand; instead of stabilizing our economy by
forcing more money into the hands of consumers to buy
the products of industry and agriculture, the security
program would thus have a depressing effect. As an alter-
native, a pay-as-you-go plan is advocated by a number of
experts. But so long as old age benefits are financed
through payroll taxes, this policy is also open to serious
criticism. In a depression period, with payrolls cut as much
as 50 percent, contributions would have to be doubled to
meet benefit payments, thereby*intensifying economic dis-
tress. A possible solution is a pay-as-you-go plan with a
relatively small contingency reserve. But since it will re-
quire several years to build up an adequate working re-
serve, Congress probably will not make the attempt
SURVEY GRAPHIC
to overhaul reserve requirements at this session.
Much the same criticism as applies to the reserve fea-
ture can also be levelled against the taxing provisions:
that is, the amount of the tax is larger than the amount of
the benefit, and the excess will build up a reserve which
not only holds the threat of inflation but also cripples
consumer purchasing power. It is not likely that Congress
will reduce the tax scale immediately nor is it important
that early action be taken, since during the first three years
there is only a one percent tax on employe and employer.
But unless benefits are considerably liberalized, the tax
probably will not be increased as rapidly as the present
scale provides. Both the taxing and the old age benefit
sections of the Act bristle with administrative difficulties
which eventually will have to be simplified. But for the
present, Congress probably will not make material changes
in these two sections, not because they are not needed but
because they have yet to be canvassed and clarified. The
lawmakers are disinclined to jump from something we
do not yet fully understand into something we under-
stand still less.
Some Congressional leaders have opposed from the out-
set the payroll tax plan of financing old age benefits and
unemployment compensation as being fundamentally a
tax on small incomes. They would prefer to see the entire
social security program paid for by income and inheri-
tance taxes. To try to secure a sum from these sources
amounting ultimately to about \l>l/2 billion annually would
be redistribution of wealth with a vengeance. Political
power has shifted greatly in the last few years but not
enough to afford serious consideration for such a change.
Unemployment Insurance Variations
JANUARY 1, 1937 WAS THE DEADLINE SET BY THE SOCIAL SE-
curity Act for state action on unemployment compensa-
tion. The collection of the federal payroll tax levied on
"employers of eight or more" began January 1, 1936. But
the law provides an "offset credit" of 90 percent of the
amount the employer pays into a state unemployment
fund set up under an approved state law. In states having
no such unemployment compensation law, the full amount
of the 1936 tax goes into the federal fund. Thirty-five states
and the District of Columbia got under the wire with ap-
proved laws before the end of 1936, seventeen of them
putting through their measures in special legislative ses-
sions between December 10 and 31. Laggard states are
pulling hard for an extension of the January 1 time limit.
But since states which have already passed unemploy-
ment compensation laws represent about 80 percent of
the voting strength of the House and about 73 percent of
the Senate the passage of any such measure seems unlikely.
The argument in favor of limiting unemployment com-
pensation to employers of eight or more persons is based
on the administrative difficulty in collecting the tax from
smaller employers. Yet the old age benefits tax is being col-
lected from employers of one or more; and there will be
an effort in this session to extend the unemployment com-
pensation coverage in the same way. Interestingly enough
the demand for this change comes in part from the small
employers themselves, who foresee that it will be difficult
for them to secure labor when the employes of larger es-
tablishments are entitled to these benefits.
Another reason for this stretching of the tent ropes is
that where small employers are not included there is a
temptation for such concerns as barber shops, chain gaso-
line distributors and so on to try to evade the tax by set-
ting up some of their workers as independent contractors.
No effective means for controlling or preventing this has
yet been devised.
In addition to workers in small establishments the un-
employment compensation provisions do not cover em-
ployes of religious, charitable, educational and other non-
profit-making agencies. Of all the groups barred to the
benefits of the Act this exclusion has the least justification.
There is strong sentiment among social workers in favor
of removing this discrimination from both the unem-
ployment compensation and old age benefits sections of
the law. An expanding number of non-profit-making
agencies and their national organizations are working act-
ively to this end.
Agricultural and domestic workers are also excluded
from the tax and from both unemployment compensa-
tion and old age benefits. There has been agitation on the
part of labor and farm organizations for the extension of
the Act to include these groups. This is desirable in the-
ory but it involves grave administrative difficulties. After
twenty-five years of experience with social insurance Eng-
land has just extended unemployment compensation to
farm labor, finding it necessary for the purpose to draft
complicated and involved provisions and devise intricate
new administrative machinery. With our present set-up
still experimental and incomplete, it is hard to believe
that Congress will this year extend either unemployment
insurance compensation or old age benefits to cover agri-
cultural labor and domestic service.
The federal Act left it to the states to determine the
form of unemployment compensation laws with which
each would experiment. Wisconsin is the only state now
operating under an "individual reserve" law, that is a
measure under which each employer's contributions are
kept in a segregated account, drawn upon only for bene-
fits to his own employes. Two states combine this form
with the "pooled fund" plan, one state permits the em-
ployer to choose the form he prefers. Thirty-two states
have passed a "pooled fund" law, under which all con-
tributions go into a single state fund, out of which bene-
fits are paid to eligible employes of all covered employers.
This is based on the sound insurance principle of "spread-
ing the risk," though until credit rating provisions are in-
troduced on the basis of experience, it will offer small in-
centive to employers to regularize employment. But the
states have so overwhelmingly favored the pooled fund
type of law, that it is not unlikely that proposal will be
made at this session to eliminate individual reserve plans
from the Act, and also the guaranteed employment plan
now permitted under the federal Act but which is not
now in successful operation in any state. This would be
fought by Wisconsin and the proponents of plant reserves
elsewhere.
The definition of employment in state laws does not
always conform with the definition in the Social Security
Act and an employer sometimes finds he is unable to
secure credit for the full amount of the state tax which
he has paid. An amendment to the federal Act to permit
all contributions paid by an employer into an approved
state unemployment compensation fund to be offset
against the federal tax will probably be adopted.
So much for changes affecting unemployment and old
age benefits, which the worker receives as a "right," be-
cause of his own contributions (Continued on page 165)
MARCH 1937
151
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Report of Progress— a la Hitler
by JOHN PALMER GAVTT
Hmo. ra
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gathering the material Bar hii
rural Policy, 19B-
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ot ue Nazi
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Co (fair, witk
of the jews tkoagk k docs sfaov chat
of ike picture, it
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ie xm*gm
people been Dec K> exp
Nazi pony VBB
World W;ir, wliicli h;is galled the German! ever since
ilicy signed it at the cannon's mouth.
So, ACCORDING TO HlTLER, TIIK SLATE IS CLEAN AS BETWEEN
(.'i many and her ncighlxjrs. He pledges himself (for
wliai i lie pledge is worth) that the stage of dramatic "sur-
prises" is over; that Germany is now prepared to help as
an equal in organizing peace. With everybody except
Soviet Russia — a modest exception, forsooth! In particular
he declares that "between Germany and France there arc
no humanly conceivable points of dispute and there can be
none"; incidentally reassuring Belgium and Holland as
regards the inviolability of their territories. But in respect
of lust for real estate there is still that little matter of colo-
nies. "We have no colonial demand or claim against states
which took no colonies away from us" ... a gentle caveat
affecting only Great Britain, France, the Union of South
Africa, New Zealand — and Japan! Nobody greatly mourns
the junking of the brutal crippling provisions and impli-
cations of the Versailles treaty, prolific of injustice and
hate, mother of further wars to come. The whole world
knows now that save for its creation of the League of
Nations and the dismemberment of that old political
nightmare known as Austria-Hungary, that "peace" treaty
was a witches' cauldron. We shall see — what we shall see.
Meanwhile for the present leaving Hitler's ill camou-
flaged aspirations toward the East in the unquestionably
competent hands of the Russians themselves.
There is excellent authority besides that of common sense
for judging professions of faith and intention by works.
Hitlerism has destroyed the slowly growing confidence of
the world in Germany's good intentions, just as Mussolini
and the militarists of Japan have destroyed it as regards
their dependability. At bottom there is the question of
the spirit; of the will to justice, fair play and good faith
among the peoples. And of the intent to cooperate peace-
ably in constructive, mutually advantageous intercourse.
As the French Premier Blum put it, almost as Hitler was
speaking: "There is a vital liaison between economic co-
operation on the one hand and the organization of peace
with restriction of armaments on the other." And Foreign
Secretary Eden was saying at the same time: "We cannot
cure the world by pacts and treaties, or by political creeds.
Nor by speeches, however lofty and peace-breathing.
There must be an unmistakable will to cooperate." This
will must be positive, and of the hearts of the folk. It is
not fostered in atmosphere such as that in Germany,
Italy and Japan, where the people are bred and trained
from cradle to grave in preparation and habitude to think
in terms of national arrogance; to say nothing of being
starved in the process to pay for weapons with which
to implement that spirit.
This goes very deep. James Harvey Robinson, in his
thought-stirring chapter on The Arrogance of National-
ism,* pointing out the startling fact that "nationalism" is
a thing of very recent origin, quotes William Graham
Sumner's Folkways about savage tribal boastings:
When the Caribs were asked whence they came, they an-
swered: "We alone are people!" The meaning of the name
Kiowa [an Indian tribe now settled in Oklahoma] is "real or
principal people." The Lapps call themselves "men," or "hu-
man beings." . . . The Tunguses call themselves "men." Others
are something else, perhaps not defined, but not real men.
• In bii magnificent posthumous synthesis, THE HUMAN COMEDY, just
published by Harper. 394 pp. Price S3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
Robinson goei on to remark that the word Deuuch,
according to Grimm, had this meaning originally, "and
it is amusing to note a certain complacency in German
writers who point this out." He adds: 'The Franks, from
whose name the French derive theirs, appear to have
thought they were 'the free.'"
AN OFFHAND, ALMOST INADVERTENT OBITER DICTUM OF MINE
in these pages a little while ago, to the effect that the
streets of Rome never were clean until Mussolini com-
pelled it, aroused considerable ire on the part of anti-
Fascist and anti-Nazi readers. One of them denounced
it as "misplaced adulation of a barbaric tyrant." To my
reply declaring that while my detestation of the Fascist
regime was as whole-hearted as his own it still was per-
missible to mention an incidental fact, he rejoins:
I hold that there can be nothing good coming out of Ger-
many or Italy; no more than one would concede that a gang-
ster who levies tribute on houses of prostitution and who is
kind to his mother and gives Christmas baskets to the poor
has an element of good in him.
Which somehow reminds me (as I wrote in reply) of
the still customary teaching of many Fundamentalists that
good works, however good, by the "unsaved" arc counted
as sin per sc in the sight of the Lord. The attitude strikes
me as precisely like that of the anti-Semites who affect
to believe that nothing good can be done by a Jew, whose
very existence is sinful in their sight. The name for this
is bigotry. We all have it; the only difference is in the form
it takes. The trouble with the Hitlers and Mussolinis is
that their ideas arc not confined to them; they permeate
an alarmingly large proportion of our own people. One
of them is the desire to suppress all statements — yes, and
all people — distasteful to themselves. At bottom we arc
all heresy hunters.
The other day I beat at golf a much better player than
myself, chiefly because his mind was not on the game but
upon his hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"I won't discuss the merits of anything he does or pro-
poses," he sputtered. "It poisons me to think of his exist-
ence."
"I understand perfectly," I said. "If Roosevelt were to
come down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments
and the Multiplication-Table, you'd declare them false."
"Yes! And what's more, they would be!"
WHILE SPAIN SMOLDERS
by Stanton A. Coblentz
Vessels that dream at anchor in a bay,
While storm-crests rock the riders of the deep,
May never see, amid their tide-lapped sleep,
The shouldering hulls that dip through squall and spray.
So we who read that, half a world away,
Gun-turrets smoke, and flaming dragons sweep
Through thunderous skies, and bomb-tossed bodies leap
And moan and fall, can scarcely know the fray,
Except as in some ancient, drowsy tale,
But hear and sigh, then turn to toil or shop,
To bicker, sell or buy, to reap a crop
Or build a house, though even now the gale,
With tower-shattering rage none try to stop,
Ghoulishly whistles toward our own calm vale.
MARCH 1937
153
LIFE AND LETTERS
Volume I, Number 1
by LEON WHIPPLE
THE NEWSSTANDS BLOOM LIKE THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABY-
lon. There is a vast stir in the world of print, with that most
hopeful of all editorial lines, Volume I, Number 1, revealing
that the publishers think they discern new audiences or new
appetites. Reader levels and reading tastes are changing — and
that is news to ponder over. The editors seem to think that
the American people want picture books, or pocket review-
digests. Does this popular interest in pictorial surfaces mean
a hunger for that immediacy of experience the camera offers
or just a new escape into an album of thrills? Do the short
cut reviews prove an impatient desire to cut through literary
decoration to the nub of information we need in this complex
age? Or do we just like delicatessen culture, sliced very thin,
that comforts us with the feeling that if we have read an
article we have done a deed? Here are pretty conundrums.
Those cosmic publishers who gave us Time and Fortune
now offer Life itself. This new Life (in name only descended
from that gay Life we oldsters hold in nostalgic regard) is
rich and handsome, fresh as paint, with text and pictures that
intrigue us, and inform us on many droll and exciting mani-
festations of the human comedy. It must satisfy some need,
for its circulation already skyrockets toward a million and
newsdealers have to bootleg their limited supply to favored
customers. I suspect it satisfies that need we all feel for vicar-
ious experience; in Life we go places and see things we know
little enough about — to the Metropolitan Opera or behind the
lines of Chinese Communist armies, to greyhound races or
the royal marriage in Holland. It is useful to look at the world
we live in, with guides who feel a cosmopolitan zest but no
urge toward propaganda. Life is in parts admirably like the
London Illustrated News or Paris L' Illustration, but edited
with razor edge modernity, that is pretty scornful of the bath-
ing girl and sensational appeals. The editors are sophisticated
beyond that sophistication. They also know display, and re-
spect photographic art without making a cult of line and
shadow. They will solve no problems unless it be the problem
of providing the middle-plus American audience of decent,
curious, human folks, with pleasant refreshment and profit-
able knowledge.
as the foreword declares is a monthly "educational
picture magazine for EVERYONE." The rather rough-and-
ready format and high voltage techniques seem aimed at a
popular audience. It comes from DCS Moines, la., where its
publishers conduct highly efficient newspapers that blanket
the region. They are also experienced in publishing syndicate
picture pages, and their experience seems to have revealed to
them that there are a lot of people who are interested in sex,
in the spoofing of celebrities {fide a series on Queen Mary's
hats or the build-up of Joan Crawford), in the kind of crusad-
ing that exploits the evils of paroling gangsters, and in the
sensational and bizarre. All this verges on the tabloid formula
though it is perhaps unfair to judge on the first issues.
Lool^ left me with the feeling that life is more unpleasant
than I thought. If there is a large audience for this kind of
picture book, it gives one to think. For example, the mores of
the time accept the pretty girl, in various drapings, as a
familiar if not always approved staple of news, what with
sun-bathing, athletics, and modern fashions. The body is no
Victorian mystery, but we prefer beauty by Miami's waves,
or in a kind of glamorous aloofness on stage and screen, or
for art's sake. In Loo^ next to the silken knees is an X-ray of
their bony skeleton; the famous glass woman parades again;
unclad dummies of window displays are grouped with cruel
grotesquerie; the art models appear in a cart load of people
dead of the Black Plague. There is a touch of the macabre,
although the editors may say they are seeking an honest
realism. One wonders whether there is a level of people in
America who, grown blase because of the constant glamor
that besets them from printed page and screen, yet are so
bored by their own dull lives that they have to be shocked
into emotion? In all sense experience we grow callous to
familiar stimuli and need odd new stimuli to get the old
"kick." Let us hope the naturalism of the body will not flare
back on us.
Coronet offers a pretty handsome pocket album of art pho-
tographs, colored prints of paintings, and cartoons. It has a
continental flavor but its humor and articles are home brew,
and the text is pleasantly discursive about medicine, spiritism,
automobiles, the effects of color and music. Coronet will
astonish you with its gifts of modern reproduction at 35 cents
though its civilized entertainment and beauty may prove
caviare to the general.
Midweek Pictorial, now divorced from the New Yor^
Times, offers good popular Sunday supplement fare, features
with pictures and entertainment, but it has discovered no new
formula, and lacks the expensive elegance of Life. It seems
just to have missed the train. For competition is stiff among
all our printed wares so there will certainly be some redistri-
bution of readers and advertising. It seems impossible that
we are developing new readers enough to go round or can
find ads for everybody, including the radio. The cleavages and
survivals and deaths are going to be interesting revelations of
our present stage of culture and pseudo-culture. Readers al-
ready subconsciously begin to measure all magazines by the
rich and elegant top-flight ones, with their splendid incomes.
They feel that the old friends look a little dowdy and dull.
Scribner's caught the turn of fashion with a new dress and
editor. Its fiftieth anniversary number (volume CI in its
history) is pretty splendid. And how it does take you back
with the articles and pictures from old numbers! Do you
remember the folk-lore drawings by A. B. Frost and E. W.
Kemble? and the design and color of Rackham and Maxfield
Parrish? and the tales by Stephen Crane and Richard Harding
Davis? Here they are to make you think those were pretty-
good days, with warm sentiments and leisure and good-
mannered gaiety.
Now for the pocket reviews. We have more digests than
materials to digest, I think, but people like 'em, for better or
worse. They are generally serious though often just journal-
ism. They seem to prove that there are many more readers
than we thought, perhaps millions, who feel a need to know
something about what is going on — if they can catch knowl-
edge on the wing. Events, for example, patterned on the old
Current History of the New Yor^ Times, is an excellent
eighty pages of world affairs by men of the authority of
Beard, Nevins, Fay, and Ogg. Here is brevity without cheap-
ness, and a guidebook of great usefulness. I hope it finds a
place, not measured by its gir% I have space only to note that
our journalists of the airways are doubling in brass in their
own review, The Commentator, edited by Lowell Thomas. It
does not cut very deep, being thin in spots, and partisan in
spots, but these men know many backgrounds and they are
close to the public so that their special viewpoints are valuable.
154
SURVEY GRAPHIC
All this printing press inflation leaves the mind in a whirl.
Doubly welcome, then, is the new Public Opinion Quarterly,
issued under the auspices of the School of Public Affairs at
Princeton University. This is no digest, but a good weighty
volume, edited by and for experts, and rich in research and
exploration. The science of public opinion, straw polls of
1936, Roosevelt and the Washington correspondents, the edi-
torial policies of broadcasting companies, surveys, and book
reviews, are some of its interests in Number 1. This is a sig-
nificant venture in a field of the gravest social import. The
editors will, no doubt, take a look at the picture books and
digests for our instruction.
Clearly this age-in-a-hurry is willing
to learn, but it resents the voluminous
and the long-winded, and with some
justice. Reading is to many no longer
a cult or a decoration, but a tool, and
it has to compete for its slice of time,
and on the run. It is valued for its
quick crop of information, entertain-
ment, emotional excitement. But we
cannot build social wisdom or sound
culture on these. We shall miss the
meditations of mature minds, the
glories of great language, the fruits
of personality garnered in serenity.
Pictures are a kind of experience, but
one of surfaces and frozen moments
that fall apart. The meaning of life
is under the surface in the spirit, and
flowers in time. These fluttering print-
forms at best are primers.
KING'S MOVE
By Peggy Pond Church
There are times when to be a king
is to show what must be done in
a man's heart.
There is something each man must face, not
this king only.
This king has faced it: he has chosen
to be himself;
to be the carpenter and not
the Christ,
We or They
"WE OR THEY"— Two WORLDS IN CON-
FLICT, by Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Mac-
millan. 106 pp. Price $1.50 postpaid of Sur-
vey Graphic.
the individual man and not
the King.
Oh difficult decision,
to reject a God's temptation, not
the devil's,
accepting the kingdoms of the earth
from neither;
to claim the kingdoms of heaven in
your own name,
and to rule, self-appointed,
in your own hell.
THE EDITOR OF Foreign Affairs, EASILY
the most intelligently run and fairest
periodical on foreign politics in the
world, has made good use of the rare
opportunity afforded him through his
close contact with developments in
all countries. His slender book deals
with the historic moment when the
offensive of modern dictatorships seems to have reached its
peak and the period of timid defensive on the part of modern
democracies seems to end. "We or They" is an articulate ex-
pression of democratic liberalism newly conscious of its spirit-
ual strength and supremacy. Having been too sure of our
political achievements, "We" have gone through a period of
despondency under the onrush of a new order distasteful to
us but seemingly victorious. Mr. Armstrong has succeeded in
putting this new order in its place. "They" are arrogant and
haughty as every youth movement has been in its day. In
their revolutionary onslaught "They" have gone so far as to
relinquish as useless the very language of their fathers. In his
brilliant chapter, The Gulf Between, Mr. Armstrong analyses
the question that confronts every representative of western
political tradition: how to talk to the men of this new dicta-
torial order who "say familiar words but mean something
else." In the vocabulary whose words have changed their
meaning there are not only "liberty," "democracy," "art,"
"newspaper," "morals," "education," "pacifism," and so forth
— there are two decisive words, "truth" and "force." A dic-
tated truth is no truth at all, and a dictated force — may it be
as thoroughly organized and armed as the new dictatorships
know how to — is not a true force before the verdict of history.
This is what Mr. Armstrong's analysis brings out clearly, at
the same time giving a considered view from the American
standpoint of how the reviving morale of the democratic
principle is to be more successfully asserted in future crises.
For the fact stands out clearly in this book that the modern
dictatorships — like those of olden times — do not know how to
proceed without dangerous, and some day lethal, internal and
external crises, whereas it is the intrinsic strength of modern
democracies that they do know. One of the most courageous
features of Armstrong's book should be mentioned: that, as
an unbiased lover of clear thinking, after some hesitation he
finds himself compelled by the force of his liberal philosophy
to put into one line of defense and offense the three major
modern dictatorships of our times, Germany, Italy and Russia.
New Yor\ TONI STOLPER
Prophecy of the American
Dream
THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN SOCIAL
CHANGE, by Charles Edward Merriam.
New York University Press. 149 pp. Price
$'3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS BOOK, WHICH CONTAINS SIX LEC-
tures delivered at New York Univer-
sity on the James Stokes Foundation,
is slim in format but wide in range of
thought. For the proper appreciation
of the importance of Professor Mer-
riam's argument, a biographical and
bibliographical note is desirable.
He began his career as a political
theorist, but then wrote extensively
on and participated in practical poli-
tics. Of late, he has been prominent in
the movement to make the social sci-
ences more "scientific." Sometimes his
role has been that of John the Bap-
tist. At other times he has been a
Principal rather than an Agent. Most
recently he has served on President
Hoover's Social Trends Commission,
on President Roosevelt's National
Planning Board which became the
National Resources Committee, and
on the President's Committee on Ad-
ministrative Management. In the in-
terstices of these activities he has
found time for a volume entitled Po-
litical Power which is the first of a
series of studies dealing "specifically and constructively with
the emerging political philosophies and programs of our
day." These lectures are a development of special phases of
these studies.
They disclose wide reading and deep thought. Mr. Merriam
is at home not only among the classical political theorists but
among the biologists, the psychiatrists, the engineers and the
wirepullers. The limitations of oral delivery to an audience are
doubtless responsible for the occasional telescoping of the
thought and for broad generalizations which, barren of illus-
trations or specific examples, are sometimes puzzling. But
the main outlines of the philosophy are clear.
The first lecture attacks theories which regard government
as a necessary evil — which "boycott" it — and the theories
which distort the position of the state in the social domain.
The second lecture puts Politics in its Place. The third breathes
a spirit of optimism as opposed to the Philosophy of Pessi-
mism and decries the Practice of Violence. After discussing
Conservation and Change in Politics Mr. Merriam proceeds
to enumerate a number of activities which he calls Strategic
Controls — quasi-governmental corporations, differential taxa-
tion, regulation of securities, public works in relation to the
business cycle, social security legislation, and so forth.
The final lecture is on the Nature of National Planning.
Here Mr. Merriam is able to rise to eloquent heights because
he nowhere defines "planning." Nor does he indicate by
MARCH 1937
155
whom and under what conditions the planning is to be
done. Nevertheless he sees "vistas of wider prosperity than
ever stretching out before us; higher standards of American
living; finer achievements in American liberty, equality and
justice if we have the wit, the will, the faith, the courage
to reach out and take them." All readers will trust that
Mr. Merriam is not hypermetropic.
Columbia University LINDSAY ROGERS
"The Nine Old Men"
THE NINE OLD MEN, by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen. Doubled*?,
Doran. 325 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THAT PARAGON OF LEARNING, JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG,
first Baron Acton, was of opinion that backstairs gossip was
not to be sniffed at as a source of historical information. That
is one point in favor of this rather unmannerly resume of
recent Washington gossip about the Court. Another is that
its authors are correct in assuming that the American people
have a legitimate curiosity about what is going on in the
Court; and since other modes of satisfying this curiosity re-
garding the most powerful governing body in this democracy
are somewhat deficient, resort must be had to common talk.
Unfortunately, however, people who take an interest in com-
piling gossip are often lacking in literary good taste, and the
present writers are not exceptional in this respect. What is
worse still, for their own case, they have indiscreetly divagated
into past history at a few points, with results which can only
prompt the question whether their gossip is more to be relied
upon.
They say, for instance, that the Philadelphia Convention
voted down four times "a provision giving the judiciary a
right to pass on the constitutionality of acts of Congress"
(page 48), a statement which is almost the exact contrary of
the truth. The provision in question would have associated
some of the judges in a Council of Revision having the right
to veto proposed legislation; and one of the principal reasons
advanced against it was that, since the judges would have
occasion to pass on the constitutionality of acts of Congress,
therefore their opinions ought not be previously tinctured by
their having had anything to do with the framing of such acts.
They also say (page 52) that the Court declared the whole
Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional in Marbury v. Madison.
This is an absurd error — much of the act is still in the statute
books. Elsewhere (page 57) they confuse Polk with Buchanan;
while their statistics (page 59) regarding the line-up in the
Court on the Dred Scott Case take no account of Justice
Nelson's neutrality on the slavery issue. They assert in two
places (pp. 315 and 320) that Justice Shiras was the judge
who changed his mind in the Income Tax Case, which also
is erroneous. The identity of the vacillating justice is not
known but he was probably Justice Gray.
Reading this book in light of Senator Guffey's recent reso-
lution asking for a Senatorial inquiry into some of its allega-
tions, one gains the impression that the Senator is a singularly
sensitive soul. The book is a chronicle of gossip, but not of
scandal in any very objectionable connotation of the term.
And it must be confessed that if some of the writers' state-
ments are not always well founded, they are at least "well
found" at times, one instance being their assertion (page 41)
that the original alignment of the Court on the AAA Case
was five to four, but that the Chief Justice eventually shifted
in order to avoid another five-to-four decision. It is certain that
Justice Roberts's opinion for the Court bears evidence on its
face of some kind of compromise, the part of the opinion
which commits the Court to the Hamiltonian theory of the
spending power being totally irrelevant to the final decision.
Another interesting bit of gossip is that Justice Roberts, in the
winter of 1934-35, was afflicted with "Presidentitis," but that
Mrs. Roberts finally decided for him that his real role was
that of stabilizer of the country, and that this decision on the
good lady's part determined the Justice's attitude in the AAA
Case.
The chapter on Justice McReynolds is entitled "Scrooge."
The authors remark (page 236) that "he is always glad when
Court reopens in the fall, it gives him something to do."
Regarding Justice Van Devanter, a point naturally stressed it
the notorious paucity of his output in opinions, although tes-
timony is also adduced (page 188) as to his helpfulness to the
Court in certain other respects. Justice Butler is regarded by
our authors as the forefront of the Conservative bloc. Of
Justice Sutherland, on the other hand, they take a quite un-
warrantably disparaging view.
Perhaps the most valuable thing about this book is the
argument which it incidentally affords for an age limit.
"Years ago," they aver, "Hughes declared that judges should
retire when they reach the age of seventy-five" (page 93); and
many of the facts here brought out strongly confirm this ver-
dict. To be sure, such an age limit would have deprived us of
Justice Holmes's most valuable years on the Bench. On the
other hand, it would probably have saved the Court from its
two most serious missteps, the Dred Scott decision and the
decision in the Income Tax Case. And at least such an age
limit would bring about a more regular replacement of the
Bench. Thus, as the authors point out (page 322), "Harding,
who lived only two years in office . . . appointed four justices,"
while "Taft, who remained in the White House only one
term appointed six justices." On the other hand, Mr. Roose-
velt has had the appointment of no justices so far; and that
fact is, perhaps, the crucial one in the present Supreme Court
situation.
Princeton University EDWARD S. CORWIN
A Jew Views His World
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWS, by Robert Gessner. Far-
rar and Rinehart. 381 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
ROBERT GESSNER, BORN AND BROUGHT UP IN MICHIGAN, FELT
that anti-Semitism would become increasingly important to
all Americans. As a "nice" Jew he had not thought much
about it until quite recently, so in order to clarify the question
both for himself and for others he began his inquiry in the
United States. He then went to England, France, Germany,
Italy, Poland, Palestine and Russia, talking to Jews of all
kinds and stations. The result is a sincere, thoughtful, timely
survey of the status of the Jew in the world today related to
forces of government and economic and political trends.
Spades are called spades with courage. Descriptions of the
past history of anti-Semitism in each of these countries as
well as unforgettable descriptions of present conditions, clar-
ify the contemporary question. This book should be exceed-
ingly helpful as a sound starting point for Jewish youth who
want an intelligent, objective account of their inherited prob-
lems. It will interest other thoughtful readers because of its
inevitable raising of the larger and fundamental issues of
tolerance vs. intolerance, nationalism and internationalism,
and the possibility of economic peace and security for as
many peoples as possible, regardless of race, creed or color.
Illustrated with lovely photographs by the author one is sur-
prised to find that his word pictures are the more vivid ones.
It is satisfying also to find a young man still under thirty
with such compassionate understanding balanced by just con-
sideration of many points of view.
Some readers will be particularly interested in his descrip-
tion of the Zionist experiment in Palestine; others in that of
Poland where his reaction isjhat "Hitler is more humane."
Many will be more interested ffi the descriptions of Germany
or the U.S.S.R. Those with a feeling of responsibility toward
current problems will find this book well worth the time
given to it. Remarkably well written it holds one's interest in
spite of many statistics and the only criticism might be that
it is too well written. It leaves you disturbed to the point of
156
feeling a need for action before the problem gets completely
out of hand or any further along the road from reason to
emotion.
New Yo/^ MILDRED SAWYER
The Common Welfare
THE MODERN ECONOMY IN ACTION, by Caroline E. Ware. Ameri-
can Association of University Women. Washington. 1936. 55 pp. Price
50 cents.
ECONOMICS IN A CHANGING WORLD, by Graham A. Laing. Amer-
ican Association of University Women. Washington. 1936. 82 pp. Price
50 cents.
GOVERNMENT, BUSINESS AND THE INDIVIDUAL, by Elizabeth
Stoffregen May. American Association of University Women. Washington.
1936. 112 pp. Price 75 cents.
Order from the Association
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL TRENDS, by Raleigh Schorling and How-
ard Y. McClusky. World Book Company. 1936. 154 pp. Price $1.32 post-
paid of Survey Graphic.
THE VAST AMOUNT OF DISCUSSION ON PUBLIC QUESTIONS NOW
going on among all sorts of groups needs not only literature
but wise guidance. For their social studies groups, the Ameri-
can Association of University Women has published three
study outlines. The first, by Caroline E. Ware, is a well
analyzed guide to a descriptive study of modern business
activity. It follows closely the larger work, The Modern
Economy in Action, written by Miss Ware and Gardiner C.
Means. Laing's Economics in a Changing World is a some-
what more searching analysis. The third pamphlet by Eliza-
beth Stoffregen May has to do more with the role of the state
in economic welfare.
All three of these books are full of useful and provocative
material. The chief criticism that might be made of them is
that they list a great many different kinds of reading refer-
ences without informing the student as to their comparative
difficulty, reliability or application.
The volume by Schorling and McClusky is further evidence
of the fact that teachers want to be citizens. It is designed for
the guidance of discussions "in both school and community"
and although not always strictly accurate in its generalizations
about present conditions, it poses questions that people would
do well to think through if they can.
Teachers College LYMAN BRYSON
What the World Is Made Of
THE WORLD AROUND US— A MODERN GUIDE TO PHYSICS, by Paul
Karlson. Simon end Schuster. 293 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
BEING BOTH READABLE AND RELIABLE, THIS is A RARE BOOK.
Without any solemn nonsense, it tells the ordinary person
what serious thoughts the scientists are thinking. But many
teachers of physics will frown upon it, because of its very vir-
tues. These teachers would do well, however, to read the book,
and even to recommend it to their students — unofficially.
Karlson has the knack of visualizing abstractions with the
help of irreverent and amusing pictures in the style of Van
Loon. All this is of course out of keeping with the orthodox
scientist's efforts to replace imagery with mathematical sym-
bols; and the book is by so much in conflict with what the
physics teacher is trying to do. On the other hand, the author
is well protected against any exceptions the purist may take
by frankly describing what is supposed to happen in electrons
and molecules by means of similes — it is as if the electrons
were crowding on the edge of the condenser plates, it is like
a pair of separated sweethearts who are trying to get together
again, it is like a car coming down the roller-coaster and
scooting up on the next bump. This is good metaphysics and
it is better science than a large proportion of science teachers
deal out. Very friendly and informal — the author is appar-
ently trying to help the reader rather than to impress his col-
leagues. No wonder it has the approval of the Scientific Book
Club. Strongly recommended to folks who are mildly curious
but skeptical of their ability to understand what science is
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157
really doing. There is one serious complaint: the title is mis-
leading, for the world around us includes human beings and
other living things, to say nothing of customs and institutions,
whereas the book sticks closely to the world of the physicist.
But that can be forgiven so good a book.
New Yorl( BENJAMIN C. GRUENBERG
Minds and Morals
THE RELATION BETWEEN MORALITY AND INTELLECT, by
Clara Frances Chassell. Bureau of Publications. Teachers College. 556 op.
Price $4.45 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
DR. CHASSELL'S WORK is A GENERAL SURVEY OF ALL THE RE-
search done in psychology, criminology and sociology which
has any bearing on the relation between morality and in-
tellect. It incorporates the findings of nearly 300 studies
pursued by investigators in this country and abroad. The
method of study employed in this research may be defined as
statistical, comparative and synthetic. The statistical technique
utilized is correlational and the studies reported are both
correlational and non-correlational in order to typify diverse
methods of investigation. The book is divided into Part I,
II, III and Conclusions. In Parts II and III, the studies are
exclusively correlational and include two investigations by the
author of the relation between morality and intellect. The
correlational results consist of 700 coefficients of different
types, calculated between measures of morality and intellect
for three types of subjects, 11,000 feeble-minded persons, ap-
proximately 300,000 delinquents, and 12,000 non-delinquents.
The author concludes that the relation between morality
and intellect in restricted groups is clearly direct; the obtained
relation is extremely variable but tends to be low, depending
on the type of evidence, the type of group, the type of co-
efficient and possibly even the country represented. She be-
lieves that the true relation is undoubtedly higher than the
obtained one. Expressed in correlational terms, the obtained
relation may usually be expected to fall between .10 and .39,
and the true relation to be under .50. She states that the rela-
tion between morality and intellect in the general population
is undoubtedly higher than usually found in restricted groups
and concludes that the relation in the general population may
be expected to fall below .70.
The qualities discussed by this book are of utmost impor-
tance to those interested in sociology and psychology.
One might question Dr. Chassell's definition of the terms
"morality" and "intellect" which she has used for classificatory
purposes, covering the various related terms used in the
studies by the author as well as the other investigators who
have done research in this field. The book is detailed, logical,
and for purposes of clarity is repetitious, and also somewhat
difficult to read because of its highly technical nature.
Jewish Board of Guardians, New Yor/^ JOHN SLAWSON
The Westernization of the Orient
WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN THE NEAR EAST, by Hans Kohn.
Columbia University Press. 329 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
WHILE THE AIR REVERBERATES WITH OPTIMISM ABOUT AMERI-
can recovery, public opinion still is in the dumps about
affairs abroad. Quite apart from its other values, Pro-
fessor Kohn's new book effectively dissipates pessimism as
far as recent developments in the Near East are concerned.
Reporting from an intimate knowledge about an area similar
in size to Europe exclusive of Russia, an area which but
recently was a by-word for conservatism and backwardness,
he shows an astonishing progress, both in the direction of
political democracy and in that of social welfare.
His theme is the Europeanization of the Near East, though
modernization may yet prove to be the better term as move-
ments stimulated from Europe or by contacts with European
civilization are seen to derive their subsequent dynamic from
revived Oriental concepts and ambitions. In fact, the country
among those discussed which has shared least fully in the
recent advance is Syria, yet most subjected to foreign domina-
tion. And this is not simply because Europe has only touched
the upper social strata in Syria — that, after all, is culturally
true wherever Western imperialism impinges on an ancient
civilization; it is also because Syria has so long been a colonial
area with sharply divided religious loyalties but no inner
national cohesion.
The author discusses interestingly many of the factors
which explain the differences in the recent development of
Turkey, the Levant states, Iran (Persia), Iraq, Arabia, and
Egypt — the parts played by natural causes, by political ambi-
tions, by the talents of individual rulers, by particular eco-
nomic needs and advantages. One cannot always agree with
the weight he attaches to various influences, but he describes
them well. Perhaps the most important historical lesson is
the dramatic way in which each of the plans hatched during
and immediately after the Great War for these Near Eastern
peoples has already collapsed because it was impossible to
check the process of invigoration of these old societies once
it had been set going. We can see in other parts of the world,
too, the same relentless march toward economic freedom
wherever the paths to greater political autonomy are cleared.
New Yor^ BRUNO LASKER
Pope Pius XI's Encyclical
REORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL ECONOMY— THE SOCIAL ENCYCLICAL
DEVELOPED AND EXPLAINED, by Oswald von Nell-Breuning. S.J. English
edition prepared by Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. Bruce. 451 pp. Price
J'3.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
PROBABLY LESS THAN FIVE OF THE READERS OF THIS BRIEF REVIEW
have seen the original version of the work which it presents.
Die Soziale Enzy^lil(a was written by a professor of moral
theology and canon law on the university faculty of theology
of Sankt-Georgen, Frankfurt-am-Main, Oswald von Nell-
Breuning, S.J., and published in 1934. It is a commentary on
the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI entitled On Reconstructing
the Social Order.
Father Nell-Breuning's work is at once the most compre-
hensive and the most enlightening commentary on this great
Encyclical that has appeared up to the present. It is funda-
mental in its discussion of the particular doctrines and it
provides a vast amount of information on collateral topics in
the fields of economics, sociology, ethics and politics. It en-
deavors to answer every reasonable question that can be asked
concerning the meaning of the text and the relations of its
parts to one another.
Father Dempsey's translation is very well done. It merits
the highest praise: not only because it renders adequately and
fairly the thought and content of the German version, not
only because it is expressed in good English, but also because
the translator had to deal with pretty difficult German.
Space is wanting here for even the briefest summary of the
matter contained in the original version. It deals adequately
with all the major propositions of the Papal Encyclical. Indi-
vidualism, economic liberalism, socialism, communism and
economic domination are discussed under their historical as
well as their economic and ethical aspects. The proposals of
the Encyclical which deal with the reorganization of indus-
trial society are explained and illustrated more satisfactorily
for the general reader than in any other commentary. This
is, of course, the most important part of the Encyclical.
The translation contains an admirable arrangement of the
contents. There are eighteerl^chapters, each of which deals
with a distinct section of the Encyclical. Within each chapter
are numerous sub-headings specifically related to the para-
graphs of the Encyclical which are under discussion. Father
Dempsey's volume is something more than a translation of
Nell-Breuning's, inasmuch as it presents at the end the full
158
English text of both Rerum Novarum and Quadratesimo
Anno, preceded in each case by an analytical outline.
National Catholic Welfare Conference JOHN A. RYAN
Industry and Order
CAN INDUSTRY GOVERN ITSELF? by O. W. Willcox. Norton. 285 pp.
Price $2.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION THERE
has been a somewhat vague conception of the terms
"unsaturated market" and "saturated market." From then
to now industry grew in an environment characterized by the
rapid increase of populations and an even more rapid improve-
ment in technology.
Very soon the populations of all civilized countries will
either become stationary or decline. We must then think
of saturation in an entirely different way. It is quite pos-
sible that many markets may become permanently if not
increasingly supersaturated. Mr. Willcox's book is important
because it is a remarkably thorough analysis of such a situa-
tion. He deals particularly with the sugar industry.
During the War sugar beet production in the contending
countries declined to a fraction of its pre-War volume. Prices
went to unheard of levels and thus stimulated production in
the cane producing areas which were not directly engaged in
the War. When peace was declared and farmers went back
to their fields they found sugar beets one of their most profit-
able crops. Naturally they planted all that they could. In a
few years much more sugar was produced than the world
would consume and by 1929 the industry faced a crisis of
major proportions. Every producing country was dumping
sugar on the free market at a rate which carried the price far
below the cost of even the lowest cost producer. The industry
was then confronted with the choice of laissez-faire, with its
inevitable wreckage, or of some sort of control.
Mr. Willcox shows how in ten countries laissez-faire was
rejected and how each of them adopted much the same form
of control. In broad outline this control involved fixed
prices, limitation and allocation of production, absorption of
export losses through the protected home price, and in some
cases compulsory diversion to other than food use. The
uniformity of these measures in widely scattered regions is an
interesting commentary on our current economic reactions.
In spite of all the objections of classical economists this type
of control seems to be spreading throughout the entire world.
It is difficult to know just where limits may be drawn. Sugar
is of uniform analysis, readily storable for long periods, and
of universal use. There are many other products of this
character and most basic products are tending toward this
category. Probably in all such products we will, before many
years, see much the same type of control as prevails in sugar.
Certainly any inclusive system of industrial control involves
many absurdities as we saw in NRA. It would seem safer
to work out individual methods for each basic industry as the
need becomes apparent and experience is gained. Mr. Will-
cox's admirable case history of the sugar industry will be a
valuable aid to those who must face this problem.
Knoxville, Tenn. ARTHUR L. POLLARD
Human Nature
PERSONALITY, ITS DEVELOPMENT AND HYGIENE. AN OUTLINE
OF MODERN APPROACHES TO THE STUDY or HUMAN NATURE, by Winifred
V. Richmond. Farrar and Rinehart. 279 pp. Price $2 postpaid of Survey
Grafhic.
THE MATERIAL IN THIS VOLUME IS WELL ORGANIZED ON THE
basis of practical clinical and teaching experience and con-
stitutes an excellent survey of the present status of the study
of personality. Without overstressing pathology through case
presentation, Dr. Richmond indicates the nature and develop-
ment of personality, and adequately discusses its various mal-
adjustments and disorders. The methods of studying person-
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By RACHEL LYNN PALMER
and SARAH K. GREENBERG, MJX
nis volume, the first of its kind, u of vital importance to
every American woman who purchases commodities associated
with those problems peculiar to her sex — those problems "about
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A glance at the chapter titles
Among the 212 products
of varying degrees of merit
will reveal to some degree the
— or lack thereof — evaluated
invaluable contents of this book.
in this work are:
•M
CHAPTER
Lysal
Kotti
1. TRa Feaiinine Htfiene Field
Madwsa
II. MeastruarJt*— A Simple Eiplaaarioa
AaaxJa
III. PyianaaiilMa — "Tha Craaips"
Nava
IV. Dnii Viadars a*d "Porladic PaJa"
Oraateiaa Piaalari
V. Otkar Ueastnial Irrnularitles
Mii-CX
VI. Adolescence
Fkisckasaaa's Yeast
VII. "The Chanie at Llfa"
Gyaetts-s
VIII. LaotarrtMa. ar "tka WMtaa"
Novak's Faawh Ones
IX. Tka Unnecessary Dautka
AaaMal
X. Lysal aad Zaaita
Aaiytal CaaiMuad
XI. Tka Akartiaa Busiaess
Heiia
Grave's Laxatfva Brata* Quinine,
Chictwster-s Diaawad Brand Pills
Zaajita
XII. Sterility aad Sterility "Cures"
XIII. Beauty— Caa It Ba BauantT
XIV. ContraatHion— Four Methods
Parlaaea Tablets
Lydla E. Plakkaafs Vetetakle
XV. Caatranatli*— Tka Advertisers' Way
XVI. Contraception— Tl» Clinic Way
HE
BlbllMnphy
MB
•5f
The price of this 312-page
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book is
Eraaaplol
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at all bookstores
MAIL THIS COUPON TO YOUR BOOKSELLER OR TO:
rTHE VANGUARD PRESS S-9 1
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1 D Hemtt send mt m copy of FACTS AND FRAUDS IN WOMAN'S j
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1 trkiek includes fostafe **d ktndlint). '
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^ Citv State !
ality, the psycho-physical make up and the conditioned reflex
are handled intelligently. The dynamics of the constitutional
and environmental forces that are involved in normal and
abnormal reactivity are presented clearly.
The general psychological viewpoint is colored with psy-
chiatric concepts, but the prevailing point of view is rational
and not warped by a passive acceptance of psychoanalytic
doctrine. The relations of the various schools of psychological
thought to the central problem of personality are objectively
evaluated, likewise the worth of sociologic methods, personal-
ity analysis and social service in therapy. As a result the book
affords a splendid authoritative outline of the current ap-
proaches to the study of personality.
New Yor^ IRA S. WILE, M.D.
Pamphlets received
A B C OF PARLIAMENTARY LAW. by August Claessens and Rebecca
E. Jarvis (25 cents from the educational department. International Ladies'
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ADULT EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE, edited by Thomas K.
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Edited by Bower Aly. (In 2 volumes, 75 cents per volume plus postage
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160
The first expert study of the basic problem of
relief ever offered!
They Shall Not Want
by MAXINE DAVIS
Author of "LOST GENERATION"
T> ASED on her own investigations here and abroad, Miss Davis' new book is an
authoritative, up-to-date report on the operation of relief in various countries-
She analyzes suggested permanent plans for America and then offers her own. A
detailed day to day record of an actual relief case is included — the first time such
official data has ever been published, so far as can be learned.
at your local
bookdealer's $2.50
or direct from
the publisher
The Macmillan Company
60 Fifth Avenue
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Chosen as the social work
Book-of-the-Month
Supervision in
Social Case Work
by VIRGINIA P. ROBINSON
Author of "A Changing Psychology
in Social Case Work"
A HE first important attempt to define
and describe supervision in social case
work as an educational process. Ex-
cellent examples of the use of this
method are cited from records of
supervisors and case workers.
200 pages, $2.50
UNO PRESS, CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
"THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY AND ORGANIZED LABOR"
by A. J. MUSTE
Gives facts on sales and wages and organization before the
strike.
Price 15c — reductions for quantity orders.
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL JUSTICE FUND
513 Park Avenue Baltimore, Md.
Which Way Recovery?
Brings into focus and
appraises the primary
factors upon which
constructive recovery
depends. Considers
the problem in its
world setting.
710 pages • • • Illus. $4.00
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
WASHINGTON, D. C.
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161
MCTIBC€K
AUGUST .---IN---- MEXICO
July 29th to August 31st
An all-expense conducted trip under the leadership
of an expert.
From New York to New York by Steamer
See or write your travel agent or
OTHER AMERICAS
19 East 48th Street New York City
EUROPEAN AND ORIENT STUDY TOURS 1937
FOR THE INTELLIGENT TRA VELLER
WHO WANTS SOMETHING MORE
THAN SIGHTSEEING.
Write for information
POCONO STUDY TOURS, Inc.
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Individual or Group Travel Everywhere
The Coronation Freighter Voyajei Orient
Cruiiej and Tours West Indies South America
South Africa North Cape
TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS
501 Fifth Avenue TV/.: MUrr.y Hill 2.7SH New York
EUROPE - 1937
with MRS. ALLEN JOHNSON
From New York June 29th In 8. S. State ndtra
52 Days — 8 Countries — $750.00
For Descriptive Literature and Details Apply to
BAXTER TRAVEL SERVICE, Inc.
522 Fifth Avenue New York City
A SUMMER HOLIDAY TO
GREECE
ALBANIA
ITALY
Visiting unusual places in the Aegean Sea, Adriatic and the
Mediterranean.
Personally conducted by Mr. Elliot Taylor of the Near East
Foundation.
Descriptive jolder on request
FARLEY TRAVEL AGENCY, 535 Fifth Ave., New York
RAMPTRIPJ'
Specializing in
FREIGHTER VOYAGES and CARGO LINER CRUISES
Booklet (No. 2) of Voyages Up to 50 Days, on
request, 44 Beaver St., N. Y. C. BO. 9-8850.
U R O P E *
60
•M Via freighter, the pleasant way that thousands of teachers,
physicians, writers, retired people, etc., go. Large outside
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(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
162
Sweden— The world-wide interest in Swedish architecture,
handicraft and applied arts, and the growing universal desire
to know by what means Sweden has effected her recovery
from the depression and solved many social problems that still
trouble a majority of countries, have prompted the Swedish
National Union of Students to plan next summer a series of
special courses at the historic Upsala University. Combined
with interesting excursions, the courses will afford students
from abroad a complete and authoritative survey of these fasci-
nating subjects. In addition, a general course will be given,
broadly delineating the background and rise of Swedish cul-
ture. The courses will be in the English language.
The first mentioned course is especially planned for foreign
students of art and handicraft, as well as architects and interior
decorators. What are the traditions behind the famous Swed-
ish pewter, textiles, metal works, and woodcraft? How are
they taught and developed? How are ancient patterns made
to fit modern use? These and similar questions will be an-
swered, and the students will learn theoretically as well as
practically, the reason for Sweden's prominence in this field.
Equally absorbing will be the course dealing with the vari-
ous phases of modern Swedish social service and legislation.
More and more Sweden is regarded as "The Middle Way."
The striking success of the Swedish Cooperative Union, with
its retail shops and factories, its department stores and news-
paper enterprises; the profitable and smoothly operating gov-
ernment monopolies in liquor and tobacco; the splendid old
age pension system, and the means by which capital is con-
trolled are subjects that occupy the minds of hundreds of
thousands of persons. These and similar topics, such as the
Swedish Labor Union, unemployment reductions, relief work
and managed currency, are scheduled to be treated by
acknowledged experts.
The course will be given between August 11 and August
31, during which time visiting students will be comfortably
quartered in the picturesque university city. Opportunities
will be afforded to make frequent visits to Stockholm for
practical demonstrations. The prices have been set as low as
possible: for the handicraft and social science courses; tuition,
$30 for each course, and approximately $25 for three weeks'
board and lodging. For the general course: tuition $15, and
about $25 for board and lodging.
New Motoring Map — A copy of a motoring map of Den-
mark, Finland, Norway and Sweden which has been published
jointly by the Tourist Traffic Committee of the four countries
will be of interest mainly to clients intending to take their own
cars to Europe or planning to hire a car while there. This map
is obtainable at the Danish Tourist Association, 28 West 48
Street, New York; the Finnish Travel Information Bureau,
630 Fifth Avenue, New York; and the Swedish Travel Infor-
mation Bureau, 630 Fifth Avenue, New York.
Seven League Books
DENMARK: KINGDOM OF REASON, fc Agnes Rothery. (Viking) $3.00
FINLAND: THE NEW NATION, by Sgnes Rothery. (Viking) $3.00
SWEDEN: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE, by Agnes Rothery. (Vikine). $3.00
DENMARK ON FIFTY DOLLARS, by Sydney A. Clark. (McBride) $1.90
SO YOU'RE GOING TO SCANDINAVIA AND THE NORTH CAPE,
by Clara E. Lauf-hlin. (Houghton) $3.00 (To be published in May)
DENMARK: THE COOPERATIVE WAY, by Frederic C. Howe. (Coward). $2.50
DEMOCRACY IN DENMARK, by Josephine Goldmark and Alice G.
Brandeis. (National Home Library), 25 cents
Share the Adventure
of
MEXICO
with
The Twelfth Seminar
presented by
The Committee on Cultural Relations
with Latin-America
Mexico City — Cuernavaca
JULY 7-27
including
The Festival of Pan American
Chamber Music
Sponsored by MRS. ELIZABETH SPRAGUE COOLIDGE
Directed by CARLOS CHAVEZ
TRAVEL
through the snow-capped Sierra, the semi-tropical valleys,
the Spanish Colonial cities, the sixth century villages.
STUDY
"on location" the story of the Maya, Toltec, Zapotec,
Aztec civilizations, the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the ruins
of Mitla and Monte Alban.
TJNDER ST A ND t^ie contemP°rary experiments in education, government,
industry, art, and music.
ENJOY
the things, the people, the places, which interest you most — old
lacquer. . . patterned silver . . . adobe roofs . . . organ cactus . . . sun and
moon gods. . . fields of rice . . . groves of ahuehuetes . . . brilliant sun-
shine. . . quick showers . . . cool, bracing air ... leisure for living.
Among those who will make up the faculty will be the following (changes will be announced later):
Federico Bach, economist and social diagnostician.
Ramon Beteta, economist and student of international affairs.
Phillips Bradley of Amherst, on international relations.
Carlos Chavez, composer and director of the Orquesta Sinfonica
de Mexico.
John Collier, Indian commissioner.
Antonio Esptnosa de los Monteros, economist.
Erna Fergusson, writer on Mexico and Guatemala.
Rene d'Harnoncourt, authority on Mexican folk arts.
Hubert Herring, writer on Latin American affairs.
Oscar Rabasa, international lawyer.
Robert E. Red field, ethnologist of the University of Chicago.
Daniel Catton Rich, of the Chicago Art Institute, on modern art.
Diego Rivera, painter.
Herbert J. Spinden, authority on the archeology of Mexico and
Guatemala.
Charles Thomson of the Foreign Policy Association.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano, labor leader.
HUBERT HERRING
289 Fourth Avenue, New York City
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
163
SEE THE
SOVIET UNION
IN ITS
20™ YEAR
The Soviet Union now continues into its third decade
those strides forward which have held the attention of
the world. Some evidences of this progress are rebuilt
Moscow, the Baltic-White Sea and the Moscow-Volga
canals, the collectivization program in agriculture, and
many achievements in industry and social betterment.
These advances are objectivized in visits to factories,
farms, museums and great social institutions made
available through the facilities of Intourist, the Travel
Company of the U.S.S.R. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev
and Odessa may be starting points for tours that extend
down the Volga to the resorts, great cities and mountain
villages of the Caucasus; thence along the Black Sea
riviera to sunny Crimea; and on to the "kolkhozes" and
industrial centers of the Ukraine.
Information may be secured from
any travel agency.
A wide variety of itineraries are available
at inclusive rates of $15 per day first class,
$8 tourist, $5 third — providing all trans-
portation on tour in the U.S.S.R., fine
hotels, meals, sightseeing and guide-inter-
preter service. For descriptive map and
booklet SG-3 write to
iWsOVIET UNION
JS?"
INTOURIST, INC.
545 Fifth Avenue, New York
360 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 681 Market Street, San Francisco
INFORMAL
CRUISES
Spring or Summer Freighter Cruises
Write to-day for suggestions:
Mediterranean, West Indies, South America,
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Limited passenger accommodations make it impera-
tive to reserve your space without farther delay.
ELIZABETH WHITMORE TRAVEL SERVICE
One East 57th Street
New York City PLaza 3-2396
THE OPEN ROAD
in the
SOVIET UNION
— llth Season—*
Through its own independent American repre-
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THE OPEN ROAD
Russian Travel Division
West 40th Street
New York
"TRAVEL VENTURES!
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Stimulating experiences in foreign lands, not just tours. South
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William M. Barber; Scandinavia and Central Europe with Royal
Bailey Farnum; Alaska Cruise with Dr. John B. May; Grand
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Send for thirty-two page booklet E
WILLIAM M.
BABSON PARK
BARBER
MASSACHUSETTS
TOURS TO U.S.S.R.
Attractive Itineraries Low Prices
FIFTH RUSSIAN SEMINAR
Leaders: Jerome Davis, George M. Day
RUSSIAN SURVEY TOUR
Leader: Dr. Tredwell Smith, Dalton School
COOPERATIVES STUDY TOUR
Leader: Dr. Roy V. Peel, New 'York University
BUREAU OF UNIVERSITY TRAVEL
44 Boyd Street Newton, Mass.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
164
SOCIAL SECURITY AND CONGRESS
(Continued from page 151)
and those of his employer to compensation funds. Let us turn
now to the several categories of the Social Security Act which
in distinction provide public assistance of one sort or another,
outright aid without any element of insurance. These include
aid to the needy aged, to the blind, to crippled children, to
dependent children, and certain health services.
Growth of Public Welfare Departments
WE HAVE LEARNED MANY LESSONS ABOUT ADMINISTRATION IN
this field in the past seven years; but none is more important
than the need in each state for a single unified and integrated
agency with adequate authority to carry out its responsibili-
ties. Most states have now established broad departments
of public welfare with responsibility for all the types of public
assistance provided for under the Social Security Act as well
as for other welfare functions. Such a consolidation is ob-
viously in the interest of effective service. But sound adminis-
tration occasionally has been less close to the hearts of the
political machines than the creation of additional "good jobs"
and where these forces have had their way, the security pro-
gram has sometimes been the excuse for unnecessary and
wasteful new agencies. Thus a few states have set up inde-
pendent old age assistance commissions, duplicating existing
state and county public welfare organizations. This procedure
has been so obviously extravagant that there is some disposi-
tion to stipulate in the Social Security Act that a state, in order
to be eligible for federal funds, must establish a single state
agency to handle all types of public assistance under the Se-
curity Act, as well as relief and other welfare functions.
At present an amount equal to 5 percent of the federal
grants for old age assistance and aid to the blind is allocated
to states for administration. This has created the unfortunate
impression that 5 percent is adequate for this purpose. Low
administrative costs, frequently assumed to indicate efficient
administration, often prove the contrary — unsound procedure
and a lack of essential services. A proposed amendment which
is likely to pass would permit the federal government to pay
one half of the cost of state administration.
The Social Security Act now specifies that state plans for
assistance as well as for unemployment compensation must
provide "such methods of administration (other than those
relating to selection, tenure of office and compensation of per-
sonnel) as are found by the board to be necessary for the effi-
cient operation of the plan." Under this provision the authority
of the board is restricted from laying down civil service re-
quirements although it is responsible for efficient administra-
tion. It is already apparent that while a majority of the states
seek to employ only competent, qualified persons to administer
public assistance, the board is hampered in dealing with situa-
tions where politicians attempt to use federal and state funds to
further partisan ends. Public assistance, affecting as it does so
many lives, and involving the expenditure of millions of dol-
lars, must not be made a political football. There will be con-
siderable agitation for eliminating from the Social Security
Act the present restrictions on the authority of the board with
reference to state personnel standards. The experience of the
past year in the administration of state plans for public as-
sistance has conclusively demonstrated the necessity for secur-
ing trained personnel for this work. The board itself has
followed this principle in the selection of its own staff.
Various changes are being put forward to broaden the as-
sistance categories or to provide more adequate aid. [See
Survey Graphic, February 1936, page 77.] The most compre-
hensive proposal would extend federal assistance to the states
for direct relief, by an amendment to the Social Security Act.
Bills to this end would provide federal grants-in-aid covering
50 percent of all direct relief paid out by the states in accord-
(ln answering advertisements please
165
THERE'S A "BABY BOOM"
IN TENEMENT ALLEY
The Russos. The Duliinskis. The Caputtos. The
Zappados. All of them have new babies.
Now there'll he huger washes — more work to
do — and less time for the mothers of Tenement
Alley to get it done.
These aren't easy problems to solve. But extra
help with the washing and cleaning would cer-
tainly make things a bit easier and encourage
better living conditions.
And extra help is what Fels-Naptha Soap brings.
Its richer, golden soap and lots of naplhn get rid
of dirt quickly — even in cool ivate.r! It's well worth
suggesting.
For a sample bar, write Fels & Co., Phila-
delphia, Pa., mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CLEAN NAPTHA ODOR
THE LABOR SUPPLY OF THE
UNITED STATES
Occupational statistics of the 1930 census tabulated by class
of work and industry, as well as by sex, race, and age groups.
Prepared by W. S. WOYTINSKY
For the COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL SECURITY
of the SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
$1.50
Available from
THE COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL SECURITY
I I West 42nd Street Suite 2806 New York, N. Y.
HANDBOOK ON SOCIAL WORK
ENGINEERING
By June Purcell Guild and Arthur Alden Guild
This book about the study of social problems and
money-raising, written by two experienced social
workers, can be understood by laymen and they are
able to apply the principles outlined to their own
local problems. Agency board members join
professional social workers in proclaiming Social
Work Engineering as something new in the field
of social organization and financial support, prac-
tical, readable, authoritative.
£1.50 prepaid from THE SURVEY GRAPHIC
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Survey Graphic — Monthly — $3.00
Survey Associates, Inc., 112 East 19th St., New York
Name ..Addr...... 3-1-37
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
For $3 — A Group of Experienced
Technicians Goes to Work for You
TTOW can you, a consumer, know what you're getting when you go
to market? The government knows what it's getting — because it
conducts technical tests of the merchandise it buys. The manufacturer
knows what he's getting — because he does the same with his raw
materials. It hasn't been so easy for
the consumer. Lacking the technical
knowledge and the facilities required
for testing products, he also lacks the funds
to test even a fraction of the products he
uses. Now, however, the consumer can have
merchandise tested for him — honestly, de-
pendably, without bias, and at a very
nominal cost — by a nation-wide, technical
organization set up and controlled by con-
sumers interested in getting the most for
their money.
The name of this organization is Con-
sumers Union of United States, Inc. Formed
on a strictly non-profit, membership basis
under the laws of New York State, the
purpose of this organization is to serve its
members in the capacity of a consumers'
testing laboratory by providing them with
accurate and unbiased technical informa-
tion about their everyday purchases.
Close to 30,000 consumers throughout
the United States are now members of
Consumers Union.
To them every month goes Consumers
Union Reports, a compact magazine provoc-
atively illustrated, written in straightfor-
ward language, and describing and rat-
ing tested products by brand names
as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," or "Not Acceptable." Com-
petent, unbiased technicians, either on the staff of Consumers Union
or employed as consultants, working in university and other labora-
clude most of the
CONSUMERS UNION OF U. S.
COLSTON E. WARNE President
ARTHUR KALLET Director
D. H. PALMER . . . Technical Supervisor
Some of the More Than Seventy
Sponsors
JACOB BAKER — President Roosevelt's Spe-
cial Commission on Cooperatives.
PAUL BLANSHARD — Commissioner of
Accounts. New York City.
HEYWOOD BROUN— Well known columnist
and a director of Consumers Union.
WINIFRED CHAPPELL— Methodist Federa-
tion for Social Service.
MALCOLM COWLEY — An editor. "The
New Republic."
DR. ABRAHAM GOLDFORB — Secretary
American Society of Experimental Biology
and Medicine.
FRANCIS GORMAN — President, United
Textile Workers of America.
DR. ALVIN JOHNSON — Director, New
School for Social Research.
PROF. ROBERT S. LYND— Department of
Educational Sociology. Columbia.
EVELYN PRESTON — President, League
of Women Shoppers.
tories, make the analyses and determine the ratings by means of
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painstakingly checked and verified. Products reported on in-
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from day to day: shoes, toothpastes, radios,
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Ratings of 1937 Cars
Divided into three price classifications under $1,000, over twenty-five leading models of 1937
automobiles are rated in the current March issue of Consumers Union Reports. Some of
them are rated as "Best Buys," some as "Not Acceptable," and others as "Also Acceptable"
in the estimated order of their merit. Based on such factors as economy, comparative safety
of operation, general performance and other engineering features, these ratings were made
by competent automotive engineers after thorough examinations and actual performance tests.
Such features as hypoid gears, automatic choke, frame durability, driver-visibility, and others
are discussed at length. Tables on comparative gas consumption are also given. This report —
which should be read by everyone contemplating the purchase of a new car — will be followed
in an early issue by ratings of cars in higher-priced groups. Previous issues of the REPORTS
(still available) have analyzed and rated tires, gasolines, motor oils, and anti-freeze solutions.
Also discussed in the March issue are the following products: RADIO SETS, FLOUR,
SHEETS, CAN OPENERS, BAKED BEANS, CANNED ASPARAGUS AND CHERRIES.
SOME OF THE CARS RATED IN THIS ISSUE
Willys Ford Chrysler
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(In answering advertisement* please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
166
SOCIAL SECURITY AND CONGRESS
(Continued from page 165)
ance with an approved state plan. The purpose is to make
possible more adequate standards of aid to the needy, and to
fill the gaps in the present program of categorical assistance,
which is now limited to those who qualify as "needy aged" or
"blind" or "dependent children." Federal and state financial
participation under such a plan would probably result in the
elimination of humiliating Elizabethan restrictions in many
state and local poor laws. Such a program is not probable un-
less it receives more active support than it now has.
Study of the average amount of assistance given needy old
people in the various states shows up the weakness in the
present grant-in-aid system which matches federal and state
funds on a fifty-fifty basis. For example in December 1936 the
average old age assistance payments were $26.25 a month in
Massachusetts, $21.41 in New York. At the same time old age
payments in Arkansas were $9.01 a month, and in Mississippi
$3.92. The same inequality holds for aid to dependent chil-
dren. The District of Columbia paid $18.43 a month for each
child assisted, and California $13.98, while at the other end
of the scale Arkansas paid $3.76 and Oklahoma $3. There will
be a strong demand for an amendment of the Social Security
Act requiring that a state plan to be approved must guarantee
those aided a "decency and health" level of subsistence. But
such a provision would not go to the root of the problem.
More generous aid can not be attributed entirely to a better
developed social conscience in the high standard states. We
must face the fact which the present grant-in-aid plan over-
looks, that some states simply do not have resources permitting
assistance at an adequate level. Consequently there will be an
attempt to change the fifty-fifty matching basis to a formula
which takes into consideration need and available tax re-
sources. This is sound in principle but as it it very complicated
to work out, it probably will not be attempted this year.
Can Standards Be Lifted?
THE WHOLE QUESTION OF THE MAXIMUM LIMITS OF AID PROVIDED
by the security program have been widely discussed. The Se-
curity Act provides federal funds of not more than $15 a
month for assistance to needy blind and aged persons, not
more than $6 a month for one dependent child and $4 for each
additional child. These low levels of payment sometimes work
hardships in areas where the cost of living is high; especially
if the state law does not permit supplementary assistance out
of state funds beyond the sum the federal government will
match. There is strong sentiment in favor of raising these
maximum limits. While this will undoubtedly be done, this
session of Congress may change only the rate of aid to de-
pendent children. Here an inequality exists, so harsh as to
focus public attention .upon it. The Social Security Act allows
the states one half the cost of aid to the needy aged and blind,
but only one third the cost of providing aid to dependent chil-
dren. Partly as a result of this, only twenty-seven states have
approved plans for aid to dependent children while forty-two
have approved plans for the care of the aged. It is almost cer-
tain that a measure to put dependent children on a par with
the old people and the blind will be enacted in this session.
Those who have studied the problem of aiding the needy
blind are almost unanimous in holding that cash allowances
are only part of an adequate program. Equally important are
measures for prevention, cure, education, vocational training
and employment. States with approved plans for aid to this
handicapped group now require an examination of each appli-
cant by a qualified physician and a report on a standardized
form. This will give us for the first time comprehensive infor-
mation about the blind. This data is intended to serve as the
basis for a program to be worked out cooperatively by federal,
state, local and private agencies in the fields of health, welfare,
LAST YEAR THOUSANDS OF FAMILIES
LEARNED MONEY MANAGEMENT AT
HOUSEHOLD FINANCE
• When a family head finds him-
self deep in debt — threatened by
creditors — in danger of losing his
job because of a garnishment —his
first need is cash to pay his bills.
To this use were put the majority
of Household Finance's 615,000
loans made last year. By returning
more than half a million families
to solvency Household Finance
performed a real social service.
Household recognizes that a
loan, of course, solves only the
immediate financial problem. Per-
manent escape from debt requires
careful budgeting — daily money
management. So Household works
out with borrowers a budget that
stops money leaks — that directs
family expenditures to the things
they need. Next we show them
how to stretch the family dollar
through better buymanship — how
to save up to 20% on purchases.
The many booklets used by
Household Finance to promote
better family money management
may help your clients. These
pamphlets cost very little — some
are free. Why don't you check the
titles below that interest you and
mail the coupon now?
HOUSEHOLD FINANCE
CORPORATION and Subsidiaries
Headquarters: 919 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago
. . . one of the lending family finance organizations, with 222 offices in 145 cities
ORDER BLANK — EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE
Published by
BURR BLACKBURN HOUSEHOLD FINANCE BERNICE DODGE
Research Director CORPORATION Home Economist
"DOCTOR OF FAMILY FINANCES"
Research Dept., SG-3, 919 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Check the booklets you want. They will be sent promptly, postpaid.
Money Management for House-
holds, the budget book.
"Let the Women Do the Work,"
an amusing but convincing argu-
ment for making the wife business
manager of the home.
-FREE BULLETINS-
D Marrying on a Small Income, Finan-
cial plans for the great adventure.
D Stretching the Food Dollar, full
of ideas on how to save money on
food bills; presents a pattern for safe
food economy.
Credit for Consumers — Installment credit and small loan agencies
and how to use them; published by The Public Affairs Committee.
-BETTER BUYMANSHIP
The titles of the series to date are listed below. The price of these booklets is two
for five cents, or three cents each.
A sample copy of the latest number in this series may be secured free by calling at
any Household Finance office.
D Poultry, Eggs and Fish Q Kitchen Utensils
D Sheets, Blankets, Table D Furs
Linen and Towels D Wool Clothing
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Fresh and Canned D Dairy Products
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D Meat
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Books
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Agents
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D Dinnerware
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D Electric VacuumCIeaners Q Gloves
Enclosed find $ in stamps; please send booklets checked to:
NAME
ADDRESS
SG-3
CITY
..STATE..
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
167
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The Regular School offers two years of graduate professional training upon the completion of which
the degree, Master of Social Work, is conferred by the University of Pennsylvania. The curriculum
includes courses in
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
The Advanced Curriculum offers training beyond the two year course to graduates of accredited
schools of social work who have had successful professional experience. This curriculum includes
advanced technical courses in
Supervision and teaching of social case work
Psychological treatment of children
Social work administration
Applications for the 1937-1938 session should be filed by May 15. A bulletin will be sent upon request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
(Continued front page 167)
safety, and education. There is concerted pressure to broaden
the terms of the Social Security Act so that federal funds may
be utilized for services as well as for cash payments to the
needy blind. It is unlikely that any proposals to make flat rate
pensions to all blind individuals will receive strong support.
The Social Security Act provides that funds which it makes
available for public assistance are for the benefit of those who
arc in "need." Highly organized groups are vociferously de-
manding old age pensions on a flat rate for all those who are
sixty-five irrespective of need, or on an uncorroborated state-
ment of need by the applicant. Because of the fact that Con-
gressional leaders seem to believe that it is more important to
grant assistance to all persons who are genuinely in need
rather than to all persons in certain specified age categories re-
gardless of need, such proposals are unlikely to be seriously
considered. In fact it is more likely that the provision of the
Act limiting assistance to those in need will be strengthened.
There remains for consideration two aspects of spreading
the load of cost involved in public assistance. First, locally:
because of the inadequacy of the general property tax as a
source of revenue, any system of public assistance relying
solely upon local funds is likely to be at a low level. The Social
Security Act therefore provided that plans for aid to the aged,
the blind, and to dependent children, must include state finan-
cial participation. Some states more or less evade this require-
ment by providing very meager financial participation or by
raising the state's share through a general property tax levy,
or a levy on the local governments. Local governments would
like to see the Act amended to require that state participation
be substantial and that it come out of state revenues.
CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH TRANSIENTS LIVE IN MANY COMMU-
nities are shocking, especially where men, women, and children
(In answering advertisements
suffer from infectious and contagious disease, without ade-
quate medical care. Local officials may be helpless, for many
states have laws prohibiting the use of state or local funds for
aid to persons who have not resided in the state or communi-
ty for from one to three years. Those counties which provide
adequate care are penalized because by so doing they attract
the needy. The transient problem is national in its origin and
can only be solved with federal assistance. The expense of an
adequate transient program would probably be much less
than the social costs of continued neglect.
Legislation may be introduced appropriating grants-in-aid
to states in proportion to the burden on them of providing
public relief for non-residents. The addition of such a section
to the Security Act would probably mean the abolition of
many of the restrictive state settlement laws which have
brought so much confusion into the national relief picture.
HOW FAR THE PRESENT SESSION OF CONGRESS WILL GO IN MODI-
fying the Social Security Act remains to be seen. The major
proposals now being put forward take for granted the basic
principles of the law. They are aimed, not at changing the
form or direction of the new program, but at removing incon-
sistencies and injustices in the provisions of the law, at broad-
ening the area of service, lifting the standard of aid, softening
inequalities as between rich and poor states, improving ad-
ministration, preventing political manipulation. The public
as well as Congress has a responsibility toward the vast experi-
mental security effort. Suggested changes in the Act or its
administration ought to be studied, discussed, supported or
condemned at county seats, slhte capitals and Washington, by
all those who, with the President, would "demonstrate that,
under democratic methods of government, national wealth
can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts
hitherto unknown, and the lowest standard of living can be
raised far above the level of mere subsistence."
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
168
EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORY
SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
SUMMER QUARTER — TERM A
June 15 — July 23
The Summer Quarter is planned for professional social
workers who wish to study during the summer. In this
quarter the School can enroll for courses a larger number
of students than in other quarters of the year. Among
the courses to be offered in Term A are the following:
Public Welfare Problems
Government and Social Work
Public Relief Administration
Education and Social Progress
Concepts of Human Behavior in
Case Work Practice
Medical Social Problems
The Child in the Institution
Supervisory Practice
David Adie
Clarence King
Arthur Dunham
E. C. Lindeman
Fern Lowry
Antoinette Cannon
Lou-Eva Longan
Fern Lowry
For special summer catalogue write the Registrar.
122 EAST 22ND STREET
New York N. Y.
SIMMONS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Social Research
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
A catalog will be sent on request
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
PLANNING A TRIP?
See Travel notes and advertisements
on pages 162-164 of this Issue of
SURVEY GRAPHIC
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Plan A The course leading to the Master's degree consists
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
ocial agencies in various cities. This course is
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session
and the first winter session, and receive the Mas-
ter's degree upon the completion of the require-
ments of two summer sessions and one winter
session of supervised case work. Limited to forty.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks is open to expe-
rienced social workers. A special course in case
work is offered by Miss Ruth Smalley. Limited to
thirty -five.
Plan D An advanced course of training in the supervision
and teaching of social case work, conducted by
Miss Bertha Capen Reynolds, Associate Director of
the School, and staff. Graduates of schools of social
work with two years' case work experience are
eligible for admission. The course consists of two
summer sessions at Smith College and, in con-
sultation with the School, a winter of supervision
and teaching during which the student may hold
a paid position in a social agency. Limited to
twenty-five.
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
March 1937
The Adjustment of Children to Foster Homes: Six Case
Studies — Adah Baxter.
The Influence of Childhood Personality and Environment
and Onset of the Psychosis on Recovery from Dementia
Praecox — Natalie Meyers and Helen Witmer.
The Function of a Family Agency as Indicated by Its
Services — Lisbeth Shulman.
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to the
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from •
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
Graduate Professional Training and Senior College Pre-
Vocational Courses in preparation for Social Work in Public
Service and in Private Agencies.
Particular emphasis on the Training of Men for Work among
Delinquents and other types of Public Service.
Courses leading to the degrees of Bachelor and Master of
Science in Social Service and Doctor of Social Science.
Electives available in the University include over a hundred
d fifty credit hours on a graduate level which have vocational
lue.
and fifty
value.
84 Exeter Street
Address
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Boston
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
169
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS
RATES: Display: 30 cents a line, 14 agate lines to the inch. Want ad-
vertisements five cents per word or initial, including address or box number.
Minimum charge, first insertion, $1.00. Cash with orders. Discounts: 5%
on three inserts; 10% on six insertions. Address Advertising Department.
TEL.: ALGONQUIN 4-7490 CT JD VFY HRAPHTP n2 EAST I9th STREET
aUKVEI VjR/\mi^ NEW YORK CITY
WORKERS WANTED
National organization, established, unique,
engaging, seeks field worker to expand mem-
bership in various cities. Should have back-
ground of acquaintance with social work and
movements and experience in raising money.
Address 7403 c/o Survey.
Large Settlement not in New York, has open-
ing for woman with experience in Settle-
ment field, to head up all activities in group
work. Address letter with full details to
7411 Survey.
SITUATIONS WANTED
Young college couple, capable taking charge in-
stitution or agency, publicity and money rais-
ing, with special training and experience in
children's work. Desire change. Member
A. A. S. W. 7409 Survey.
MATRON — DIETITIAN — 12 years' experience
wishes position Jewish Institution. Excellent
references. 7413 Survey.
Worker with long successful experience in settle-
ment boys work available June or September.
Keen understanding of boys. Highest refer-
ences. 7414 Survey.
Position as COTTAGE SUPERVISOR and
MATRON wanted by experienced American
Protestant middle-aged couple in children's
institution anywhere. 7415 Survey.
CAMP DIRECTOR— Outstanding expert and
authority on children's camps available this
summer. Top-notch progressive organizer.
Unexcelled successful experience. Corres-
pondence confidential. Box 7407 Survey.
American Negro Ph.D. (Jan., 1937) University
of Dijon, France ; college teaching experience ;
wants directorship of boys' work or princi-
palship of an agricultural school in the
Americas or Africa. 7408 Survey.
College woman, experienced librarian, needs job
desperately. Cataloging private collections,
literary research, anything. 7416 Survey.
CASEWORKER AND EXECUTIVE. Man, de-
sires position in delinquency or protective
work. Nine years social work, including case-
work with men and boys in welfare and pro-
bation fields. Also experience in community
organization and as business executive. Gradu-
ate Columbia University and New York School
Social Work. Member A. A. S. W. 7418
Survey.
REAL ESTATE
FOR SALE: Choice home site; three or more
acres : Westchester County, three miles from
Peekskill ; magnificent view ; large road
frontage ; water and electricity ; adjacent
Bronx River Parkway. 7417 Survey.
MISCELLANEOUS
Believing some men and women are burdened,
anxious, needing help in meeting perplexing
personal problems, a retired physician offers
friendly counsel for those who desire it. No
fees. 7419 Survey.
Your Own Agency
This is the counseling and placement agency
sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
tion of Social Workers and the National
Organization for Public Health Nursing,
National. Non-profit making.
«/ ifo<«Jtn\oiJr C/SMin
( Agency)
122 East 22nd Street, 7th floor. New York
GERTRUDE R. STEIN, INC.
Vocational Service Agency
11 EMt 44th Street NEW YORK
MUrray Hill 2-4784
A professional employment bureau specializing
in social service, institutional, dietetic, medical,
publicity, advertising and secretarial positions.
MULTIGRAPHING
MIMEOGRAPHING
ADDRESSING
FILLING-IN
FOLDING
COMPLETE MAILINGS
• • •
QUICK SERVICE LETTER COMPANY
INCORPORATED
5 SPARK PLACE- NEW VORK
SALES CAMPAIGNS
PLANNED AND WRITTEN
APPLICANTS for positions are sincerely
urged by the Advertising Department to
send copies of letters of references rather
than originals, as there is great danger of
originals being lost or mislaid.
to EMPLOYERS
Who Are Planning to Increase Their Staffs
We Supply:
Executives
Case Workers
Recreation Workers
Psychiatric Social Workers
Occupational Therapist!
Dietitians
Housekeepers
Matrons
Housemothers
Teachers
Grad. Nurses
Sec'y-Stenogs.
Stenographers
Bookkeepers
Typists
Telephone Operators
HOLMES EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL
One East 42nd Street New York City
Agency Tel.: MU 2-7575 Gertrude D. Holmes, Director
THE BOOK SHELF
'—•ill
Bill \\
AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS
By Harold Coe Coffman
President, George Williams College
"Invaluable," says the Red Cross Courier, "to
the organization executive interested in Founda-
tion assistance as well as to the social worker
concerned with child welfare projects." ... .$3.00
ASSOCIATION PRESS
347 Madison Avenue New York, N. Y.
"COMPANY SICKNESS BENEFIT PLANS
FOR WAGE EARNERS"
What is being done in 72 companies to help re-
lieve wage earners of the burden of sickness.
72 pp. $1.50
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SECTION
Princeton University Princeton, N. J.
"ECONOMICS AND PEACE: A Primer and a
Program"
By Marc A. Rose
World Affairs Book Number 18, containing the
report submitted to the National Peace Confer-
ence by its Committee on Economics and Peace
signed by 34 distinguished economists. Order from
NATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE
8 West 40th Street New York, N. Y.
In paper 35c; in colorful cloth binding, 7Sc.
"THE COTTON SOUTH AND AMERICAN
TRADE POLICY"
By Peter Molyneaux
World Affairs Book Number 17 — a vital dis-
cussion of problems integrally related to our
national welfare.
In paper 3Sc; in cloth 7Sc.
Order from
NATIONAL PEACE CONFERENCE
8 West 40th Street New York, N. Y.
THE EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR
The First Twenty Years 1917-1936
By Scott Nearing
I. The Decline of the West
II. Marx, Lenin and the Workers' Revolution
III. Counter-Revolution
IV. The People's Front
V. The Outlook for Europe
Christian Social Justice Fund, Inc.
513 Park Avenue Baltimore, Md.
LOG OF THE TVA
By Arthur E. Morgan
Director of the TVA
An attractive paper-bound book, containing all
instalments of the story of the TVA, written
by its Director.
50c each postpaid
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
112 E. 19 St. New York, N. Y.
"THE NEXT GREAT PLAGUE TO GO"
By Thomas Parran
Surgeon General, U.S.P.H.S.
Thousands sold. A new supply is now avail-
able with charts which accompany the article.
lOc each
Greatly reduced rates in quantity
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
112 E. 19 St. New York, N. Y.
PAMPHLETS AND PERIODICALS
The American Journal of Nursing shows the part
which professional nurses take in the better-
ment of the world. Put it in your library. $3.00
a year. 50 West 50 Street, New York, N. Y.
LITERARY SERVICES
Special articles, theses, speeches, papers. Re-
search, revision, bibliographies, etc. Over
twenty years' experience serving busy pro-
fessional persons. Prompt service extended.
AUTHORS RESEARCH BUREAU, 616
Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
170
We Enter Our Twenty-Fifth Year
Annual Statement by the Editor
1936 in Review Prospect 1937
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, lnc
112 East 19 Street
New York
1912
1937
"THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIFTH YEAR OF SUR-
vey Associates, Inc. is a milestone of no little importance
in the world of social thought and work. Formed as a
cooperative publishing society in New York when the era
of Taft was giving way to the New Freedom of Wilson,
this pioneering organization began at once to blaze trails
on the frontiers of knowledge. As Paul Kellogg writes in
the current issue of the SURVEY GRAPHIC, newspaper head-
lines today read like some of the titles of articles which
THE SURVEY printed five, ten and twenty years ago. Housing,
slum clearance, minimum wages, maximum hours, unem-
ployment insurance, old age benefits, collective bargaining
— these front page topics of our times have been discussed
for years in the publications of Survey Associates. It would
be impossible to overstate the service which this organiza-
tion of men and women of vision has performed in carrying
on the non-commercial venture. They have had a hard
struggle, but all their efforts are richly rewarded in the
realization that as prophets of a better social order they
helped shape the course of American life."
Sf. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4, 1936
• You have a great paper and it strikes the
spot others never hit or find. — THOMAS D.
HENSHAW, Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
• I am proud of THE SURVEY and of all
that it stands for. — FLORENCE E. ALLEN,
U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Cleveland,
Ohio.
• That is a fine article on Minnesota in the
October SURVEY GRAPHIC. I read it last
night with great interest. — CHARLES McD.
PUCKETTE, The New York Times.
• You co'ntinue to be the cleverest, most
persistent, as well as the most appreciated
promoters of good ideas. I am glad to con-
tinue my modest support. — TRACY STRONG,
Geneva, Switzerland.
• Government Cow is the best bit of humor
that has appeared in print in many a year. I
congratulate the SURVEY GRAPHIC in getting
its lariat around so priceless a maverick. —
OWEN R. LOVEJOY, American Youth Com-
mission, Washington, D. C.
• It has been a sacrifice to remain a co-
operating member of the Survey Associates
but I have been fully repaid in the conscious-
ness of your splendid contribution to the
social structure of the world. — FRANCES
STERN, The Boston Dispensary.
• Miss Amidon's article (January SURVEY
GRAPHIC) was a gorgeous piece of work
and, as you undoubtedly know, various or-
ganizations are ordering reprints to use as
campaign tools/ — GERTRUDE FOLKS ZIMAND,
National Child Labor Committee.
• Appreciation for the splendid work you
are doing in calling public attention to sig-
nificant social situations in a fair-minded way
and with attention-compelling facts, and re-
vealing illustrations. — GLENFORD W. LAW-
RENCE, director of Adult Education, Chicago
Commons.
• If every young college student and new
worker, and every board member of a social
and health agency, could start with THE
SURVEY as one of his sources of stimulation,
there will be a guarantee of complete intune-
ness with the times. — JAMES L. FIESER,
American Red Cross, Washington, D. C.
• I consider the survival of THE SURVEY of
capital importance to our country, and will
keep on with my modest contribution "till
the last act," as Uncle Remus says. I think
the magazine gets better and better. I'm
proud of it as an American. I mean as an
American, I'm proud of it. — DOROTHY
CANFIELD FISHER, Arlington, Vt.
• The enclosed clipping from the Washington
Post tends to show the real interest aroused by
Miss Lerrigo's article (Prisoners Must Work,
in The Survey for July). We have sent it as
explanatory material to all governors, sena-
tors and representatives, and to a large num-
ber of others interested in this field. — JAMES
P. DAVIS, executive director, Prison Indus-
tries Reorganization Administration, Wash-
ington, D. C.
Said of Survey
• Excellent and timely. — KARL DE SCHWEIN-
ITZ, executive director, Pennsylvania ERB.
• You are doing a great job. — J. EDGAR
PARK, president, Wheaton College, Norton,
Mass,
• I depend very much on THE SURVEY for
interpretation of the momentous issues and
events of the present. — ELOISE TUDOR, Las
Cruces, N. M.
• I continue to think Survey Associates one
»f the most constructively useful organiza-
tions I have any connection with. — FREDER-
ICK LAW OLMSTED, Brookline, Mass.
• The quarter century of THE SURVEY has
been one of real accomplishment and prog-
ress, and the record of outstanding articles is
certainly fine. — O. K. GUSHING, San Fran-
cisco, Calif.
• I can't afford not to subscribe to THE
SURVEY, and here's a check for $75 not, I
fear, dragged out of me by your letter, but
by your magazine itself. — FRANCESCA BLACK-
MER, Pyramid, Nev.
• I have learned to appreciate the quality
and methods of discussion as carried on in
THE SURVEY and SURVEY GRAPHIC until
they are almost indispensable. — E. L. LIVEY,
State Normal School, Fairmount, W. Va.
THERE'S SHOVE IN THE TIMES
THEMSELVES
". . . Take the press as sign of it. Long
since we coined » phrase thai was to find cur-
rency. Read The Survey, we said, and get
back of the newspaper headlines. I'll have to
confess that often there were no headlines to
get back of. But the front page has been
catching up with our table of contents/ head-
lines today read like some of the titles we
carried five, ten, twenty years before the things
they stood for were news. . . . Take the gen-
eral magazines which play into this new strong
suit of the press. Take the Franklin Square
Librarians who, every month, list the 'Ten Out-
standing Articles' of their choice. This last
year, every other month a fifth of the articles
they chose have been ours. ... Or take
issues brought to the fore in the campaign this
fall. Through the years we foreshadowed them
in handling unemployment, relief, job-supply
and the social insurances. We broached them
in investigations of housing and hours, minimum
wages and collective bargaining; dramatized
them in special numbers on steady-work, on
power and planning as factors to reckon with
in raising the level of American life." — From
a letter to members, November 1936.
• Even if it means dropping other contribu-
tions. As far as I am concerned, this is "the
tops." — MARION D. ABBOTT, Chicago, III.
• This (November) SURVEY GRAPHIC is
swell and I read it from cover to cover and
feel a little more cheerful about the world. —
GEORGE W. ALGER, New York.
• You have done such an outstanding job
that I want to express my appreciation
tangibly. Therefore check for $10 is en
closed. — E. J. MEHREN, Chicago, III.
• I don't think we could exist without THE
SURVEY, and how you editors anticipate and
put into readable form the things that later
happen has always bewildered me. — MARY
EDNA MCCHRISTIE, Court of Common Pleas,
Cincinnati, Ohio.
• I think you have done a very fine job and
have presented the problems involved in this
whole question of turnover on relief in a
very forceful manner. — BENJAMIN GLASS-
BERG, superintendent, Department of Outdoor
Relief, Milwaukee, Wis.
• May I take this opportunity (enclosed $10
in joining Survey Associates) to tell you how
many times we make use of the material
you present. — BERTHA McCALL, general di-
rector, Nat'l Association for Travelers Aid &
Transient Service, New York.
• Congratulations on the growth and influ-
ence of THE SURVEY and its related activities
during the past twenty-five years. It is a
source of satisfaction not only to you but to
your hosts of friends throughout the coun-
try of which I count myself one. — WILLIAM
F. SNOW, M.D., New York.
• As you know, I am intensely interested in
the success of the SURVEY GRAPHIC and be-
lieve it is the only magazine in the United
States that consistently and persistently up-
holds the welfare of the common man and
the underdog in the fight for life. — JOHN R.
HAYNES, Los Angeles, Calif.
• Herewith my check for my $10 Cooper-
ating Membership. Congratulations on what
you are doing with the GRAPHIC! The Social
Service Training Department of our College
(Meiji Gakuin) is clamoring for my SURVEYS
each month before I am half through with
them. — RUTH E. HANNAFORD, Tokyo, Japan.
• In common with many, many other social
workers I have an increasing respect and
appreciation for the very great contribution
that THE SURVEY is making to fundamental
social thinking and I am very glad indeed
to be numbered as one of THE SURVEY
family. — EARL N. PARKER, executive secre-
tary, Seattle Community Fund.
• We note with interest the items on Penn-
sylvania unemployment relief in the Social
front d^artment of the August MIDMONTHLY
SURVEY. Incidentally, Survey Associates are
to be congratulated on the extremely able
editing which makes this department as
unique as it is comprehensive. — WILLARD
E. SoLENBERGER, State Emergency Relief
Board, Harrisburg, Pa.
1936 Reviewed ANNUAL STATEMENT BY THE EDITOR in Prospect 1937
IN MID-JANUARY OUR BOARD AND STAFF
took reckonings together. We did this at
the outset instead of at the close of our
anniversary year because we want to
make the most of it. Our best assurance
that we shall lies in the active participa-
tion of every member of Survey Asso-
ciates— and of every Survey reader — at
one stage or another in the months ahead.
Now it happens that in callings and in-
terests, age, sex and previous condition-
ings, our joint conference was a pretty
fair cross section of America as Ameri-
cans go. Plus that sap of social impulse
running through the grain which makes
us representative of our membership as a
whole. As one after another chipped in
experience, criticism and proposals that
boxed the compass of opportunities be-
fore us, we caught a fresh sense of how
roundly propitious these times are for
such a craft as ours.
For from the start, something over
twenty-four years ago, we have employed
a ship as symbol — a rakish caravel crib-
bed from an early sixteenth century map
of the coasts of the New World. We like
tu feel that it stands for discovery and
interchange along the horizon lines of
modern existence. Today the winds bring
us the tang of changes astir in American
life — for us to appraise and interpret.
The tides carry to us driftwood from
new landfalls and reaches of the general
welfare — ours to explore.
THUS OUR OUTLOOK IS AHEAD BUT WE
cannot be unmindful of the strewn wake
of the depression; its wreckage of for-
tunes, high and low, more widespread
than anything in history. Nor can we be
unconscious of the slowness of recovery
to "pass around." We are alive to house-
holds, communities, industries, even
regions, still interlaced with misery — half
submerged, if you will, like a sargasso
sea. Nonetheless we can take to heart
the insight of one of the sagest of observ-
ers who long since held that, given time,
it would be the "prosperous" Twenties
that would be looked back upon in the
United States as our Black Years. Black,
because they were blind and took no
thought for the whole or for the morrow.
What followed in the Thirties is one
of those thumb-worn chapters in the
Book of Democracy which chronicle our
repeated failures to defend ourselves
against acts of God, against untamed
nature or untrammeled economic forces.
The story is told first in one way and
We Enter Our
Twenty- Fifth
Year
then in another. Within the year two
versions have borne the water-marks of
last spring's floods in our northeastern
river systems; of this winter's floods in
the Ohio and Mississippi basins. It
would seem that only great loss and suf-
fering in such catastrophes can spur us to
set enduring safeguards from the high-
lands down to the sea. After lesser
floods, we have mostly forgotten and
lapsed into old neglect.
THE DEPRESSION CARRIED UNTHINKABLY
greater loss and suffering in its train.
Forces that had backed up behind the
log jam of national indifference, burst
through and ripped up our footholds as
a people. Laggardly at first, and then like
a town running to a fire, we called out
voluntary first-aid to the hard times;
then we mustered our public reserves
for relief; then we unlimbered large
scale means for control and prevention.
For the depression animated measures
long overdue which should bring our
protection against unemployment level
with other industrial countries. It gave
rein to the American bent for innovation
in working our way out and through. It
shook loose insurgencies as to what
should be done from top to bottom of
our economic watershed if we are not
only to control inundation but to prosper
and irrigate our lowlands of life and live-
lihood. So doing, inevitably it widened
those social cleavages which have mani-
fested themselves in last year's elections
and this year's strikes. But whether we
look at the political alignments for and
against the administration at Washing-
ton, or at the lines drawn in industrial
conflicts, in process or in prospect, the
dynamic upshot of this chapter written
by the depression has been that it
changed inertias into awareness and en-
ergy. It shifted the basis of decision from
whether to how we should act.
THIS IS OF COURSE MY OWN PROSPECTUS;
not an attempt to crystallize our joint
conference. But we shall all remember
the evening session which canvassed de-
velopments where industry flanks the
public welfare; where, for example, the
social insurances have become part of the
order of business; where interest bristles
in the going relations between labor
and management; producers, consum-
ers. Here entirely new audiences are
thrown open to us if we have the in-
genuity to go after them and to revamp
what is expert into what is everyday.
A publisher-member had challenged
us to help take the mystery out of meas-
ures for the younger and more alert
executives. Now an employer-member
pointed out the service to be rendered the
relatively small business man who wants
to put his decency and liberalism to
work under the changed conditions.
A lawyer-member had urged that we
reexamine where, after all, responsibility
rests for affording employment and
what are the advantages of collective bar-
gaining under the auspices which its
advocates assert to be the only proper
ones. Now a labor-member traced how
old fought-for improvements in working
conditions caved in under the hard
times; how with fifteen million people
out of work no single employer, no in-
dustry as a whole (they were themselves
victims) had been able to safeguard
their employes. How now, as a conse-
quence, a new labor leadership proposes
to press forcefully in both the economic
and political life of the country, not only
to see that its interests are given proper
consideration, but for security in its
broadest sense, and for the constructive
use of all our facilities to lift the level
of the common life.
Let me paraphrase the analysis of the
university-member who assumed agree-
ment, regardless of party affiliations, on
the general direction the country is go-
ing to take— as registered decisively by
the vote, and unlikely to be reversed by
events in the years right ahead. We are
in, he held, for increasing realization of
social interdependence, expressing itself
both in voluntary and public arrange-
ments. Recognition of this interde-
pendence in industry and social relations
will come inevitably through an enlarged
penetration of government activity.
Here we are a generation behind Eng-
land— not morally but temporally be-
hind. Our physical problems, our prob-
lems in labor relations and social secur-
ity emerged from this interdependence;
but their acuteness today derives from
this lag in general recognition. True,
173
every now and then we had strikes, bad
ones intermittently, but their causes were
not seen to be the staple concern of
government and private enterprise.
Twenty-five years ago such problems
were considered the preoccupation of
radicals — of long-haired men and short-
haired women. And just as the short-
haired woman has become the conven-
tional woman, so with these problems.
Turning from the whimsy of an-
alogy vo the matter in hand, his sum-
mation was that the stuff of concern of
The Survey has become the stuff of
concern of the country. Right there lies
our opportunity as publishers and du-
cators, and the call to meet it.
IN FACING THIS OPPORTUNITY WE COME
into the turn of our quarter century as
stewards of a cooperative organization,
a working scheme and two periodicals.
The organization is country-wide and
1620 strong. The working scheme is dis-
tinctive in its combination of research
and journalism. The two periodicals en-
tered 1937 with a joint subscription list
of 15,000 and, inclusive of this, The Mid-
monthly Survey readies 16,350 subscrib-
ers as a "journal of social work"; Survey
Graphic, 20,450 subscribers as a "maga-
zine of social interpretation."
Our Cooperative Organization
THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE
fields of education and publishing when
Survey Associates was founded Novem-
ber 4, 1912. We established a member-
ship corporation (here I am quoting
from a letter which went out to all mem-
bers last November):
. . . tough enough to persist, live enough
to count. It has no counterpart today when
the chance is ours to put it to telling use.
We bring experience in getting beneath the
surface of things; and an explorer's kit that
works. Bring also that zest for foraging
ahead of the times which goes with faith
in the American future, and gives our work
the same lift of adventure with which we
began.
Responding, over 500 members
pledged renewal in advance for 1937.
The hard times have gnawed at our
structure of support in the larger brack-
ets, but our $10, $25, $50 and $100 mem-
bers have stood by tenaciously. Our ob-
jective in our 25th anniversary year is
not merely to recapture lost ground, but
to bring our roster to 2500.
In laying a basis for membership (and
here I am quoting from a presentation
ten years ago):
We have had the college, the library and
the laboratory as our prototypes. True, we
have taken over from journalism the inde-
pendent editorial column; but we have not
built on the sandy premise that all readers
would find agreement with the editors on
SURVEY GRAPHIC SCORES
"10 Outstanding Articles of the
Month"
The Franklin Square Subscription Agency
(Harper's) has enlisted three librarians of
standing to read advance proofs sent them
by American magazine publishers. The selec-
tions afford a gauge of how far we make the
grade in handling our subject matter in the
social and economic field. In 1936 we made
the list 17 times; twice rating first place.
JANUARY—
3. La Guardia — Portrait of a Mayor
By John Palmer Gavit*
FEBRUARY—
5. A Man Can Talk in Homestead
By John A. Fitch"
MARCH—
1 . The Fight for Academic Freedom
By C. Hartley Grattan**
6. The Italians Themselves
By Paul H. Douglas
APRIL— (Special Number)
1. The Bill for Hard Times
By William Trufant Foster
6. The American Bent for Planning
By Arthur E. Morgan
MAY—
3. Runaway Rivers
By Victor Weybright*
JULY—
5. The Next Great Plague to Go
By Dr. Thomas Parran**
AUGUST—
3. Employment, by Paul Kellogg*
5. Steel: 1936, by John A. Fitch**
SEPTEMBER—
5. Electricity Goes to the Country
By Morris L. Cooke
7. You and I and the Railroads
By Ralph L. Woods
OCTOBER—
8. Minneapolis: I. Jim Hill's Empire
By Charles R. Walker**
10. All Children Should Pass
By Samuel Tenenbaum
NOVEMBER—
2. Authority and Freedom
By John Dewey
10. The France of Leon Blum
By Edgar Ansel Mowrer
DECEMBER—
5. Cordell Hull: Good Neighbor
By John Palmer Gavit*
* Staff articles.
' Outside assignments. Survey procedure — including
first-hand inquiry/ submission of first draft to parties at
interest For advance criticism; opportunity for rebuttal.
any point, of any one on all. We have built
up the contributing membership of Sur-
vey Associates among men and women
holding differing points of view, on the
solid execution of educational functions:
1. Chronicling news in fields we have
made our own.
2. Pooling experience.
3. Providing a medium for discussion
and criticism.
4. Investigating; interpreting research.
Such an enterprise has been caught
between pincers these depression years.
From the outset we had endeavored to
put our publishing operations on a busi-
ness basis; to bring publishing receipts
to the point where they covered pub-
lishing maintenance. In 1928-9, with to-
tal revenue of $212,870, four sevenths of
it from publishing receipts, we had fair-
ly achieved this. We looked to member-
ships, contributions and grants to carry
our educational activities and to em-
ploy in circulation investment that would
expand our educational reach. We held
to this formula through the hard times,
but what they did was to cramp des-
perately what we live by and for. We
have slowly gained ground since mid-
depression, when our publishing receipts
had dropped by $37,000; our contribu-
ted funds by $46,000. Taken together,
the shrinkage was more than our total
memberships and contributions today. In
1936 these registered a gain from $58,593
to $62,649. We seek $70,000 and above
to do justice to our anniversary year.
The pressure of these years has been
matched by their claims upon us. Chron-
icle and investigation have become more
exacting commissions, with action at
Washington radiating nationally; emerg-
ing in state and local administrations;
provoking cleavages and welling up into
the courts. We are in for a resurgence
of initiative regionally and locally. Not
only is our practice of throwing light
into hot places more timely in such a
period; because of the factors mentioned,
it is more costly. It is easy enough to en-
list writers who will damn or applaud
out of their inner consciousness, but to
appraise developments nationally calls
for time and travel, no less than even-
handed integrity.
Research Desk
NONETHELESS IN THESE YEARS OUR STAFF
work of inquiry and interpretation has
reached new coverage and output. Some-
thing over a year ago we broke down
our old departmental fields and singled
out certain "trends that lead out from
these kut years of emergency into the
American future" — ranging from land
and water planning ("The Ground We
Are Losing"; "The Power We Can
Harness") up through social, industrial,
community and governmental concerns
to education and the arts as a respon-
174
SURVEY GRAPHIC
MIDMONTHLY SURVEY
Condensed Statement — 1936
REVENUE
Publishing Receipts
Contributions
Midmonthly Fund
Less Allocations
Total Revenue
EXPENSES
Publishing Maintenance
Circulation Investment
$2,675.
395.
$35,410.
2,280.
$37,690.
$33,753.
9,385.
Total Expenses
Deficit (Appropriated from General Fund)
$43,138.
$5.448.
MIDMONTHLY ACCOUNT
REVENUE
Joint Subscriptions
New
Renewals
Plus Vi of Allocations
Midmonthly Subscriptions
Sales
Total Circulation Revenue
Advertising
Jobbing ('/:)
Discounts Earned (1/3)
Total Publishing Revenue
Appropriations
From General Fund
From Midmonthly Fund
Total Revenue
EXPENSES
Administration (1/3)
Editor's Office C/i)
Editorial
Manufacturing
Subscription Routine
Sales
Advertising
Total Publishing Maintenance
Circulation Investment
Joint Subscription
Extension (%)
Midmonthly Promotion
Total Expenses
$16,784.
31.861.
548.645.
$ 5.448.
2.280.
$3.242.
10.764.
$9.379.
6.
$24.323.
4,050.
3,084.
127.
$31.581.
2.569.
1,034.
223.
$35.410.
7,728.
$43,138.
$ 3.996.
14,006.
9.119.
4.497.
29.
2,106.
$33.753.
$ 9,385.
$43.138.
sive but developing part of current his-
tory. In the year succeeding we have
brought out over fifty articles, based on
staff research, outside assignments on
Survey procedure, or the findings of oth-
er agencies, public or private.
It is not new for us to point out that
when millions are spent each year on
social and economic research, a case can
be made for this work of our House
of the Interpreters. It takes on new sig-
nificance in years crowded with events,
issues and situations, with experiments
and demonstrations. Our swift research
yields results while decisions are up; it
follows through when reports have
grown dusty on shelves. A major proj-
ect of our anniversary year will be to put
that case in terms of the times in a way
that may win for it fresh support.
The Midmonthly Survey
OUR LARGEST, MOST CONSECUTIVE PIECE
of field work in the year ahead is made
possible by the American Public Wel-
fare Association. This is bound up in the
spread of the social securities and of
welfare departments, city, county, state
and, if the administrative reorganiza-
tion goes through, national. It will en-
able the managing editor of The Mid-
monthly Survey to fairly span the coun-
try and observe these new services as
they get down to localities and people.
Out of the realities of the work she is
fashioning a new "Miss Bailey" series to
do for the new personnel and for citizen
boards what her earlier series did- for
emergency relief workers.
This piece of collaboration helps turn
right side up our most serious discom-
fiture in 1936. The dismemberment of
staffs which followed the liquidation of
federal relief lost us $7000, as a minor
casualty in that grim experience, cutting
down our joint subscriptions written by
1500 and all but wrecking our budget
for the year. Last spring, we recast edi-
torial and circulation plans to meet the
new public developments half way.
At the same time we are strengthening
our service to the established fields of
social work and to the lay and profes-
sional groups engaged in them. Today
two editors give full time to The Mid-
monthly Survey. As one anniversary
project, we shall (without laying off
our joint subscription extension) for the
first time push The Midmonthly Survey
as a separate periodical — with 2500 new
subscribers as our goal. And as one of
our anniversary objectives, we shall en-
deavor to bring contributions to our Mid-
monthly Fund, from social workers, lay-
men and social agences, to $10,000 — to
cover investment in its growth and en-
rich the service it can render.
Survey Graphic
THIS MONTH'S ISSUE OF Survey Graphic,
and the two which have preceded it,
register a new stage in a process now fif-
teen months along. We were the first
American publishers to introduce the
Neurath method of visualization which
has broken out through such a variety of
media in the last two years. Our recent
covers give a hint that from now on it
will even more enter into our graphic
treatment. That is but one of several in-
novations which we hope will bring new
lightness of touch, personality and en-
gagingness to our pages as the months
go forward. And along with them, deft
and brief handling of developments.
In following through the frame of ref-
erence we had set for ourselves in 1936,
no outsider could guess how thin and
uncertain our resources were. There was
the showing of major articles to which
reference has been made, standing for
infinite pains in inquiry, reference and
rewrite. There was the tally of the
Franklin Square librarians well up
among the leading monthlies. There was
our special April number: These United
States, edited by Mary Ross — which
elicited many letters of appreciation and
reads today like a foreword to major
issues before Congress and the Supreme
Court. There was our collaboration with
the Reader's Digest in perhaps the most
arresting offering of the American mag-
azine year: Surgeon General Parran's
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Condensed Statement — 1936
REVENUE
Publishing Receipts
Contributions
Founders Fund
Less Allocations
Total Revenue
EXPENSES
Publishing Maintenance
Circulation Investment
Total Expenses
Balance for year
$53.385.
$19.910.
$73,120.
$54.518.
18.525.
73,043.
GRAPHIC ACCOUNT
REVENUE
Joint Subscriptions
New $16,784.
Renewals 31,861.
C/j) $48.645.
Plus !/a of Allocations
Survey Graphic Subscriptions
New $ 5,535.
Renewals 5,800.
Sales
Total Circulation Revenue
Advertising
Jobbing (',',)
Discounts Earned (2/3)
Royalties
Total Publishing Revenue
Appropriated from Founders Fund
Total Revenue
EXPENSES
Administration (1/3)
Editor's Office C,i)
Editorial
Manufacturing
Subscription Routine
Sales
Advertising
Total Publishing Maintenance
Circulation Investment
Joint Subscription
Extension ('..)
Graphic Monthly Promotion
Total Expenses
$ 3.242.
16.467.
$ 9.379.
9.146.
$24.322.
4,050.
11,335.
1.072.
$40,779.
10,169.
1.034.
447.
956.
$53,385.
19,658.
$73.043.
$ 3,997.
19.709.
17.297.
5,497.
5SO.
7.438.
$54,518.
18.525.
treatment of Syphilis — The Next Great
Plague To Go. This was reprinted to the
tune of 55,000 copies in our office, 400,-
000 in theirs. It broke taboos, stimula-
ted public and private health agencies
throughout the country, and the heart
of it was carried by newspapers with
an aggregate circulation of six millions.
Between such astronomical figures and
our slender editions a wide gulf is set.
How can we take advantage of the new
stuff of public concern in the things
that are ours? This has been a live ques-
tion at our board and staff conferences.
The objective of our editorial and pro-
motion plans this 25th year is to bring
our Graphic list to the 25,000 mark.
So MUCH AS PUBLISHERS. ON THE OTHER
side of our shield are scratches that may
turn into headlines tomorrow, if our gift
of foresight holds and Survey Associates
continues to function as an educational
force. I have been reading the published
letters of Stephen Mackenna (translator
of Plotinus) who seems to know the
ways of seers and harbingers and such.
He writes of "windows opening on vis-
tas of the possible." That, thanks to our
participants, seems to fit much of our
work to a T. But he speaks also of "great
doors opened suddenly." There, too, af-
ter our fashion, we can give a shove.
MARCH 1937
175
Survey Associates, Inc.
112 East 19 Street/ New York
a membership corporation, chartered November 4, 1912, without shares or stock
holders, under the laws of the State of New York,
"to advance the cause of constructive philanthropy by the publication and
circulation of books, pamphlets and periodicals, and by conducting any
investigation useful or necessary for the preparation thereof."
Officers
LUCIUS R. EASTMAN
President
JULIAN W. MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN,
JOHN PALMER GAVIT, Vice-Presidents
PAUL KELLOGG, Editor
ANN REED BRENNER, Secretory
Board of Directors
JULIAN W. MACK, Chairman
ELEANOR R. BELMONT AGNES BROWN LEACH
FRANCIS BIDDLE EDITH G. LINDLEY
JACOB BILLIKOPF SOLOMON LOWENSTEIN
JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN J. NOEL MACY
FRANCES G. CURTIS RITA W. MORGENTHAU
LUCIUS R. EASTMAN BEARDSLEY RUML
FELIX FRANKFURTER EDWARD L. RVERSON, JR.
SIDNEY HILLMAN RICHARD B. SCANDRETT, JR.
NICHOLAS KELLEY HAROLD H. SWIFT
JOHN A. KINGSBURY LILLIAN D. WALD
National Council
The Members of the Board Ex-officio
Richard C. Cabot William T. Johnson
J. Lionberger Davis Loula D. Lasker
Edward T. Pevine Joseph Lee
Samuel McC. Lindsay
John A. Ryan
Alfred G. Scattergood
Graham Taylor
.
Livingston Farrand
Samuel S. Fels
John R. Haynes
Staff
EDITOR
Paul Kellogg
MANAGING EDITORS
Gertrude Springer, (Midmonthly) Victor Weybright, (Graphic)
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Mary Ross John Palmer Gavit
Beulah Amidon Loula D. Lasker
Ann Reed Brenner Leon Whipple Florence Loeb Kellogg
Edward T. Devine
Joanna C. Colcord
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
R. L. Duffus
Haven Emerson, M.D,
Graham Taylor
Russell H. Kurtz
Gustav Stolper
Ruth Lerrigo
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Helen Chamberlain
Me
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Janet Sabloff, Ida Ratliff, Hannah Gallagher
BUSINESS OFFICE
lie Condon, George F. Havell, Circulation Managers
Fielo Representatives
Anne Roller Issler, Elizabeth Mack
Ruth Dodge Mack, Lucy Lay Zuber
Mary R. Anderson, Advertising Manager
Martha Hohmann, Accountant
Isabelle M. Graham, Office Manager
Mary J. Brennan Frieda Ancess
FINANCE AND MEMBERSHIP DEPARTMENT
Ann Reed Brenner, Director
Mary Katz, Registrar
HOW WE CAME OUT IN 1936
Condensed Statement — All Operations
REVENUE
Contributions
•Loss Allocations
$62.649
8.100
Net Contributions $ 54 549
Publishing Revenue 88.795
EXPENSES
Association Account $ 27.053
Publishing Accounts (Combined)
Publishing Maintenance $88.271
Circulation Investment 27,911 116,182
Total Revenue $143,344
Total Exptnses $143,235
Excess of Revenue over Expenses 109
ASSOCIATION ACCOUNT
MEMBERSHIP AND CONTRIBUTIONS
GENERAL FUND
Total Memberships .................. $22 640
Other Contributions ........................... 14,038.
Total Genera) Fund ........................
Departmental Funds
'nd"J«J'T ...................................... S 2.275.
Health ....................................... 8|6.
Education ............................. 220
Communities .................................. 75.
Total Departmental Funds ........................
General and Departmental Combined ................
'Less Allocations .......
$36,678.
$40.061.
7,530.
$32.534.
MIDMONTHLY FUND
Contributions
•Less Allocation
GRAPHIC FOUNDERS FUND
Contributions
•Less Allocation
Total Contributions Received.
'Less Allocations
Net Contributions
$ 2,875.
395.
$19.910.
175.
EXPENSES
Administration (13)
Editor's Office ('/»)
Membership and Finance Departments
EDITORIAL RESEARCH DESKS
Industry $3,312.
Health 2.363
Education 2.322.
Communities 318.
Total Association Account Expenses
APPROPRIATIONS TO PUBLISHING ACCOUNTS
From General Fund to Midmonthly Account...
From Midmonthly Fund to Midmonthly Account..
From Graphic Founders Fund to Graphic Account
Total Expenses and Appropriations
Balances for the year
General Fund
Graphic Founders Fund
$62.649.
8.100.
$ 3.996.
6,483.
8,260.
19.735.
$54.549.
$27.054
$ 5.448.
2.280.
19.658.
$54.440.
32.
77.
• $5 is allocated to subscription receipts from each membership and contribution to
cover the regular subscription of the member or contributor.
HOW WE ENTERED 1937
Summary of Funds, December 31, 1936
Balances Dec. 31. 1935
Unfilled Pledges and Bad Accounts
Balances for year 1936
Balances Dec. 31. 1936
General
$269
108
Graphic
$3.210
34
Reserve
$5.000
Combined
$8.479
142
$161
32
$3,176
77
$5.000
$5,000
$8.337
109
$193
$3.253
$8.446
CHARLES M. CABOT FUND
In Hand. December 31. 1935
Interest, bonds and savings account
Disbursements: Travel and Manuscripts
Balance in Hand. December 31. 1936
$10.739.
293.
$11.032.
267.
$10.765.
CERTIFICATE OF AUDIT
Survey Associates, Inc.: We have Mdited your accounts for the twelve months end-
Ing December 31, 1936. We certify that the condensed statement of revenue and
expenses on a cash basis and the related statements of association and publishing
accounts and educational funds are in agreement with the books of account and conform
to the apportionments approved by your management: and in our opinion correctly set
forth the revenue and expenses and the summary of funds for the year ending Decem-
ber 31, 1936.
New York. January 30. 1937.
(Signed) COOPERATIVE LEAGUE ACCOUNTING BUREAU.
WERNER E. REGLI. Director. HOWARD J. APFEL. C.P.A.
176
Membership Roster
Acknowledgment of Contributions Made to the Educational Funds of Survey Associates
for the Fiscal Year 1936
MIDMONTHLY FUND
($2675)
•Swift. Harold H $1400
American Public Welfare Asso-
ciation. Chicago 300
Post. James H 100
Springer, Mrs. Gertrude 50
Chicago Commons 25
Children's Bureau. Philadelphia 25
Community Welfare Federation.
Wllkes-Barre 25
Family Service Society, Buffalo 25
Publicity Department. Detroit
Community Fund 25
American City Bureau, Inc.,
Chicago 10
Associated Welfare Agencies,
Springfield, III 10
Atkinson, Miss Mary Irene 10
Atkinson. R. K 10
Blildle, Eric H 10
Blackey, Miss Eileen 10
Blakeslee. Miss Ruth 10
Blanchard, Ralph 10
Boston Council of Social Agencies 10
Cannon, Miss Ida M 10
Canton Welfare Federation 10
Carey, Harry M 10
Chandler, Mrs. Henry P 10
Chickerlng, Miss Martha A 10
Children's Aid Association. Boston 10
Children's Aid Society of Pa... 10
Children's Village, Dobbs Ferry,
N. Y 10
Clague, Ewan 10
Community Chest. Washington. 10
D. C 10
Community Chest. St. Joseph. Mo.
Elder, Miss Jeannette M
Eldrldge. Miss Anita 10
Emerson. Miss Ruth 10
Faatz. Miss Anita J 10
Family Service Society, New
Orleans 10
Family Welfare Association, Balti-
more '0
Family Welfare Organization,
Inc., Allentown, Pa 10
Foote, Miss Maud Bryan 10
F
E
Goldstone, Fred D
Guild, Mr. & Mrs. Arthur A...
Hathway. Miss Marion
Holbrook, David H
Jewish Board of Guardians, N. Y. C.
Jewish Homo Finding Society of
Chicago
Jewish Social Service Association,
N. Y. C
Kaiser, Miss Clara A
"J.D.K."
Karpf, Dr. M. J
Keegan, Msgr. Robert
Kenworthy. Dr. Marion
Lawrence, Glenford W
Lane, Robert P
Loomis, Dr. Alice M
Magnusson, Leifur
Marquette, Bleecker
McCall. Miss Bertha
New Haven Community Chest..
Newsletter, Wllber I
Parker, Earl N
Parsons, Reginald H
Peck, Miss Llllle M
Phelan, Miss Helen
Rablnoff, George W
Randall. Miss Ollle A
Reynolds, Wilfred 8
Ross, Miss Madeline Dane
Roxbury Neighborhood House
St. Paul Community Chest, Inc.
Schenk, Miss Eugenie
Simmonds. Lionel J
Social Service Federation of
Englewood
Stuyvesant Neighborhood House.
N. Y. C
Sytz, Miss Florence
Telegraph HIM Neighborhood As-
sociation, San Francisco
Tulsa Community Fund
Webster, Miss Elizabeth H
Whaley, Miss Nell
Willett, Herbert L.. Jr
Wood, Prof. Arthur Evans
Y.M.C.A.— New York
DEPARTMENTAL FUNDS
INDUSTRY
($2275)
Brandeis. Justice & Mrs. Louis D. $500
tFels, Samuel S 500
Filene. Lincoln 250
Ittleson. Mrs. Henry 250
Huyck. Edmund N. (In Menwrlam) 200
Brandeis, Miss Elizabeth 100
Dickson, William B 100
Evans, Mrs. Glendower 100
Lewlsohn, Sam A 100
Mallery, Otto T 50
'Davis, J. Llonberger
Draper, Ernest G
Schwarzenbach. Robert J. F. (In
Memoriam)
Anderson, Mrs. Rachel R
Beard, Charles A
"Cooke. Morris Llewellyn
Greening. Miss Florence
Prendergast, Hon. William A...
HEALTH
($816.27)
Thomas Thompson Trust $600
!• Julius Rosenwald Fund 51.27
Potter, Miss Blanche 25
Shelden. Mrs. Henry 25
Wile, Dr. Ira S 25
Forbes, Dr. Alexander 20
Wald, Miss Lillian D 20
10
Id
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
25
25
25
10
10
10
10
10
Eernheim, Dr. Alice R 10
Gcodale, Dr. Walter S 10
Haskell. Mrs. John A 10
Jones, Mrs. Robert McK 10
Maternity Center Association.
New York 10
EDUCATION
($220)
Stern. Mr. & Mrs. Alfred K... $200 Eddy, Mr. & Mrs. L. J 20
GRAPHIC FOUNDERS FUND
($19,910)
Twentieth Century Fund
'Pels. Samuel S
•Rosenwald Family Association..
Julius Rosenwald Fund
•Lamont, Mr. & Mrs. Thomas W.
•Eastman, Mr. & Mrs. Lucius R.
Keith Fund '. .
Anonymous
Chamberlain, Miss Ellen S
Elmhlrst, Mrs. Leonard K
Goldman, Henry
Ittleson, Mr. & Mrs. Henry....
Warburg. Mr. & Mrs. Felix M.
Morrow. Mrs. Dwight W
Bamberger, Louis
Blaine, Mrs. Emmons
•Cannon, Mrs. Henry White
•Chamberlain. Prof. Joseph P...
$3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
1000
500
500
500
500
500
500
400
250
250
250
250
•Lasker, Miss Loula D...
Leach, Mrs. Henry G
James. Mrs. Bayard
Scattergood, Mrs. Thomas
Anonymous
Lamont, Thomas S
Leeds, Morris E
Dodge, Mrs. Cleveland H...
Scattergood, J. Henry
Scattergood, Miss Margaret
Thomas, Arthur H
Evans. Mr. & Mrs. Harold
I Men. Julius
tMaier, Paul D. I
Preston, Miss Evelyn
Rhoads, Charles J
Rhoads, George A
GENERAL FUND
($36,677.50)
Russell Sage Foundation $3000
Anonymous 1500
tChamberlaln, Prof. Joseph P. .. 1000
Lehman, Hon. Herbert H 1000
Tucker, Mr. & Mrs. Carll 1000
Ryeraon, Edward L., Jr 750
Backer, Mrs. George 500
Cabot, Dr. Richard C 500
[Eastman. Mr. & Mrs. Lucius R. 500
Kaufmann, Edgar J 500
tLamont, Mr. & Mrs. Thomas W. 500
+ Rosenwald Family Association..
Lasker, Albert D
Epstein, Max
Halle, Hiram J
Lamport, Arthur M
McGregor, Mr. & Mrs. Tracy W.
Anonymous
Lee, Joseph
Levy, Mrs. David M
Austin, Mrs. Chellls A
UNCLASSIFIED
Asher. L. E $75
Huyck. Francis C 75
Potter, Dr. Ellen C 40
Bruere, Henry 35
•Embree. Edwin R 30
Ingraham, Mrs. H. C. M 20
Parsons, Miss Edith F 20
•Seaver, H. L 20
Thorp, Miss Anne 20
Alford. Miss Martha 15
Alger, George W 15
Anderson, Judge George W 15
Braman, J. L 15
Bruere, Robert W 15
Catlln. Miss Ruth 15
Delano. Frederic A 15
Emerson, Dr. Haven 15
Farnam, Prof. Henry (In Mem-
orlam) 15
Harper. J. C 15
Janeway, Rev. F. L 15
Klmber. Miss Natalie B 15
Overstreet, Mrs. Elsie Burr 15
Rounds, R. S. 15
Shattuck, Dr. & Mrs. George
Cheever 15
•Wadsworth, Hon. Eliot 15
Wales, Mrs. Edna MeC
Winchester, Harold P
•Barus, Mr. & Mrs. Maxwell
•Biddle, Mrs. F. B
•Castle, Miss H. E. A
*de Schwelnltz, Karl
•Gltt, J. W
•Wilson, Mrs. Luke I
•Winston. Mr. & Mrs. Donald
•Ladd, Mrs. William S.
Anonymous
•Barker, Mrs. L. B. R
•Churchill. Miss Grace E
•Coolidge, Miss E. W
Jones, Eugene Klnckle
•Moorhead, Mrs. Howell
•Rhebergh. Miss Rose Ingred.
•Smith, Rev. Everett P
•Spingarn. J. E
•Stapleton. Miss Margaret
•Tapley, Miss Alice
•Taylor, Prof. Paul S
•Van Vleck. Joseph.
Neer. Miss Mary L.
Porter, Charles H...
Monroe. Miss Day. . .
Jr....
250
250
100
100
50
50
50
25
25
25
25
10
10
10
10
10
10
500
300
250
250
250
250
200
200
200
150
IS
15
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
7.50
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
2
2
I
MEMBERSHIP CLASSES
$100 CONTRIBUTING MEMBERS
ANDRE
REWS. Mrs. W. H.
Blumenthal, George
Burlingham, C. C.
tCannon, Mrs. Henry White
Castle, Mrs. George P.
Colvln. Miss Catharine
•Cooke. Mrs. Morris Llewellyn
Cravath, Paul D.
Curtis. Miss Frances G.
Cushing. 0. K.
Esty, R. P.
Flexner, Bernard
Gaisman, Henry J.
Ganter, Carl R.
Gilbert, S. Parker
Gregory, Richard H.
Harris, Charles C.
Haynes, John Randolph & Dora
(Foundation)
Household Finance Corporation,
Chicago
Ingersoll. Mrs. Raymond V.
Keldel, Louis A.
Loeb. Jacob M.
Mack, Judge *. Mrs. Julian W.
Mason Fund
Brownl'w. Louis
COMMUNITIES
($75)
$50 Burnham, E. Lewis
KEY :
* Gave also to other classifications under General Fund
t Gave also to Graphic Founders' Fund
' Gave also to Departmental Funds
t Deceased
177
($100 Contributing Members Continued)
May, Herbert L.
May, Mr. & Mrs. Walter A.
Merrill, Charles E.
•Norman, Edward A.
Paddock, Bishop & Mrs. Robert L.
Parkinson, Thomas I.
Peabody, Rev. Endicott
Pick, George
Pope. Mrs. Wlllard
Rosenthal, Lessing
Rosenwald. Lessing J.
Rublee, George
•Scandrett, Richard B., Jr.
Sherwln, Miss Belle
'Swift, Harold H.
Weinberg. Mrs. Sidney J.
$50 CONTRIBUTING MEMBERS
ALLEN, Hon. Henry J.
Anonymous
Anonymous
Belmont, Mrs. August
Blddle, Francis
Bonnell, Mrs. Henry H.
Bucher, Mrs. Paul
Chapln, Miss Caroline B.
Chenery, William L.
Clark, Miss Jane Perry
•Converse, Miss Mary E.
"Cooke, Morris Llewellyn
"Davis, J. Llonberger
Dayton Bureau of Community
Service & Community Chest
Elizabeth MeCormick Memorial Fund
Frledlander, Edgar
Gannett, Mrs. Mary T. L.
Griffith, Miss Alice
•Harbison, Miss Helen D.
Ingalls. Mrs. Abbott
Kelley, Nicholas
Kellogg, Paul
Koshland, Mrs. Marcus S.
•Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees
tLasker. Edward
Lasker, Miss Fiorina
tLasker, Miss Loula D.
Lehman, Judge & Mrs. Irving
Mirston, George W.
Mayer, Albert
McMurtrie, Miss Ellen (In Mem-
oriam)
Meyer, Alfred C.
Milbank, Albert G.
Moors, John F.
Morris, Mrs. Harrison S.
Newborg, Moses
Newborg, Mrs. Moses
Pope, Wlllard
Pratt, George D., Jr.
Rosensohn, Mrs. Samuel J.
Schatfner, Joseph (In Memoriam)
Sshlesinger, Elmer, Jr.
Seager. Henry R. (In Memoriam)
•Seligman, Eustace
Smith, Mrs. Carlton R.
Btix, Mr. & Mrs. S. L.
Stuart, R. Douglas
Waldheim, Aaron
Warburg, Mrs. Paul M.
$25 SUSTAINING MEMBERS
ABBOTT. Mrs. Donald P.
Allerton, Miss Ida M.
Ailing, Miss Elizabeth C.
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous
Ansbacher, David A.
Athey. Mrs. C. N.
BALDWIN, Mrs. H. p.
•Baldwin, Miss Rachel
Barnes, John Hampton
Bartlett, Miss Harriett M.
Beardsley, Mrs. John
Beer, Walter E.
Berle, Mrs. Adolf A.. Jr.
Bllllkopf, Ruth Marshall (In
Memoriam)
Brady, Dr. John W. 8.
Brenner, Mrs. Ann Reed
Brooklyn Bureau of Charities
Buell, Miss Bertha G.
Buttenheim. Harold 8.
Buttenwieser, Mrs. Benjamin J.
CARTER. Richard B.
Chanter. W. G.
Chew, Miss E. B.
Clowes, F. J.
Conyngton, Miss Mary
•Cooke, Mrs. Morris L.
Council of Social Agencies,
Cincinnati
Cowles, Gardner
Cowles, Mrs. Gardner
Crawford. Miss Anne Lethrop
Cummings, Mrs. D. Mark
Curtis, Miss Isabella
T~)AVIS. Miss Betsey B.
Davis, Henry L.
Day, C. M.
de Forest, Henry L.
DeSllver, Mrs. Albert
Dodge, Percival
Donaldson, Mrs. Henry H.
Douglas. James H.
Dreler, Mrs. H. E.
Duffield. Mrs. Edward D.
Dummer. Mrs. W. F.
Duveneck, Mrs. F. B.
ElDLITZ. Mrs. Ernest Frederick
Elsendrath. Mrs. Joseph N.
Elliott. Dr. John L.
English, H. D. W. (In
Memoriam)
Esberg, Henry
Evans, Miss Anna Cope
PELS. Mrs. Samuel S.
Ferry, Mansfield
Fisher, Mrs. Dorothy Canfleld
Fleisher, Mrs. H.
Frank. Walter
T.
GAMBLE, Miss Elizabeth F.
Gannett, Mrs. Mary Ross
Gavlt. Mrs. E. Palmer
Gavlt, John Palmer
Gavit, Mrs. John Palmer
Geler, Frederick A. (In Memoriam)
George, Miss Julia
Gillesple. Miss Mabel Lindsay
Golf. Frederick H. (In Memoriam)
Goldsmith, Mrs. Elsie Borg
Goodrich, Mrs. N. L.
Goodspeed, C. B.
HARMON, Miss Helen Griffiths
Harrison. Shelby M.
Hart. Mrs. Harry
Hatch. Mrs. P. E.
Hilton. Mrs. F. M.
Hilton. George
Hollander, Sidney
Houghton. Miss May
Hoyt, Mrs. John Sherman
Hughes, Chief Justice Charles E.
Hunter, Miss Anna F.
IDE, Mrs. Francis P.
llngham. Miss Mary H.
Isaacs, Stanley M.
KANE. Francis Fisher
Kellogg, Miss Clara N.
Kellogg, Mrs. Florence Loeb
Kellogg, L. 0.
Kennedy. Prof. F. L.
Kingsbury, John A.
•Kirkbride. Miss Mary B.
Koshland, Daniel E.
Kunn, Mrs. Simon
Kulakofsky, Mrs. J. H.
LA MONTE. Miss Caroline B.
Lewisohn, Miss Alice
Lewisohn, Miss Irene
Liebman. Mrs. Julius
Liebmann, Mrs. Alfred
Liverlght. Mrs. Alice F.
Lowcnstein. Dr. Solomon
Ludlngton, Miss Katharine
MacLEISH. Mrs. Andrew
Maty. J. Noel
Marshall. Robert
Mason. Miss Mary T.
McChesney, John
McConnell, Bishop Francis J.
Meyer. Carl
Moors, Mrs. John F.
Moos, Joseph
Morgenthau. Mr. 4 Mrs. Henry
Morgenthau. Mrs. Rita W.
Morse. Mr. & Mrs. H. M.
NoRDLINGER, H. H.
Morris. George W.
OLESEN. Dr. & Mr>. Robert
PATTERSON, Mrs. E. L.
Peabody, Miss E. R.
tPerkins. Dr. Rogers Griswold
Pinehot. Mrs. Gifford
Polk, Frank L.
Porter. Mrs. James F.
Porter, Rev. L. C.
Proskauer, Mrs. Joseph M.
Pulitzer, Joseph
RENARD, Miss Blanche
Robbins, Mrs. Frances C. L.
Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin D.
Rosenbloom, Charles J.
Rothermel. John J.
Rubens, Mrs. Charles
OAUNDERS, B. H.
•Schonblom. H. E.
Schwarz, S. L.
Senior, Max
Shaplelgh, Miss Amelia
Sherwln, Miss Prudence
Shroder, Mr. & Mrs. W. J.
Simmons. Mrs. Dorothea
Skewes-Cox. Mrs. V.
Slep, D. N.
Sloss, Mrs. M. C.
Smith, Geoffrey S.
Spahr, Dr. Mary B.
•Stix, Mr. & Mrs. Ernest W.
Strong, Mrs. j. R.
lAFT, Charles P. 2nd
Talbot, John C.
Taylor, Miss Anna H,
Taylor, Miss Katharine
Thompson, Mrs. William Reed
Torrance, Mrs. Francis J.
•Twombly, John Fogg
VAN DER LEEUW. C. H.
Villard, Mrs. Henry (In Memoriam)
Villard. Oswald G.
Vincent, Dr. George E.
WALSH. Frank P.
Watson, Miss Lucy C.
Wheeler, Miss Mary Phelps
Wieboldt Foundation, Chicago
Wllchlnskl, N. M.
Willard, Dr. C. J.
Willcox, Miss M. A.
Williams, Dr. Frankwood E. (In
Memoriam)
Wlllson, Miss Lucy B. (In Mem-
oriam)
Wilson, Miss Mildred W.
Wise, Dr. Stephen S.
YoUNG. Owen D.
$10 COOPERATING MEMBERS
ABBOTT. Miss Edith
Abbott. Miss Grace
Abbott. Miss Minnie D.
Abbott. Miss Rachel 8.
Abrons. Mrs. Louis W.
Adams, Miss Emma F,
Adams, Miss Jessie 8.
Addams. Miss Jane (In Memoriam)
Adle, David C.
Affelder, Louis J. (In Memoriam)
Alderton, Mrs. W. M.
Allen, Mrs. Ethel Richardson
Allen, Judge Florenca E.
Alschuler, Mrs. Alfred
Alspach, Charles H.
Amberg, Julius
Amldon. Judge Charles F.
Anderson. Mrs. Mary R.
Anderson, Miss Margaret B.
Anderson, Nets
Anderson, Mrs. Norma C.
Andrews, Mrs. D. E.
Andrews, Miss Elizabeth P.
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anthony, Miss Julia B.
Areson, C. W.
Argetslnger, John
Armstrong, Mrs. E. J.
Arnsteln, Leo
Ashe, Miss Elizabeth
Ashley, Miss Mabel Pierce
Ashley. R. L.
Associated Jewish Philanthropies.
Boston
Association of Junior Leagues of
America
Atwood. Miss Alice C.
Auerbaeh. Mr. & Mrs. H. H.
Austin. Mrs. Gertrude B.
Austin, Louis W.
Austin. Miss Ruth
Avery, Miss Eunice Harriet
BACHARACH, Mrs. s. (in
Memoriam)
Baerwald, Mrs. Paul
Bailey, George D.
Baker, Judge Harvey H. (In
Memoriam)
Baker, Mrs, John A.
Baker, Ray Stannard
Baltimore Federation of Churches
Baldwin, Arthur D.
•Baldwin. Miss Rachel
Ballard, Ernest S.
Bamfaerger, Edgar S.
Bane, Miss Llta
Barbey, Henry 6.
Barker. Miss Ada M.
Barnard, J. Lynn
Barnard, Miss Margaret
Barnes, Rev. C. Rankin
Barnes, Fred A.
•Barker, Mrs. L. B. R.
•Barus, Mr. & Mrs. Maxwell
Bascom, Miss Leila
Baylis, R. N.
Becker. James H.
Becker, John
Beckhard, Martin
Bedford, Miss Caroline
Bedinger. George Rust
Belsser, Paul T.
Bellamy, Mr. & Mrs. George A.
Benjamin, Mrs. David
Benjamin. Edward B.
Benjamin, Miss Fanny
Benjamin, Dr. Julian E.
Benjamin, Paul L.
Bennett, Roger W.
Berle. A. A.. Jr.
Bernhelm, Mrs. Henry J.
Beswlck, Mrs. Florence M.
Bettman, Alfred
Blcknell, Ernest P. (In Memoriam)
•Biddle. Mrs. F. B.
Blddle, William C.
Bigelow, Miss Alicia J.
Bigger, Frederick
Bijur. Miss Caroline
Bllllkopf, Jacob
Bingham, Judge Robert W.
Bird, Mrs. Clarence E.
Bishop, C. 8.
Blssell, Miss Elizabeth E.
Blackmer. Mrs. 8. A.
Blair, Henry P.
Bliss. Cornelius N.
Bloehman, L. E,
Bloom. Dr. W. S.
Blumgart. Dr. Leonard
Boese. Qnlrirv Ward
Bolen. Miss Grace R.
Bolton. Mrs. Chester C.
Bonbrlght, Miss Elizabeth M.
Bond, Mrs. Charles Wood
Bond. Miss Elsie M.
Bonsai, Mrs. Stephen
Boomsllter. Mrs. George P.
Borden, Miss Fanny
Borg, Mrs. Sidney C.
Borton. Mrs. A. Wallace
Botsford, Miss Laura H.
Bowen, Mrs. Joseph T.
Bowen. Miss Ruth
Bowers. Mrs. Martha D.
Bowie, Mrs. W. Russell
'Bracken, F. B.
Bracket!. Dr. Jeffrey R.
Bradley. Prof. Phillips
Bradway, John 8.
Brandels. Mrs. Alfred
Braueher, H. S.
Brecklnrldge, Mrs. Eleanor
Brenner, Mrs. Ruth F.
Brewer. James L.
Brewinoton. Miss Julia R.
Brewster. Rev. Harold S.
Bronson, Rov. Oliver Hart
Brooklyn AICP
Brooks, John Graham
Brown, Miss Hazel H.
Brown, Lester D.
Brown, Dr. Philip King
Brown, Dr. Rexwald
Brown, Prof. Willian&kdams
Brownlow, Mrs. Louis
Bruce, Miss Jessica
Bruno, Frank J.
Brunswick. Mrs. Emanuel
Bryson. Lyman
Buchanan. Miss Etha Louise
Buck, George G.
Buckstaff, Mrs. Florence G.
Bufflngton, Miss A. A.
Buffum, Mrs. F. D.
Bulkley, Miss Mary
Bunce, Alexander
Bureau of Maternal & Child
Health, Trenton
Burgess, Ernest W.
Burkhard, Hans
Burleson, F. E.
Burns, Allen T.
Burritt. Bailey B.
Busch, Henry M.
Busselle, Miss Anne Stuart
Bussey, Miss Gertrude C.
Butcher, Miss Theodora S.
Butler, Mrs. E. B.
Butzel. Miss Emma
Butzel. Fred M.
Butzel. Mrs. Henry M.
Butzel. Mrs. Leo M.
Byington, Miss Margaret F.
CAHN, Miss Frances
Calder, John (In Memoriam)
Caldwell, Mrs. J. E.
Calvert, Mrs. Alan
Camp, Kingsland
Campbell. Miss Elizabeth A.
Cannon. Miss Mary Antoinette
Capen, Edward Warren
Capron, C. Alexander
Cardozo, Justice Benjamin N.
Carlson, Miss Mathilda S.
Carmody, John Michael
Garner, Miss Lucy P.
Carnes, Miss Helen A.
Carrel, Mrs. J. R.
Carstens, C. C.
Carter, Miss Luella
Cassels, Edwin H.
•Castle, Miss H. E. A.
Catlin. Mrs. Randolph
Cautley, Mrs. Marjorle Sewell
Cavin. Miss Evalyn T.
Chadbourne, William Merrlam
Chaffee, H. Almon
tChapln. Mrs. R. C.
Chapman, Miss Bertha
Chaso, Mrs. George M.
Chase, Miss Pearl
Chase, Mrs. Philip B.
Chase, Randall, 2nd
Chase, Stuart
Chatfleld, George H.
Cheever. Mrs. David
Children's Aid Society. Buffalo
Children's Welfare Federation,
N. Y. C.
Chllds, R. S.
Chubb, Percival
Church. Mrs. Fernor 8.
•Churchill. Miss Grace E.
Claghorn. Miss Kate Hnllad.iv
Clapp, Raymond
Clark, Evans
Clements, Dr. Frederic E.
Clements, Dr. George P.
Cleveland Foundation
Cleveland, Newcomb
Clopper, E. N.
Cochran, Miss Fanny T.
Codman, Miss Catherine A.
Codman, Mrs. E. A.
Coffee, Rabbi Rudolph I.
Cogswell. Ledyard, Jr.
Cohen. Benno
Cohen, George Lion
Colbourne, Miss Frances
Cole, Mrs. Charles M.
Cole, Miss Jean Dean
Coles. L. F.
Colton. Harold S.
Colvln, Mrs. A. R.
Community Chest of San Diego
Community Chest of San Franclsce
Community Chest of Tampa
Community Union, Madison, Wis.
Condon. Miss Mary >. R.
Conklin. Miss Agnes M.
•Converse, Miss Mary E.
Conyngton, Thomas
Cook. Mrs. Alfred A.
Cooley, Charles H. (In Memoriam)
•Coolidge. Miss E. W.
Cooley, Miss Rossa B.
Coon, Thurlow E.
Cooper, Charles C. (In Memoriam)
Cooper, Walter I.
Cope, F. R., Jr.
Cornell, Miss Ethel L.
Council of Social Agencies, Buffalo
Council of Social Agencies, Pasadena
Coyle, C. H.
Crapullo, Mrs. George A.
Crlley, Miss Martha L.
Crooker, Mrs. George H.
Crosby, Miss Caroline M.
Cross, Mrs. Gammell
Crow, Miss Dorothy L.
Crozler, William
Culbert, Miss Jane F.
Cummings, W. A.
Curtis. Miss Margaret
Cushman. Mrs. James S.
Cutler, Prof. J. E.
Cutler, Mrs. Leslie B.
178
($10 Cooperating Members Continued)
DANFORTH. Mrs. H. G.
Daniels, Frederick I.
Davidson. Rev. H. Martin P.
Davies, Mrs. Natalie R.
Davis, Mr. & Mrs. Abraham N.
Davis, Miss Eleanor Bushnell
Davis, James
Oavis, Dr. & Mrs. Michael M.
Dawson. John B.
Day, Mrs. George P.
Day, Mrs. Harry Arnold
Oeane, Mr. & Mrs. Albert Lytle
Deardorff, Dr. Neva R.
de Beyersdorff, Miss Mathllde
De chert. Robert
Ddafleld. Mrs. Lewis L.
Dell, Rev. Burnham North
Dempsey, John P.
Denison, M. C.
Denny, Miss E. G.
Denny, Dr. Francis P.
Derrick, Calvin
"de Schweinitz. Karl
Detroit League for the Handicapped
Deutsch, Miss Naomi
Devine, Dr. Edward T.
Dewar, Miss Kathari ne
Dewees, Dr. Lovett
Dewing, Miss Mary S.
Diack, Mr. & Mrs. A. W.
D Ickl nson. Dr. Robert L.
Dillingham, Mrs. Thomas M.
Dilworth, R. J.
Dodge, Cleveland E.
Donnelly, Thomas J.
Doster, Miss Agnes M.
Douglas, Prof. Paul H.
Dow, M iss Carol i ne B. (In
Memorlam)
Downer, Mrs. Harry
Doyle, Miss Anastasia
JDrake. Mrs. Louis Stoughton
Draper. Miss Laura A.
Draper, Mrs. M. C.
Dreier, Miss Mary E.
Drury, Miss Louise
Dublin, Dr. Louis I.
Dwight, Miss M. L.
Dykstra, C. A.
EA
'ARLE, Mrs. E. P.
Earle, Miss Louise S
Earle. Mrs. R. K.
Eastman, Fred
Eastman. Miss Lucy P.
Eaton, Allen
Eddy, Sherwood
Edgerton. Mrs. Henry W.
Ege, Mrs. Anthony
Ehrich, Mrs. Walter L.
Elslg, Arthur M.
Ekern, Herman L.
Eklund. Edwin G.
Eldridge, Mrs. L. A.
Eliot, Mrs. H. R.
Elkus, Abram I.
Ellis, Charles W.
Ellis, Miss Ethel Franklin
Elsworth, Mrs. Edward
Ely, Miss Gertrude S.
*Embree, Edwin R.
Emerson, Mrs. B. K.
Emerson, Edwards Dudley
Emerson, Miss Helena Titus
Emerson, Dr. Kendall
Emerson, Prof. William
Emery, Mrs. E. Stanley
Emmerich, Herbert
Ennis, Mrs. Robert Berry
Erdmann, Albert J.
Erlanger, Mrs. Sydney
Ernst, George G.
Erskine. Mrs. Morse
Evans, Mrs. Jonathan
FABRY, Mrs. H.
Fahey. John H.
Falconer, Douglas P.
Family Society of Philadelphia
Family Welfare Society of Rochester
Farrand, Dr. Livingston
Farrand, Max
Fechheimer, S. Marcus (In
Memoriam)
Federation of Jewish Philanthropies,
Pittsburgh
Fegley, Rev. Charles K.
Feinrman, Miss Ethel R.
Fels, Maurice
Felton, Mrs. Charles N
Ficke, Mrs. C. A.
Fieser, James L.
Finley, Dr. John H.
Fischer, Rev. Theodore A
Fisher, Galen M.
Fisher, Mrs. Janon
Fisk, Miss M. L.
Fitch. John A.
Fleisher, Arthur A.
Fleming, Mrs. Thomas, Jr.
Flower, Miss Mercedes
Floyd, Dr. J. C. M. (In Memorlam)
Flurscheim, Bernard H.
Foley, Miss Edna L.
Folks. Homer
Forbes, Mrs. J. Malcolm
Fosbroke, Rev. H.
Fosdick, Raymond B.
Foster, Miss Edith
Foster, Miss Mattie Louise
Fowler, Henry
Fox, Miss Elizabeth G.
Frankfurter. Prof. Felix
Franklin. Miss Mary
Franklin Street Settlement, Detroit
Frazier. Miss Elizabeth P.
Freeman, Harrison B.
Freiberg, Maurice J.
French, Mrs. J. S.
Friedlander. Mrs. Alfred
Friedenwald, Dr. Harry
Friedman. Miss Mollie A.
Friedmann, Lionel
"Friend"
Friend. Miss Helen R.
"Friend in Need"
Frlnk. Mrs. Angellka
Frothingham, Mrs. William I.
GALLAGHER. Miss Dorothy
Gamble, Sidney D.
Gannett, Miss Alice P.
Gannett, Frank E.
Cans. Mrs. Howard S.
Gardiner, Miss Elizabeth G.
Gardner, Arthur F.
Gardner, Mrs. L. H.
Gardner, The Misses
Gardner, Robert A.
Gates, Mrs. Gertrude
Gavlt, Mrs. Frances P. (In
Memorlam)
Gavit, Joseph
Gavit. Miss Julia N.
Gavlt. Walter P.
Geffen, Mrs. Pauline F.
Gemberling, Miss Adelaide
German, Frank F.
Gest. Miss Lillian
Gibbons. Miss Mary L.
Gibson, Miss Mary K.
Gideonse. Harry D.
Giles. Miss Anne H.
Gilkey. Rev. Charles W.
Glllespie, Miss Eva
Gllman, Miss Elisabeth
Gllmore, Miss Marcia
Girl Scouts. Inc.
•Girt, J. W.
Glazier, Mrs. Henry S.
Glenny, Mrs. Bryant. Jr.
Glueck, Dr. Bernard
Glueck, Mrs. Sheldon
Goldbaum. Miss Ruth Dene
Goldblatt, Arthur
Goldman. Mrs. Henry
Goldman, Rabbi Solomon
Goldmark, Miss Josephine
Goldmark. Miss Pauline
Goldsmith, Miss Louise B.
Goldwater, Dr. S. S.
Goodnow, Miss Minnie
Gottlieb, Harry N.
Goulder, Miss Sybil M.
Grandin. Miss Julia V.
Granger, Mrs. A. 0.
Graves, Mrs. Henry S.
Gray, Mrs. H. S.
Greene, Miss Amy Whitney
Greene, Miss Esther F.
Greene, Mrs. F. D.
Greene, Mrs. Theodora A.
Greenebaum, Dr. J. Victor
Greenough, Mrs. John
Grinnell, Mrs. Morgan
Gross, Miss Irma H.
Grossman, Hon. Moses H.
Gruenberg, Mr. & Mrs. Benjamin C.
Grunewald, Miss Lucile R.
Guffey, Hon. Joseph F.
Guinness, Rev. George G.
Guinzburg, Mrs. Harry A.
Gulnzburg, Mrs. Victor
Guthrie. Miss Anne
Gutwllling. Miss Mildred A.
HAGEDORN, Joseph
Haines, Earl S.
Halbert, L. A.
Hale, Miss Ellen
Hale, Miss Harriet F.
Hale, Robert F.
Hall, Miss Helen
Hall, Mrs. Keppele
Halle, Eugene S.
Halle, Salmon P.
Halleck, Mrs. R. P.
Halliday, Miss A. P.
Halliday, Miss Mary H.
Ham, Arthur H.
Hammond, Mrs. Gardiner
Hanf, Howard
Hannaford, Mrs. Howard
"Harbison, Miss Helen D.
Hardee, Miss Agnes 0.
Harmon Foundation, Inc.
Harmon, Mrs. William E.
Harris. Mrs. Arthur I.
Harris. Miss Helen
Harris, Miss Helen M.
Harrison, Earl G.
Hart. Dr. Hastings H (In
Memoriam)
Hart. Mrs. John I.
Hart, Mrs. Thomas
Hartig. E. L.
Harvey. Mrs. John S. C.
Harvey. Dr. Samuel C.
Hasbrouck, Judge Gilbert D. B.
Haslett, Mrs. S. M.
Havel!, George F.
Hay, Mrs. William Sherman
Hayes. C. Walker
Hayes, Mrs. E. C.
Hayford. F. Leslie
Hays, Arthur Garfleld
Healy, Mrs. Elizabeth Stem
Healy, Dr. William
Heard, Mrs. Dwight B.
Heldman, Miss Anna B.
Heller. Miss Julia
Helm, Miss Kathryn
Henderson, Mrs. E. C.
Henderson, Harold L.
Hendricks. Mrs. Henry S.
Hendrie, Miss Jennie F.
Henderson, Miss Olive E.
Henshaw, Miss R. G.
Herrick, Mrs. J. B.
Mersey, Miss Ada H.
Hershfleld, Isidore
Hickin. Miss Eleanor Maude
Hill. Mrs. George A., Jr.
HIM, Howard C.
Hill, Louis W.. Jr.
Hillor, Miss Alma
Hills, Mrs. James M.
Hincks, W. E.
Hitch. Miss Ruth A.
Hitchcock. Mrs. Geraldine L.
Hodson. Hon. William
Hodges. Miss Virginia
Hoehler, Fred K.
Hoey, Miss Jane M.
Hohmann, Miss Martha
Holden, Arthur C.
Holladay, Mrs. Charles B.
Holland, Dr. E. 0.
Hollander, Walter
Hollcnback, Miss Amelia 8
Holmes, C. 0.
Holt. Miss Ellen
Hopkins, Dr. Ernest Martin
Hcpklns, Dr. George W.
Home. Louis W.
Hoskins, Mr. & Mrs. Harold B.
House, H. Sherbourne
Howard, John R., Jr.
Howell, Mrs. John White
Hudson. Edward W.
Hughes, R. 0.
Hull, Miss Inez H.
Hulst, George D.
Hunter, Joel D.
Hutchins. Dr. Robert M.
Hutsinpillar, Miss Florence W.
Hyde, Deaconess H. C.
Hyde Park Library
Hyndman. Miss Helen W.
ICKES, Hon. Harold L.
Ihlder, John
ngram. Miss Frances
rene Kaufmann Settlement,
Pittsburgh
saaes, Lewis M.
srael, Mrs. Rachel M.
ssler. Mrs. C. H.
ves. Mrs. D. 0.
JACKSON, Alice Day
(In Memoriam)
Jackson, Mrs. Willard C.
Jacobs, Mrs. Sinclair
James, Mrs. E. H.
James, Henry
Jasspon. Mrs. W. H.
Jatho. Miss Georgia
Jeffers, Mrs. G. B.
Jeffrey. Walter
Jenkins, Mrs. Edward C.
Jewish Orphans Home,
Los Angeles
Jewish Welfare Federation,
Cleveland
Johnson, Mrs. Clara Sturges
Johnson, Miss Eleanor Hope
Johnson, Miss Evelyn P.
Johnson, Mrs. E. W.
Johnson, Rev. F. Ernest
Johnson, H. H.
Johnstone. Bruce
Jonas. Mrs. Ernst
Jones, Mrs. Adam L.
Jones, Cheney C.
Jones, Rev. John Paul
Jones, Livingston E.
Jones, Mrs. S. M.
Joslyn, Mrs. Arthur E.
KAHN. Mrs. Albert
Kahn, Miss Dorothy C.
Kahn, Mrs. Gilbert W.
Kat2, Mrs. Abram
Kaufman, A. R.
Kawin. Miss Ethel
Keefer. Mrs. Mary Wysor
Kellogg, Arthur (In Memoriam)
Kellegg, Mrs. Mary F. (In
Memorlam)
Kellogg, Miss Ruth M.
Kelsey, Dr. Carl
Kennedy, Mrs. Anne
Kennedy, Miss Jean
Kent. Mrs. William
Kidde, Walter
Kimmel. W. G.
King, Clarence
King. Mrs. Edith Shatto
King, Mrs. R. F. (In
Memoriam)
Kingdon, Frank
Kingsbury, Dr. Susan M.
•Kirkbride, Miss Mary B.
Kirkwood, Mrs. Robert C.
Kittner, Miss Violet
Klaw, Mrs. Alonzo
Klem, Miss Margaret C.
Knight, Miss Harriet W.
Knight, Howard R.
Kohn, Robert D.
Krehbiel, Prof. Edward
KVollk, Julian H.
Kuhn, Dr. Hedwig S.
-L/ABOR Cooperative Educational
& Publishing Society
•Ladd. Mrs. William S.
•Laidlaw. Mrs. James Lees
Laldlaw, Mrs. Robert R.
Laird, Miss Mary
Lamont, Corliss
Lament, Miss Elizabeth K.
Langdon, Miss Ellen E.
Langer. Samuel
Lansing, Miss Gertrude
Laptad. Miss Evadne M.
Lasker. Mrs. Bruno
Lattlmer, Gardner
Lawrence, Rev. W. A.
Layman, Dr. Mary H.
Lazaron, Rabbi Morris S.
Leal. Miss Margaret
Le Cron, Mrs. James L.
Lee, Miss Frances
Leeming, Mrs. G. B.
Lehman, Mrs. Arthur
iLehman, Irvin F.
Lehmkuhl, Mrs. Florence H.
Leiserson. Prof. William M.
Lemann. Monte M.
Lenroot, Miss Katharine F.
Lennox. Miss Elisabeth
Letch worth. Edward H.
Levlnson, Mrs. Salmon 0.
Levy, Mrs. Lionel Faraday
Lewis, Edwin T.
Lewis. Mrs. Lansing
Lewis. R. W.
Lewis, W. D.
Lewis, William Draper
Lichten. Miss Grace M.
Lies, Eugene T.
Lincoln, Edward A.
Llndsley. Mrs. John
Llndguist. Miss Ruth
Lindsay, Dr. Samuel McCune
Lipman. Mrs. Martha S.
Litchfleld. Rev. Arthur V.
Liver-more, Paul S.
Locke, Dr. Alain
Loeb. Mrs. Howard A.
Loomls, Frank D.
Love, John W.
Lovejoy, Owen R.
Lovell. Deaconess A. W.
Lovell, Miss Bertha C.
Loyal Order of Moose,
Mooseheart, III.
Lucas, Dr. William Palmer
Lukens, Herman T.
Luscomb, Miss Florence H.
Lynde, Edward D.
MACAULEY, Capt. Edward
MacDowell, Mr. & Mrs. E. C.
Machugh, Miss Cecilia A.
Mack, Jacob W.
tMacomber. Miss Bertha
Madeira, Mrs. L. C.
Madeira, Percy C., Jr.
Magee, Miss Elizabeth S.
Manges, Dr. M.
Mannheimer, Rabbi Eugene
Manning, Mrs. Charles B,
Manny, Prof. Frank A.
Mapes, Riley E.
Marburg, Mrs. Louis C.
Marburg, Theodore H.
Marks, Louis D.
Marshall. Mrs. George
Martin. John
Martin. Mrs. Sydney E.
Martins. Miss Edith V.
Marty, Miss Eva A.
Marvin, Walter R.. Jr.
Mason, Miss Lucy R.
Mathews, Miss Catherine
Matthews, Albert
Matthews, Miss Elizabeth
Matthews, Miss Mabel A.
Matthews, William H.
Maule. Miss Margaret C.
Maverick, L. A.
Maxwell, Wilbur F.
May. E. C.
Mayer. Mrs. Leo
Mayer. Mrs. Levy
McAdam. V. F.
McAdoo, Miss Peggy
McAlpln. C. W.
McAlpin, David H.
McChristle, Miss Mary Edna
MeConnell, Miss Beatrice
McCorkle, Rev. Daniel S.
McCormick, Miss M. V.
McCormick, Mrs. Rtbert E.
McCullough, T. W.
(McDowell. Miss Mary E.
McEvoy, Dr. S. H.
McHugh, Miss Rose J.
McKibbin, Mrs. George B.
McLean, Miss Fannie W.
McMlllen, A. Wayne
McWilliams, Prof. R. H.
Mead. Daniel W.
Mead, Miss Margaret P.
Means, Miss Margaret K.
Mears, Eliot G.
Meeker. Miss Edna G.
Mehren, Edward J.
Mercer. Mrs. William R.
Meriam, Lewis
Merrill-Palmer School. Detroit
Merrill, Rev. William P.
Methodist Children's Home
Society, Detroit
Meyer, Dr. Adolf
Meyer. Dr. K. F.
Miles. R. E.
Miller, Rev. Llndley H.
Millhauser. Mrs. Dewitt
Milliken, Mrs. Seth M.
Mitchell, H. B.
Mitchell. Mrs. Lucy Sprague
Mitchell, Dr. Wesley C.
Mitler. Mrs. Herbert
Moak. Harry L.
Monteflore Hospital, Pittsburgh
Montgomery, Miss Helen
Montgomery, Miss Louise
Moore, Miss Alice E.
Moore, Miss Sybil Jane
•Moorhead, Mrs. Howell
Moran, Mrs. Mary H.
Morgan, Miss Anne
Morgan, Dr. Arthur E.
Morris, C. C.
Morse, Miss Frances C.
Morton. Miss Helen
Moseley, Mrs. Henry P.
Mosher. Mrs. H. T.
Moskowitz. Mrs. Henry (In
Memoriam)
Moss, Joseph L.
Mott, Dr. John R.
Moxcey, Miss Mary E.
Mullen, Rev. Joseph J.
Muller, Mrs. Gertrude E.
Muller, Mrs. Olga Erbsloh
Murdoch, Frank B., Jr.
Musgrove. W. J.
Myers, Miss Bessie
Myers, Miss Eleanor D.
Myers, Dr. Lotta Wright
NAG EL, Charles
Naumburg. Mrs. Walter W.
Nauss, Dr. Ralph W.
Nealley, E. M.
tNecarsulmer, Mrs. H.
Nelson, Rev. Frank H.
Neustadt, Richard M.
Newberry, M. A.
Newell, Miss Anna G.
New England Homo for Little
Wanderers
New York Guild for Jewish Blind
New York School of Social Work
Nicolay. Miss Helen
Nixon, Rev. Justin W.
Nollen, G. S.
•Norman, Edward A.
Norris, Miss J. Anna
Norton. William J.
Norton, W. W.
OBERNDORF, Dr. c. P.
O'Brien, Mrs. R. L.
O'Donoghue, Sidney
Odum. Howard W.
Ohio Humane Society
Oliver, E. L.
Oliver. Sir Thomas
•Olmsted. Frederick Law
Openhym, Mrs. Adolphe (In
Memoriam)
Oppenhelmer, Mrs. Alfred M.
Oppenheimer, Miss Emilie
Osborne. Charles D.
179
($10 Cooperating Members Concluded)
Otis, Rowland
Overstreet. Prof. H. A.
PACKARD. George
Paddock. Royce
Page. Dr. Calvin Gates
Paine, Rev. George L.
Park, Dr. J. Edgar
Park, Dr. Marion E.
Parker, Miss Mary A.
Parker. Miss Ruth Louise
Parker, Miss Theresa H
Parker, Dr. Valeria H.
Parker, Mrs. Wlllard
Parmenter. Miss Ella C
Parrlsh, Miss Helen L.
Parsons, Prof. P. A.
Pascal, Mrs. H. S.
Passamaneck, H.
Patrick, Miss Sara L
Paull, Mrs. A. W.
Payson, Miss Margaret
tPeabody, Prof. Francis G
Peabody, Miss Margaret C. (In
Memoriam)
Pelxotto. Dr. Jessica B.
Pendleton, Miss Ora
Perkins, Miss Emily 8.
Perkins, Richard R.
Person, Dr. Harlow 8
Persons. W. Frank
Peterson, Dr. & Mrs. Frederick
Pettit, Walter W.
Pfeiffer, C. W.
Phillips, Miss Martha E.
Phinny, Miss Mary M.
Pilgert, Mrs. Kathryn G
Pinchot. Hon. Glfford
Plnney, Edward S.
Plttsfleld Community Fund
Association
Plait. Philip 8.
Platt, Truman H.
Playground Athletic League, Inc
Baltimore
Playter, Miss Charlotte 8.
(Plimpton, George A.
Plumley, Miss Margaret Lovell
Poage. Dr. Lydla L.
Polachek. Mrs. Victor
Pollak, Dr. M.
Pond, Miss MIMIcent
Pope, G. D.
Popper. Mrs. William C.
Powell, Miss Rachel Hopper
Powell. Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Reed
Prince, Rev. Herbert W
Provident Loan & Savings Society
Detroit
Pryor. Miss Emily M.
Purdy, Lawson
Putnam, Harrington
Pyle. Mr. 4 Mrs. Robert
QUEEN, stuart A.
RADLO, Miss Dora A.
Railway Clerk. Cincinnati
Rand, Miss Winifred
Rantoul, Mrs. Meal
Ratllff. Mrs. Beulah Amidon
Rauh, Mrs. A. S.
Rawson, E. B.
Raymond, Miss Ruth
Refsland, Mrs. John C.
Reber, Mrs. J. Howard
Red Cross, Cleveland
Reed, Jacob
Reed, Paul L.
Reimer. Miss Isabelle A.
Rels. Mrs. Arthur M.
Renard, Mrs. Wallace
Renold. Charles G.
Research Work Department of the
Community Chest. Cincinnati
Retieker, Miss Ruth
Reynolds, Miss Bertha C.
Reynolds, Mrs. Paul R.
"Rhebergh, Miss Rose Ingred
Rice, Mrs. W. G., Jr.
Rlchberg, Donald R.
Richmond, Dr. Winifred
Rlddiek, Mrs. E. G.
Roberts, Mrs. Dudley
Roberts, Edward D.
Roberts, Mrs. H. W.
Roble, Mist Amelia H.
Robins, Mrs. Raymond
Robinson, Mrs. A. H.
Robinson. Dr. G. Canby
Roche, Miss Josephine E.
Rockwell, Harold H.
Rockwell, Mrs. L. H.
Rockwell. Mrs. W. W.
Roe, Miss Clara S.
Rogers, Francis
Rogers, Miss Margaret A.
Rogers, Rt. Rev. Warren L
Rohm, Miss Helen L.
Rood, Miss Dorothy
Rosenberry, Justice Marvin B.
Rosenfeld. Edward L.
Rosenfeld. Mrs. M. C.
Rosenwald. Julius (In Memoriam)
Rosenwald. William
RMS, Prof. E. A.
Ross, Dr. Margaret Taylor
Ross, Mrs. R. R.
Rotch, Mrs. Arthur G.
Rothschild, Dr. Leonard
Rothbart, Albert
Rounds, Mrs. L. R.
Routzahn. Evart G.
Routzahn, Mrs. Mary Swain
Rowell, Miss Olive B.
Rublnow, Dr. I. M. (In Memoriam)
Ruffner, H. W. (In Memoriam)
Rugg, Prof. Harold
Ruml, Dr. Beardsley
Ryan, Rev. John A.
SACKMAN. Charles
Sage, L. H.
Sailer, Dr. T. H. P.
St. John, George C., Jr.
Saltonstall, Mrs. Robert
Salvation Army, San Francisco
Samson, Miss Mary E.
Sand, Dr. Rene
Sandford, Miss Ruth
Saplro, Milton D.
Savin, William H.
Sayles, Miss Mary B.
Sayre, Mrs. F. B. (In Memorial
•Scandrert, Richard B., Jr.
Scarlett. Bishop William
Schabert, Kyrill S.
Schaedler. Miss Pauline R.
Schaeffer. Paul N.
Schaffner, Joseph Halle
Schaffner, Miss Marlon
Schamberg, Mrs. J. F.
Schleffelin. Dr. William Jay
Schiff, John M.
Schoellkopf. Alfred H.
Schoellkopf, Mrs. Alfred H.
•Sehonblom, H. E.
Schorer, Arno R.
Schroeder. Hyman
Schrceder, Dr. Mary G.
Schuehman, F. E.
Schwab, Miss Emily
Scott, Miss Nell
Sears, Mrs. Alfred E.
Seattle Community Fund
•Seaver, H. L.
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a Plea«e send me FREE CATALOG No. 279-SG.
SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn,
N. Y. Executive office. 112 East 19 Street. New York. Price: this issue (April 1937; Vol. XXVI. No. 4) 30 cts.: $3 a year; foreign
postage, 50 cts. extra : Canadian 30 eta. Entered as second class matter at the post office at Brooklyn, N. Y. ; under the Act of March 3, 1879.
Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917 : authorized December 21, 1921.
A BKAND-NEW CUSTOMER used the tele-
phone this morning. Betty Sue called
up that nice little girl around the
corner.
Every day, hundreds of Betty Sues
speak their first sentences into the
telephone. Just little folks, with casual,
friendly greetings to each other. Yet
their calls are handled as quickly and
efficiently as if they concerned the
most important affairs of Mother and
Daddy. For there is no distinction
in telephone service. Its benefits are
available to all — old and young, rich
and poor alike. To Betty Sue, the
telephone may some day become
commonplace. But it is never that to
the workers in the Bell System.
There is constant, never-ending
search for ways to improve the speed,
clarity and efficiency of your telephone
calls ... to provide the most
service, and the best, at the
lowest possible cost.
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
182
The Gist of It
VOL. xxvi No. 4
FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS JOHN A. FlTCH ! " —
has brought Survey readers a knowledge of APRIL 1937 CONTENTS
the steel towns, and of the human values be- -^
neath their smoky pall. His perspective now
makes him the most authoritative commen- Cnvrr rwitrn
tator on what the February conferences be- PICTORIAL STATISTICS, INC.
tween John L. Lewis and Myron C. Taylor Among Ourselves 133
really signified. (Page 187) I u r r • rv • i TT
John L. Lewis— Drawing by Horace A. Knight FRONTISPIECE
BEGINNING A NOTABLE SERIES OF ARTICLES Steel and the C.I.O JOHN A. FITCH 187
on the instability of industry that underlies ctr.t, w II j T; • \
the instability of employment (page 192) St3tC Wa"S and Economic Areas. PIERCE WILLIAMS 192
Pierce Williams describes typical areas that Drawings by Howard Cook 197
defy state lines in their relation to our whole ~,, D. , ,
national economy. An economist whose in- The Rlse of the Democratic Idea in the United States. CHARLES A. BEARD 201
quiries into the cost of medical care are Dykstra of Cincinnati . . GENEVA SEYBOLD 204
well known, Mr. Williams left the Bureau
of Economic Research to go to Washington Farewell to Bohemia EDUARD c. LINDEMAN 207
at the request of the Hoover administration Art Goes to Main Street .. 209
in the summer of 1932. His work on the Re-
construction Finance Corporation's extension Uncle Sam Takes the Stage HIRAM MOTHERWELL 212
of relief funds to the cities led naturally to T a • « D ,
his continuance under Harry Hopkins, first La5"°ffs Wlth ^ CAROL AND BOYD c' SHAFE* 214
as supervisor of federal relief on the West Is the World Going Mad? FARNSWORTH CROWDER 219
Coast, and eventually as an investigator of „. . . T . . , _
the basic economic conditions underlying not Through Neighbors Doorways
only the need for relief, but the future of Farce of the Chandelier-Players JOHN PALMER GAVIT 221
employment in the vital industries. T -n. r-, TTT u « /^ XT • i i
Lillian D. Wald — A Great Neighbor 223
CHARLES A. BEARD NEEDS NO INTRODUC- Life and Letters
tion to Americans, whose history and cir- A „!,«,.. o.,=. T™ *>-> .
, ; Arches Uver i ime LEON WHIPPLE 224
cumstances he has ever recorded with the
clarity of the long view. In the first of the Human Inventions: Pick and Shovel Holiday JOHN F. REICH 232
Bronson Cutting Memorial Lectures (page „ • > «c u j j»
201), he gives us a reassuring interpretation Russla s Four Hundred . .RUTH v. MORSE 234
of the democratic processes in the modern Suffer the Little Children KEN CAMPBELL 236
industrial world.
© Survey Associates, Inc.
WHEN WE SENT TO CLARENCE A. DYKSTRA
— city manager of Cincinnati who has just • — __^_
accepted the presidency of the University of
Wisconsin — a first draft of the article about ance set-up means to the stability of a typical who has contributed to leading magazines,
him (page 204) he replied, with typical manufacturing community. She depicts Janes-
modesty, that there was no such extraordinary ville, home of Parker Pens and General Mo- AN APPROPRIATE INTERPRETER OF THE VOL-
person as Geneva Seybold portrayed. But as tors plants, as well as local industries. (Page unteer work camps organized by the Ameri-
research editor for the National Municipal 214.) can Friends Service Committee (page 232),
League Miss Seybold had right at hand the John F. Reich' is a Danish-Jewish Quaker,
material on Cincinnati and its enviable gov- FARNSWORTH CROWDER, PROBER INTO THE born in England. After a Haverford College
ernment from which she evolved her portrait sanity of moderns (page 219), is a journalist education, he remained in the United States,
of the city manager.
SOCIOLOGIST AND PHILOSOPHER, EDUARD C.
Lindeman is always on the go, delving into
the grass roots of the United States one day,
sitting in on profound discussions of the
destiny of mankind, the next. His reach of
mind and experience gives him a unique
grasp of the federal arts projects, which he
evaluates as he has seen them from the inside
as an adviser, and from the outside as an
observer. (Page 207)
FOLLOWING MR. LINDEMAN'S LANDSCAPE OF
artists and Americans Hiram Motherwell, an
old hand in the theater as dramatic critic for
Stage and other periodicals, gives us a close-
up of the theater projects in the development
of which he has participated. (Page 212)
WITH THE COLLABORATION OF HER HUS-
band — Boyd C. Shafer, sociologist — Carol
Shafer, author of a telling Surrey Graphic
article on the rural relief situation in one
Wisconsin county last summer, now describes
what the Wisconsin unemployment insur-
Among Ourselves
Six Errand Boys Wanted — Apply
White House
THE PRESIDENT NEEDS AT LEAST six AIDES,
in addition to his secretarial staff, accord-
ing to the recent report of the President's
Committee on Administrative Management.
"They should be men in whom the President
has personal confidence," stated the report,
"and whose character and attitude is such
that they would not attempt to exercise power
on their own account. They should be pos-
sessed of high competence, great physical
vigor, and a passion for anonymity." Com-
menting on these recommended liaison as-
sistants at the annual meeting of Survey
Associates in February, Louis Brownlow,
chairman of the committee that prepared the
report, said: "We don't want them to be
assistant presidents, and we don't want them
to be super-cabinet officers; we want them
to be intelligent errand boys."
Management and Workers
To THE EDITOR: Public interest in industrial
unionism bids fair to press to the fore a
question which has long been latent. What
is the status of the directory in industrial
corporations of immensely dispersed stock
ownership? The older theory, that directors
are agents for stockholders, no longer fits the
facts — as may be seen from Berle and Means',
Modern Corporation and Private Property.
Ownership, vested in thousands, often tens
of thousands of stockholders, has become
separated from control in the hands of a few.
No doubt, directors and general officers
hold a position of trust for the corporation.
But does this imply a fiduciary position to-
183
ward stockholders? Probably, tew corporation
officials will voluntarily assume such a role,
once they understand its significance. And
why should a directory be regarded as a
fiduciary towards a fluctuating mass whose
ownership may be "in" or "out" on a tele-
phone call to a broker — rather than toward
the static mass of workers whose lives and
that of the corporation are intertwined?
Only in form is the directory of most great
corporations elected by free choice of stock-
holders; actually, the directory is generally a
group self-perpetuated by use of the proxy
machinery.
Sooner or later, the position of the con-
trolling elements in the great industrial cor-
porations must become clarified. If they are
not trustees for stockholders, why should they
stand apart from their co-workers?
It would be easy to show that nothing in
accepted corporate theory compels such an
isolated position.
FRF.DERIC DREW BOND
Winsted, Conn.
Who Wants Peace?
FROM READERS THE COUNTRY OVER, DOROTHY THOMPSON'S ARTICLE ON THE PEACE
movement, published in February Survey Graphic elicited acclaim, together with a lively
sheaf of letters of criticism. In so far as these dealt with omissions, the space limitations
of even our longest article of the year did not permit Miss Thompson to draw in full on
the materials gathered by Marian Churchill White, who did the research. — The Editors
To Miss THOMPSON: IT is A SHAME THAT
your informants put you into the embarrass-
ing position of covering an entirely wrong
story with your authoritative name. I had
expected Mrs. Marian Churchill White, who
is credited with collecting the data, to grasp
at my suggestion to check up her information
on my original documentary material, but had
no response to my offer.
Trying to get ready for the hospital in
the next fortnight, I am unable to keep a
jour with my own work. Therefore I can-
not undertake — as you suggest — to write a
corrected version of your article "Who Wants
Peace." I repeat my offer both to you and
to the Survey Graphic to look up original
documents in my own war-time archives.
I will gladly cooperate in picking out th<
material for your writing the correction with-
in the minimum of time.
To point out two "sample" mistakes, let
me say that The Hague Congress was not
called by Jane Addams, but she was invited to
attend it. On invitation of Dr. Aletta Ja-
cobs, a group of twenty-seven Dutch, four
Belgian, five British and four German wo-
men met on the 12th and 13th of February
1915 in The Hague and decided to call the
Congress. They invited Mrs. Carrie Chap-
man Catt to preside over it and asked me
to get Mrs. Catt's consent. Being en route
lecturing in the United States, I wrote to
Mrs. Catt, but she was unwilling. After Mrs.
Catt's refusal, the Europeans, who first had
invited Miss Addams merely to attend, now
asked her to preside over the Congress. The
Europeans urged me to get her consent.
(Original correspondence in my files.) I per-
suaded Miss Addams to accept, in personal
conversations in Chicago.
Not from all warring countries did women
get through to the Congress, only from:
Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great
Britain and Hungary. The neutrals present
were from: Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands,
Norway, Sweden and the United States. Two
British women were early in The Hague (a
third one came from the United States with
the American delegation), so were two Ger-
mans. These four women helped the Dutch
women in the preparation of the Congress.
One hundred eighty British and scores of
German delegates, one French, one Bulgar-
ian (the Hungarian authorities refused her a
visa to pass through the country though they
visaed passports of several Hungarian dele-
gates) were prevented by the authorities from
attending the Congress. The Resolutions
Committee had nearly finished its work pre-
ceding the opening of the Congress, when
Jane Addams and the American delegation
arrived, welcomed by the Congress crowd
which included the German women, who in
your story were welcomed by her. Not a sin-
gle French woman was present.
I cannot undertake to analyze more of the
historically wrong data you were made to
use. Once more: my archives are at your dis-
posal. ROSIKA SCHWIMMER
To THE EDITOR: I PARTICULARLY OBJECT
to the statement regarding the Carnegie En-
dowment to the effect that ". . . officials
of the National Council for the Prevention
of War, the Women's International League,
the American League Against War and
Fascism, the League of Nations Association,
and the National Peace Conference ... ex-
press the doubt whether the endowment is
really fulfilling the demands of its founder."
As the present executive officer of the
National Peace Conference, I desire to repudi-
ate the implications of this statement. I do
not know who the officials were that Dorothy
Thompson had in mind when she spoke
of "officials of the National Peace Confer-
ence" in this connection. She does not speak
my mind, nor the mind of our steering
committee. On the contrary, were we now
to express judgment it would be an apprecia-
. tion of the many courtesies extended to the
National Peace Conference by the Carnegie
Endowment. WALTER W. VAN KIRK
Director, National Peace Conference
To THE EDITOR: I AM ASKING FOR A RE-
traction of the statement in Miss Thomp-
son's article on the peace movement that
the League of Nations Association is criti-
cal of the program of the Carnegie Endow-
ment. The falsity of the statement is ob-
vious. At the moment the association is
cooperating with the endowment in an ex-
tensive educational program throughout the
country on behalf of the recommendations
of the conference held at Chatham House,
London, and the conclusions of the Commit-
tee of Experts set up jointly by the Carnegie
Endowment and the International Chamber
of Commerce. This cooperation on the part
of the association with the work of the en-
dowment has been going on for two years.
Apparently Miss Thompson or your research
worker had little realization of the wide
scope of the educational program of the
Carnegie Endowment in this very practical
field of removing the economic causes of war.
I feel that Miss Thompson's article is quite
disproportionate in its emphases and shall
give one illustration to show what I mean.
At the time that your article appeared on the
newsstands the National Conference on the
Cause and Cure of War was holding its an-
nual sessions in Chicago. Eleven women's
organizations with a total membership of
six million are federated in this conference.
Their Chicago convention was attended by
over seven hundred delegates. Their dis-
cussions were realistic with conclusions fear-
less and intelligent. These Cause and Cure
of War annual conferences have been going
on for eleven years. Between conferences
hundreds of groups throughout the country
hold marathon round tables in which they
discuss American foreign policy and inter-
national relations.
I notice the absence of any mention of
the name of Miss Josephine Schain, chair-
man of the conference, who is one of the
outstanding leaders of the women's peace
movement at the present time, and the ab-
sence of anything but a casual reference to
the entire Cause and Cure of War movement.
This is all the more noticeable inasmuch as
Miss Thompson introduces her article with
the history of the women's peace move-
ment and gives the impression that the Ameri-
can peace movement is considerably a
woman's affair. The reasons for this omis-
sion are quite incomprehensible.
Director CLARK M. EICHELBERGER
League of Nations Association, Inc.
To THE EDITOR: I HAVE JUST BEEN READ-
ing with substantial satisfaction Dorothy
Thompson's brilliant Who Wants Peace?
I hope it may be available in a reprint —
but with some corrections of rather serious
misstatements. EMILY G. BALCH
Wellesley, Mass.
To THE EDITOR: THE ARTICLE BY Miss
Dorothy Thompson entitled Who Wants
Peace? which appears in your February
issue is one that needs revision if the Sur-
rey Graphic is to maintain its reputation for
an adequate and fair presentation of the
material it offers.
In your note on Miss Thompson you
characterize her as one of the "keenest ob-
servers of our time." It would seem, how-
ever, that in this case the observing was
done not by Miss Thompson but by Marian
Churchill White, and the resultant material
too voluminous to be properly studied by
the writer.
This is hardly a method that is likely to
insure accuracy, and the result is perhaps
what might be expected under the circum-
stances. However it does not make for a
feeling of confidence in the material pre-
sentedjjy the Survey Graphic. This seems
to me * far more serious matter than any
specific failure in the article itself, though
these failures are not to be ignored if your
readers are guided by this estimate and
characterization of individual organizations.
Two of the most important organizations
in the field are substantially ignored, or
184
SURVEY GRAPHIC
dismissed with a sentence or two that give
a completely false picture of their activities
and accomplishments as well as the philoso-
phy underlying them. I refer to Miss Thomp-
son's allusions to the Foreign Policy As-
sociation and World Peaceways. Both have
aided materially in bringing about the
achievements so cursorily described in the
last paragraph, and both have made invalu-
able and unique contributions to the whole
technique of public information and educa-
tion— contributions of the utmost signifi-
cance if "America is to be kept to the Ameri-
can dream." The problem of distribution
of goods has been recognized as the basic
economic problem of our time; the distribu-
tion of ideas is an equally fundamental
problem if democracy is to survive. Both
the Foreign Policy and World Peaceways
have contributed in no small measure to the
solution of this problem. Their work de-
serves more adequate analysis and apprecia-
tion than has been accorded them in this
article. In the interests of accuracy and
in justice to the peace movement, as well
as to the Surrey Graphic's own reputation
for fairness, I therefore suggest that a series
of articles be devoted to the many aspects
of the peace problem and the role of the
various organizations in their attempts to
solve it. This, I believe, is the only way
in which you can rectify the incomplete
and necessarily superficial picture of peace
activities which Miss Thompson presents.
The subject is really too large and compli-
cated to be satisfactorily treated in the
space of a single article.
THERESA MAYER DURLACH
World Peaceways
To THE EDITOR: IT is GOOD THAT THE
Survey Graphic devotes the leading article
in its February number to an appraisal of
the American peace movement but disap-
pointing to ..find the article deficient in a
number of important respects.
In the interest of a truthful record, and
not I hope from mere masculine pride, 1
would point out that there is no mention
of any stand taken for peace in the War
by men or organizations led by them. No
mention of Eugene Debs and the American
Socialist Party. Nor of Roger Baldwin, Evan
Thomas, Harold Gray and some hundreds
of other conscientious objectors who went
to prison rather than support war, some
of whom endured treatment in military
confinement that was comparable to the
punishments since made familiar by Fascism.
There is not a word about men in conspicu-
ous position who championed peace like
John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Vil-
lard, Norman Thomas, Bishop Paul Jones,
Peter Ainslie, Richard Roberts, William
Fincke, Edmund Chaffee, Scott Nearing and
others, all of whom took active part in or-
ganizing and carrying forward the Fellow-
ship of Reconciliation which never wavered
in its pacifism throughout the war.
Nor do the researches of Mrs. White or
interpretation of Miss Thompson show that
they ever heard of Rufus Jones, Wilbur
K. Thomas or Hollingsworth Wood and his
sister, Carolena Wood, who with other
Quakers organized the American Friends
Service Committee which raised millions of
dollars in this country to feed German,
Austrian and Russian children and old peo-
ple, victims of the Allied-United States.
hunger blockade and of typhus, famine and
war. In cooperation with the British War
Victims Relief the Quakers were so nearly
perfect in administrative detail and spirit
of love that no whisper of criticism was ever
raised against them. The same was true of
the Near East Relief managed by such stal-
wart pacifists as Charles Vickrey and Harold
Jacquith.
Perhaps such work as building founda-
tions of peace would be characterized by
Miss Thompson as "the good will attitude"
and considered relatively unimportant. How-
ever, any such judgment would be wrong
because it would not take into account the
disastrous spiritual blight that lay upon
Europe after the war as the result of poi-
soning by propaganda. These consequences
were quite as important as the economic
ones and it was a sound instinct which led
a resolute wing of the peace movement to
attempt to counteract them.
I will not ask for space similarly to chal-
lenge Miss Thompson's statement that "from
that day to this the peace movement in
America has been preeminently a woman's
crusade" and the remark that she quotes
from Mr. Libby that "the twelve thousand
most reliable peace workers in the United
States are women." I do not believe it. But
I gladly acknowledge the great and incalcul-
able part which women do play in the peace
movement of our country. In that connec-
tion I wish that Miss Thompson had given
us more than an incidental reference to Mrs.
Catt and the work of her Committee on the
Cause and Cure of War.
And did Miss Thompson never hear of
the programs for the Outlawry of War which
Salmon Levinson, Senator Borah, Charles
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Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors;
RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD, RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPER, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MARY R. ANDERSON, adver-
tising manager.
Clayton Morrison, Raymond Robbins, Judge
Florence Allen and others championed so
effectively? That the idea was incorporated
in the Kellogg Pact signed by sixty-three
nations? It is true, of course, that the Pact
was terribly vitiated by the statesmen who
excepted national defense from its provisions
and by Congressmen who voted for extra
naval vessels at the identical session of Con-
gress which ratified the Pact. Nevertheless
if one is making a research as to Who
Wants Peace, it is strange to completely
ignore such a notable and valiant effort as
that which was made by the outlawry group.
Unfortunate too is the ignoring of youth's
part in the peace movement. The reader
of this article would never guess that 500,-
000 American students demonstrated in a
strike against war on their college campuses
last April. Nor would he find a word about
the eleven years' fight waged by the Com-
mittee on Militarism in Education against
War Department financed and controlled com-
pulsory military training in more than a
hundred universities and high schools.
I realize that a magazine article about so
large and intricate a subject as the Ameri-
can peace movement must perforce be
sketchy and omit a great deal of important
matter. However I think we had a right to
expect that when The Survey set out to do
this job it would have given us a better
balanced and broader article, and that it
would have omitted the inaccurate backstairs
gossip about the Carnegie Endowment and
the alleged attitude of officials of certain
peace organizations to it. As president of
the National Peace Conference I beg to dis-
associate myself completely from what Miss
Thompson says that officials of the Na-
tional Peace Conference and other organiza-
tions said on this point. The Survey owes
some of us a retraction.
JOHN NEVIN SAYRB
President, National Peace Conference
To THE EDITOR: THANK YOU FOR SENDING
me the comments on my article, Who Wants
Peace?
I gather from them that few people active
in the peace movement are satisfied. And,
indeed, I am not surprised. I, also, as you
recall, was not satisfied. A definitive study
of the peace movement cannot be done in
the scope of six thousand words. The
material which Mrs. White assembled, which
I digested, supplemented by what I collected
myself, could not adequately be dealt with
except in a large thick volume. If I passed
over many organizations with no more than
a superficial reference, I did so entirely be-
cause of reasons of space. An article of
this type has to be written with some in-
tegrating pattern, and I selected those or-
ganizations for exposition which seemed to
me to represent the most varying ideological
content, not because they were necessarily
the most powerful or worthy. . . .
The criticisms of the Carnegie Endow-
ment were made personally by officials of
the organizations named in my article. Their
remarks were not for quotation, but they
definitely tried to influence opinion about
the Carnegie Endowment.
I suspect that no one writing of the peace
societies as a layman can possibly please
them all, nor can anyone do justice to the
subject in the scope of an article.
DOROTHY THOMPSON
APRIL 1937
185
JOHN L. LEWIS
Drawing by Horace A. Knight
APRIL 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 4
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Steel and the C.I.O.
by JOHN A. FITCH
Mr. Fitch, who for a generation has been writing the stubborn history of the
mill valleys, conies to a new chapter — Steel and Steel Workers Today, and
Tomorrow
FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO, HENRY CLAY FRICK, AS PRESIDENT
of Carnegie, Phipps & Company, signed an agreement
with a union of steel workers. The next time the Car-
negie name appeared on such a document was March 1,
1937, when it was put there by Benjamin Fairless, presi-
dent of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation. Prick's
agreement was the last act before the curtain rang down
on trade unionism on the stage of the steel industry. In
the agreement signed by Benjamin Fairless, that curtain
is rising again. This is the great difference between 1889
and 1937. But, because the actors are not the same, and
because the full significance of the new play is still un-
known, the curtain rises in an atmosphere of "wild sur-
mise.
If anyone other than a small group of insiders knew on
March first, an hour before the beginning of a confer-
ence between the biggest subsidiary of the United States
Steel Corporation and the officers of the Steel Workers
Organizing Committee, that an understanding was im-
minent, he has not made himself known. There is no
evidence that Washington had any advance informa-
tion. The day before the signing of an agreement that
has set the whole industrial world by the ears, the New
Yor^ Times published a dispatch from a staff writer in
Pittsburgh, stating that April first was the "zero hour"
for a strike in steel.
Thus, with no warning whatever, came the departure
from practices so firmly established as to have seemed
permanent. Three years after the last previous agree-
ment with the Carnegie Company came the famous
Homestead strike of 1892, which smashed the union.
1901 saw the creation of the United States Steel Corpo-
ration which took over the Carnegie mills. One of the
first acts of its board of directors was to adopt a resolu-
tion declaring a policy of opposition to unionism.
Promptly thereafter, the Amalgamated Association of
Iron, Steel and Tin Workers called a strike in all Steel
Corporation plants. The strike failed and the Amalga-
mated lost ground. The strike of 1909 also failed and
the union was eliminated from U. S. Steel Corporation
mills. Twenty years later the great strike of 1919, led by
William Z. Foster, was participated in by more than
300,000 men but it disturbed the non-union policy of the
companies not a whit.
The tide first began to turn with the Recovery Act
of 1933, with its section 7-a. Trade unionism began to
revive, and to forestall it company unionism came with
a rush to the steel industry. But, so late as July of last
year, the American Iron and Steel Institute of which
United States Steel is an important part, was publishing
full-page ads in hundreds of papers, to give expression
to its fears, and its defiance of unionism. And John Lewis
was denouncing this appeal as a "declaration of indus-
trial and civil war."
SUCH WAS THE HISTORY OF NEARLY A HALF CENTURY. AND
then came the drama of a quiet, unheralded conference,
in which a half dozen men signed their names to a nego-
tiated document. In that agreement, the Corporation
"recognizes the Steel Workers Organizing Committee or
its successors, as the collective bargaining agent for those
employes of the Corporation who are members of the
Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Work-
ers of North America." Furthermore, the company "rec-
ognizes and will not interfere with the right of its em-
ployes to become members of the union or its successors.
There shall be no discrimination, interference, restraint
or coercion by the Corporation or any of its agents
against any member because of membership in the
union." At the same time, the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee agrees "not to intimidate or coerce employes
into membership or to solicit membership on corpora-
tion time or plant property."
It is apparent, therefore, that the Corporation is accept-
ing the status quo, whatever that may be. Mr. Frick
signed in 1889 for a single Carnegie plant, but Mr. Fair-
less signs in 1937 for all Carnegie-Illinois plants. More-
over, conferences have taken place not only between
187
union representatives and officials of the Carnegie-llli- In the first place, the organizing campaign of: the
nois Company but between the chairman of the C.I.O.
and the chairman of the parent U. S. Steel Corporation;
as well as between officers of the Steel Workers Organ-
izing Committee and President Irvin of the corpora-
tion. By the time this article is in print it is likely that
union agreements will have been signed by all of the
operating companies of United States Steel recognizing
the union as bargaining agent for its members and the
right of all workers to join the union.
By that time also the significance of what has hap-
pened may have become clearer. But what is clear now as
I write is so startlingly clear and in such marked con-
trast with past history that the temptation to resort to
sounding phrases like "the end of an epoch" is almost
irresistible. Such a term may be inaccurate for there are
the company unions still to hear from, and the inde-
pendent steel companies. Some of the largest of these,
such as Jones and Laughlin, and Weirton Steel, have
been among the most bitter opponents not merely of
union recognition but of organization itself.
How shall we account for the amazing turn of events?
It now appears that for two months before the agree-
ment was reached, John L. Lewis, head of the C.I.O.,
and Myron C. Taylor, chairman of the United States
Steel Corporation, had been engaging in informal con-
ferences. It has been suggested that what followed was
the logical result of the coming together "of two men of
intelligence and good will." Conferences between two
such men must always lead in the direction of better
understanding but that is not in itself sufficient to ac-
count for what has taken place. It takes more than a
conference between two men, however intelligent, to
overcome the effects of fifty years of stubborn policy.
There are certain other facts that must be taken into
account.
'
*
American Federation of Labor
Brown Brothers
The Ups and Downs of steel organization. 1919, the year of the great strike: In the campaign under
William Z. Foster the Association of Iron and Steel Workers grew to almost 30,000 members
C.I.O. has apparently had a degree of success that had
not been anticipated. In the fall of 1935, before the or-
ganizing drive began, the Amalgamated Association of
Iron, Steel and Tin Workers claimed a membership of
8600. Previous efforts on its part to increase membership,
even with the help of the AF of L, had never been very
successful. At the peak of the organizing campaign of
1919 the Amalgamated had under 30,000 members. It
reached a figure of about 19,000 in a preliminary drive
in 1934. It had built up a history of repeated failures and
the workers in many of the steel centers had little con-
fidence in it. Under the new strategy adopted by the
Steel Workers Organizing Committee, skillful and ex-
perienced organizers from some of the most successful
unions in the country, notably the United Mine Workers,
were sent into the field. These organizers were greeted
with enthusiasm, particularly in the centers where mem-
bers of company unions had been struggling to make
effective use of that instrument for collective bargaining.
The strategy adopted by the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee was to capture the company unions, and they
succeeded either in bringing into the union or in secur-
ing the cooperation of great numbers of company union
representatives. Thus, there was created an atmosphere
favorable to the extension of union organization. It was
charged by opponents that all the organizers wanted was
a fat treasury to be built up out of the dues to be paid
by the new members. That charge was nullified when
they abolished the initiation fee and admitted new mem-
bers without any financial consideration until such time
as the local lodges should be organized and actively
functioning.
WHILE THE ACTUAL MEMBERSHIP THAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED
is not known, the figure of 200,000 which is claimed by
the Steel Workers Or-
ganizing Committee is
not being seriously
challenged. It is possi-
ble, therefore, to imag-
ine that the success of
the campaign itself
had something to do
with the willingness of
the corporation to con-
fer. It was perhaps a
recognition of a fait
accompli. And for that
credit must be given to
the C.I.O. and to the
fine strategy and lead-
ership of John Lewis,
Philip Murray, and
the others of the Com-
mittee for Organizing
Steel Workers.
In the second place,
sound judgment ar-
gued in favor of peace
rather than warfare.
The steel industry is in
the midst of a boom
the like of which it has
not encountered since
188
SURVEY GRAPHIC
1929. It is not only getting out of the
red but it is well over into the black.
Prospects for increasing business and
consequent profits are bright. Business
interests were everywhere looking fear-
fully at steel, hoping that developments
there would not interfere with recov-
ery. This sensitivity on the part of other
business interests to the disadvantages
of pulling the props out from under the
recovery movement may well have been
shared by the steel industry itself.
In the third place, there were some
inferences to be drawn from the General
Motors situation, of which intelligent
men might reasonably be aware. It
took six weeks to reach a settlement in
Detroit which might have been accom-
plished at the beginning, and during
these six weeks plants were idle, mar-
kets were lost to competitors, thousands
of men were out of work and business
interests suffered. At the conclusion of
the General Motors tie-up, Governor
Murphy expressed the hope that the
settlement would be "a contribution
toward ending forever, in the United
States, anything but peaceful, reasonable
and conciliatory methods." It is not im-
possible to believe that the steel indus-
try, so closely associated as it is with the
automobile industry, learned something
from the events of December, January
and February.
There can be no doubt that political
conditions, both general and specific,
made their contribution to the decisions
reached on March first. The twenty-
seven million votes cast for the present
administration last November were not
all of them votes for trade unionism.
But a tremendous number were votes
for a policy of protecting the underdog. It is obvious
that a larger section of the public looks with favor on
the right of labor to organize than ever before. The last
half dozen years have taught us something about eco-
nomic insecurity. The words, "the right of employes to
organize and to bargain collectively through representa-
tives of their own choosing," have been repeated since
1933 from a thousand platforms and in countless edi-
torials, until a new slogan has been added to the lan-
guage. An employing corporation that challenges the
validity of that slogan is bound to encounter public criti-
cism to a greater degree than ever before.
To be sure, the steel industry does not depend upon
the whim of the individual consumer. Only with great
difficulty could a traveller express his distaste for non-
union steel rails. But, public opinion has a way of ex-
pressing itself in Washington. There is a strong suspi-
cion abroad that even if the Wagner Labor Relations Act
should be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme
Court, a way may be found of making effective the
national will that labor should be free to organize if it
wishes to do so.
More specific evidences of a change in political thought
Acme
1934: Union men
mated Iron, Steel
outside a Pittsburgh hall, when the membership of the Amalga-
and Tin Workers had reached 19,000 — but dropped to 8600 by
the fall of 1935
and a shifting of the balance of control appear in the
attitude of elected officials, state and local. In 1919, the
Pennsylvania State Police were used to prevent picket-
ing and to intimidate strikers generally. It is no secret
that they will play no such role in 1937. And the situa-
tion in Pennsylvania is duplicated to some degree in
the other states where steel mills are congregated. It is
significant also that local officials as well as governors
are representatives of a new deal. Mayors and sheriffs
are not company officials this year as they were in 1919.
And it is not to be overlooked that public relief is not
now being denied to destitute persons even if they are
on strike.
Beyond all this, there have been evidences in the recent
past of a new type of leadership in the steel industry.
New attitudes in leadership may arise with the coming
of new men and they may result, without a change in
personnel, from the ability of men to increase in under-
standing and to grow with developing events. There are
grounds for believing that both things have happened in
the steel industry.
If the foregoing suggested reasons for a change in policy
on the part of the world's largest producer of steel are
APRIL 1937
189
valid, they are no less so for the so-called independents.
It is noteworthy that all of the more important companies
have announced the same wage and hour adjustments as
are embodied in the Carnegie-Illinois union agreement.
The Republic Iron and Steel Company, which has dealt
with unions before, has already announced its willingness
to bargain with any organized group of its employes.
President S. E. Hackett of the Jones and Laughlin Steel
Corporation in a communication to company union rep-
resentatives called attention to the action of the other
large steel companies in raising wages and to the fact that
"public sentiment both in government and in industry is
uniting to effect in the near future a shorter week than
exists at the present time." The officers of the company
were therefore "constrained by these compelling reasons"
to announce a change in hours and wages effective March
16, similar to the changes adopted by the other companies.
"The question," President Hackett concluded, "has been
decided both for you and for the corporation for the rea-
sons indicated."
WHILE THE WALSH-HEALY ACT DOUBTLESS HAD SOMETHING
to do with it, Mr. Hackett's emphasis on the action of the
other companies seems significant. If it was in fact their
action on hours and wages that "constrained" this large
company to follow suit, it would seem that the acceptance
of unionism by the United States Steel Corporation might
lead to similar action by the independents. As this is
written no conferences between the independents and the
Steel Workers Organizing Committee appear to be in
progress. As a matter of fact, the first reaction of the in-
dependents to the news of the defection of United States
Steel from non-union ranks seems to have been one of
perplexity and irritation. The Weirton Steel Company gave
out the news that its employe representatives were appeal-
ing to it not to deal with an "outside" union. There
seems, however, to be a note of resignation in the com-
ments that have been made in behalf of the independents.
Under the agreement with the union, the Carnegie-
Illinois Corporation is left free to bargain with the com-
pany unions or other labor organizations. Apparently
the Corporation intends to maintain relationships with
these groups and perhaps to strengthen them as bargain-
ing agencies. When the company unions began to get
obstreperous, as described in my article in the Survey
Graphic for February 1936, the Steel Corporation was in-
clined to look upon their activities with disfavor. The
employe representatives of Carnegie plants in the Pitts-
burgh-Youngstown area tried to organize on a district
basis and to bargain for the district as a whole instead
of on a plant basis, and this proposal was rejected by the
company. Now, however, Mr. Fairless is bargaining with
a central committee representing the district. This group
is apparently much perturbed over the agreement with
the union and is claiming the right to speak for the em-
ployes. It is considering reorganizing as a union on a
membership basis and has already given itself a new name
— "The American Union of Steel Workers."
This organization sent a telegram to William Green
asking him to come to their assistance. When he declined
on the ground that they were under "company influence"
they turned to John P. Frey, president of the Metal Trades
Department of the AF of L and arch enemy of the
C.I.O. Mr. Frey accepted the invitation and left at once
for Pittsburgh for a conference with the employe repre-
sentatives with a view to bringing them within the fold
of the AF of L. On arrival, Mr. Frey outlined a plan
which would substitute for the industrially organized
company union a system of federated craft unions. This
was rejected by the employe representatives on the
ground that craft organization would "bring confusion."
In the Chicago-Gary district there are other develop-
ments. Even before the union agreement of March first,
there had come into being the "Steel Employes Inde-
pendent Labor Organization," promoted by representatives
elected under the company union plan in five plants of
the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation. This organization,
while it has some of the earmarks of the old company
union plan and is led by the company union representa-
tives, claims to be independent and that it is spokesman for
the rank and file of workers. It has won from President
Fairless the right to bargain for its members and it has
declared its willingness to be governed by the rulings of
the National Labor Relations Board. Among its sponsors
are representatives who took a prominent part in the ef-
fort of two years ago to develop the company unions on
a national basis, some who were active in organizing an
independent union at the South Works in 1935 and at
least one former officer of a local lodge of the Amalga-
mated Association.
So the curtain rises, as I said, in an atmosphere of
uncertainty. The issues involved are too complicated for
clear statement at this time even by the principal actors
themselves. March 1, 1937, marked a break with the past,
the consequences of which will affect the whole steel
industry and perhaps all other industries; will affect or-
ganized labor of whatever type . and perhaps the whole
future of collective bargaining in America.
It is a tremendous responsibility that rests upon those
effecuat^d pursuant to Sootion 4 hereof,
ie until February 20, 1938.
CAFrEGIE-ILLIJJCIS STEEL CORPORATION,
By
3TSEL jpsfefs ORGANIZING COMMITTEE,
By ^M^d^^-^
LS 'ijJhaSSaa"*
/P
Director, T^stern Region
Director, Kortheastern Region
•-•ral Counsel
Pictures, Inc.
March 1937: Thirty-six years after the U. S. Steel Corporation
declared against unionism, its chief unit recognizes the
Amalgamated
190
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Pictures. Inc.
The Steel Workers Organizing Committee, led by John Lewis and Philip Murray, claims a membership for the Amalgamated of
200,000. Above: Employes of the Edgar Thomson Mill, members of the C.I.O., congratulate Chairman Murray on the new agree-
ment with Carnegie-Illinois
who have entered into the present agreement. If they
make it work, its effect upon the future of industrial
relations in the United States will be tremendous.
It was a long and intelligent forward step that was
taken by the officials of the United States Steel Corpora-
tion when they decided to enter into collective bargain-
ing arrangements with a union of their employes. Be-
cause they have taken that step the steel workers now
enjoy the first opportunity they have had in a half cen-
tury to prove their capacity for self-government under
self-chosen leadership. The Corporation is entitled to
credit for breaking through the crust of tradition and
making that opportunity a living reality. At the same
time it is reasonable to expect that the Corporation will
avail itself of the virtues of patience and self-control dur-
ing the period necessary for the development of leader-
ship. For it is not the fault of the steel workers that they
had no opportunity for such development heretofore.
What the situation requires is time and opportunity.
The elements necessary for leadership are not lacking. I
have known the men of the steel mills for thirty years.
There are none better. It takes men of intelligence, strength
of body, and strength of character to stand up to the job
of making steel. Steel breeds such men. It is because I
know them that I have thought it a tragic thing that over
thirty years they have had no voice in the determination
of the conditions under which they work; the conditions
under which there is brought into being through their
toil the stuff of which bridges and buildings are made,
railroads and automobiles — the physical framework of
modern living. For any worker to be denied the right
to speak effectively in his own behalf is a grievous wrong;
for such men as steel workers to be denied that right has
seemed to me too grievous to be borne. So when the great
strike of 1919 brought more than 300,000 men out of the
mills, I called it in The Survey "a strike for freedom,"
and when that strike was lost, I thought that something
more than the smoke of the mill chimneys dimmed the
brightness of the sun in Allegheny County, in Gary, in
South Chicago and wherever steel is made.
BUT NOW THE FREEDOM THAT HAS BEEN LACKING SO LONG
is returning to the mill valleys. The steel workers are be-
ing enfranchised once more. There is no reason in the
world why there should not be built up in steel a new
and effective unionism, fully equal in intelligent leader-
ship to that of the Railroad Brotherhoods. Sixty years
ago when the railroads were fighting unionism the loco-
motive engineers were fighting back. Pittsburgh was the
scene of "The riots of 1877" and the labor participants
in those riots were the predecessors of the railroad men
of today. But the railroads stopped fighting unions
among their train service employes and there were then
built up the stable, self-controlled and intelligently led
brotherhoods of the present. Give the rollers, heaters,
melters and the other workers of the steel mills a few
years to work out the structure and policy of their union
without fear of attack and we may expect to see in that
industry also the emergence of a labor organization of
stability, self-control and fine leadership. The ground-
work has been laid with wisdom and statesmanship by
the leaders of the Committee for Industrial Organization.
APRIL 1937
191
State Walls and Economic Areas
by PIERCE WILLIAMS
Beginning a series of articles on what might be called a geography of Amer-
ican opportunity, Mr. Williams explores industrial and agricultural sections,
the prospects and problems of which can not be bounded by state lines
WlTH A RAPIDLY SPREADING FEELING THAT THE DEPRESSION
is over, the American people once more pick up the task —
interrupted by unfavorable Supreme Court decisions—
of buttressing the economic security of the masses. Al-
though only vaguely expressed, the nation's concern is
how to bring about a better balance between production
and consumption. Must we always be at the mercy of
an economic system in which supply and demand fluc-
tuate between feverish boom activity and industrial stag-
nancy bordering on collapse? The French say that a
problem clearly stated is half solved. By the same token,
if an economic problem cannot be seen in its vital aspects,
can it possibly be solved ? Yet that, it seems to me, is more
or less the position we are in today. Our ingrained habit
of looking at the country's economic functioning through
the clouded lens of forty-eight state organizations obscures
the complex interplay of the forces responsible for eco-
nomic instability. An ever-widening circle of the Ameri-
can people accept the view that separate state by state
legislation in respect to wages, competition, collective bar-
gaining, crop control, and so forth, cannot secure the
desired balancing of supply and demand. Nevertheless,
if anything in the nature of advance planning is to be
developed in the American economic system, something
more will be needed than undisputed power by the fed-
eral government to regulate business without danger of
the "Stop" sign being raised by the Supreme Court. The
central government must have at hand, in daily usable
form, information showing the changing patterns of eco-
nomic relationships as they affect production and con-
sumption. However, so long as we persist in looking at
the economic system through the distorting screen of the
state-by-state framework, we shall never be able to get
down to the root causes of the economic insecurity which
holds its constant threat over the lives of our people.
Two general principles may here be stated: 1. The
economic well-being of the working masses is largely
determined by the stability of the industries in which
they gain their livelihood. 2. The stability of the service
industries — transportation, communications, finance and
trade — is largely dependent on the stability of the primary
productive industries— agriculture, manufacturing, min-
ing and construction.
Unemployment (with its attendant mass relief) is
merely the symptom of the basic instability. It goes with-
out saying that we shall deal as effectively as we can
with the symptom, by means of unemployment compen-
sation, relief, emergency public works employment, and
so on. We ask simply that preoccupation with that im-
mediate task shall not divert all of our energies from the
equally important job of trying to bring more stability
into the system.
Now, not only does the basic instability still exist, it
is being intensified by special forces. In the not distant
future another economic crisis may have to be faced—
one perhaps graver than the recent one. To an abnormal
extent, industrial activity in all the principal European
countries today is geared to high-speed preparations for
war. Gold flows to the United States in an unceasing
stream, not in its normal function of settling trade bal-
ances between friendly countries, but because enormous
amounts of capital are in feverish search of a safe refuge
against heavy taxation and possible confiscation. Eu-
ropean finance ministers stimulate this capital flight by
announcing that their governments will require billions
for national defense. To a considerable extent the export
trade of the United States is based on the determination
of prospective combatant countries in the Old World to
be amply stocked up with war goods, from food and
copper to machine-tools and airplanes, in case our impor-
tant neutral source of supply should be closed following
the outbreak of hostilities. The recent sudden spurt in
the price of copper, tin, lead and zinc — metals indis-
pensable in the manufacture of munitions of war — is a
most alarming sign of unstabilizing forces at work in the
supply and demand of raw materials.
RECOGNITION OF THE DANGERS THAT LIE CONCEALED UNDER
the apparently smiling surface of the present recovery
movement makes many thoughtful people hope that the
federal government will speedily receive the powers
needed to deal effectively with the next economic crisis.
Those who recall how dangerously close the American
productive system came to complete stoppage in 1933 do
not need to be warned that much more drastic interven-
tion by the federal government in the domain of private
business may be needed in the next crisis to prevent the
nation from falling into economic chaos.
No European economist visiting the United States fails
to remind us of the role which "free trade among the
states" has played in the prodigious growth of American
industry. The products of our farms, mines and factories
move freely across the boundaries of the states in which
they are produced into forty-seven other states. However,
when the nation begins to concern itself about the well-
being of the worker whose labor produced those same
commodities, it comes up against a strong force which
can only be called "State-ism." The capitalist has accepted
with alacrity the freedom of trade given him by^ie Con-
stitution with regard to the commodities he deals in,
but he has taken advantage of that same instrument to
make his business a "protected industry" in competition
with others in the United States, by successfully op-
posing social legislation that might have increased
192
SURVEY GRAPHIC
his cost of production.
But however efficacious
"state-ism" may be in
legislating controls over
the conditions of produc-
tion, it is obviously with-
out power to affect the
conditions determining
the consumption of its
products in other states.
We tend to overlook the
important fact that the
army of producers be-
comes the army of con-
sumers merely by taking
off its overalls and aprons
and getting "dressed up."
This truth sufficiently ex-
plains why the causes of
economic instability are
not to be found by any
analysis which confines
itself to the productive
aspect of business. The
State of California can, if
it wishes, determine the
acreage of prune orchards
in the Santa Clara Valley
and the working condi-
tions of migratory or-
chard workers, but it cannot affect the habits of persons
with a fondness or a distaste for prunes in other states.
Massachusetts could enact legislation affecting the rates
of pay and hours of work in the cotton textile industry
within its own borders, but it could not deal with the
competing rayon industry in West Virginia, New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Michigan, if it desires, may establish
minimum wages and a maximum working week for its
automobile workers, but it cannot in any way influence
the decision of automobile owners outside the state to
keep their old cars a while longer or their ability to buy
new ones. Yet these consumption factors exercise a deter-
mining influence on the economic well-being of the pro-
ducing workers.
Following somewhat the above train of thought, and
frankly admitting that the key to the persistency of the
relief load during the recovery period would not be found
in any statistics available in the federally established
state-by-state administration of relief, Works Progress
Administration, in 1935, undertook a line of investigation
aiming at uncovering the relationship existing between
economic insecurity and economic instability. Thanks to
the work previously done by Col. J. M. S. Waring, a
method of analysis was available which, while blotting
out the state boundaries, yet took full advantage of all
available census and industrial data. This was his method
of sectional economic analysis.
Rural economic areas, each possessing a fair degree of
homogeneity, were established by Colonel Waring in the
following way: First, each county in the United States was
analyzed (using the data from the April 1930 census) to
determine whether the economic well-being of its in-
habitants rested primarily on agriculture or industry. If
more of the non-service employes gained their liveli-
hood in agriculture than in other "productive" occupa-
This modification of Pictorial Statistics' imaginative cover design
shows how state lines fail to confine the Pittsburgh Industrial
District, which, with its heavy industry based on coal and steel,
includes 22 counties in Western Pennsylvania, 17 in Eastern
Ohio, 2 in Western Maryland and 14 in Northern West Virginia.
tions, that is, manufactur-
ing, mining, construction,
the county was classed as
primarily agricultural. If,
vice versa, the productive
industries mentioned gave
more employment than ag-
riculture, the county was
classed as primarily indus-
trial.
The second step was to
ascertain the vital eco-
nomic basis of each
county. In the case of an
agricultural county, the
principal types of farms
which together accounted
for at least 70 percent of
the total farm income in
the county in 1929 were
taken as "vital." In the
case of an industrial coun-
ty, the most important in-
dustries, which collectively
represented 70 percent of
the employment in produc-
tive (non-service) indus-
tries in the county (1930)
were considered as "vital"
to the economic well-being
of the population.
The final step was to group contiguous agricultural
counties with the same types of "vital farms" into agri-
cultural sections and industrial counties having similar
"vital industries" into rural industrial sections.
In no instance were agricultural and industrial counties
combined.
IN ARRIVING AT THESE GROUPINGS OF INDUSTRIAL AND AGRI-
cultural counties into rural economic sections, cities with
25,000 or more inhabitants were excluded. This does not
signify that they were ignored; quite the contrary. How-
ever, speaking generally, the larger cities are relatively
more concerned with "servicing" the productive industries,
industrial or agricultural, of their respective districts or
regions than with direct production and they are essen-
tially more heterogeneous in their economic composition
than the rural areas. And, as stated earlier, it is a demon-
strable fact that the stability of employment in the service
industries is closely related to that of the productive indus-
tries. For the purposes of analysis of the relationship
between economic insecurity, as represented by unemploy-
ment and economic instability, each city of 25,000 or more
inhabitants was treated as a separate "urban industrial
section."
What an unaccustomed appearance the United States
takes on when broken up into its basic economic pattern:
In place of the familiar checkerboard layout of the forty-
eight states and the District of Columbia, Colonel War-
ing's sectional economic analysis discloses a country
consisting of ninety-six rural industrial sections (not count-
ing the urban industrial sections) and eighty-eight agri-
cultural sections, of irregular size and shape. How little
account these economic sections take of the purely politi-
cal state boundaries! Of the ninety-six rural industrial
APRIL 1937
193
Inland Empire: I'imlnT. lumber and
.illu-vl Industrie*— 6 counties, northern
Idaho; 6, WMtvrn Montana ; 2 countiw,
.-.I.I.TU \\ jshmnton
Pacific Nocthwwti Timtwr,
•nd atlwd induttri**— 18 couatm.
Wathin^ton: 13, wmara
5, northern California
sections, thim-tive
take in counties in
more than one state.
And the extent to
which state bounda-
ries arc unrelated to
the realities of rain
fall and water
courses, topography
and temperature. -
'.-need by the way
in which agricultural
sections group con
tiguous counties in
different states. It is
not practicable to re-
produce the entire
sectional economic
map of the United States, but a few sections that com
parts of more than one state are shown in the cuts, and
their "vital industries" listed. Arnold Brecht, a German
economist now on the Graduate Faculty of Political and
Social Science at New Yoik's New School for Social
Research, puts the matter strikingly. Says he, "Your state
lines are like walls of glass; you do not see them, but you
butt your head against them when you try to go through."
The extent to which historical, political and sentimental
considerations pla\ hob with economic realities is in no
part of the United States demonstrated more forcibly by
sectional economic analysis than in New England. When
Colonel Waring '$ method is applied to that region, the
highly complex nature of its economic organization is
revealed, and we gain a clearer idea of the well-nigh
insuperable difficulties that will be encountered in alter-
ing to develop new institutional needs on a state-by-state
basis. Instead of the six states to which we are accustomed,
the New England region proves to consist of twelve
sections, each one possessing a fairly distinct economic
character. Only two are primarily agricultural. One is
in the northern pan of Maine; the other in northern
Vermont. But these Green Mountain counties, whatever
their historical, sentimental and political ties with the rest
of New England, find greater economic community of
interest to the westward, and the agricultural section of
which they form a part also takes in counties of northern
V .... \ ,,
1NCW < OTK,
Two of New England's industrial sections also reach
over to take in counties in eastern New York state. Even
tiny Rhode Island cannot claim economic unity on a state
basts, four of its counties ioming with eastern Connecticut
because of the predominance of textile and
machine manufacture, and one county
(Newport) finding itself combined with
the Cape Cod and Island counties of
Massachusetts, through a common de-
pendence of the working population on
fishing and industries built around the sea-
food resources of the neighboring waters.
Because of the importance of the textile,
leather and related machine industries,
part of New Hampshire finds itself
grouped with contiguous counties in cast
crn Massachusetts, one in Vermont and
one in southeastern Maine. The other
two counties of New Hampshire more or
less stand In themselves economically, because the pulp
and paper industry provides the vital factor in local em-
ployment. The outstanding importance of the quarrying
industry groups two contiguous counties of Vermont in a
rural industrial section of different character from neigh-
boring counties. Western Connecticut, as is well known,
is not New England, socially, culturally or economically,
but is tightly held within the orbit of New York t.
Many of its communities are "bedroom tou us" tor the
metropolis.
THE FOKI N MUEI >IMM\R\ M NO v.l VNS FXHAl'S -
the vital differences between different sections of the N
Fngl.md region — indeed between parts of the same s;.
l-'oi example, there is a marked difference between the
age distribution of the population of Maine. Vermont
and New Hampshire and that of Massachusetts, Rhode
Island and Connecticut, older people constituting a larger
percentage of the population in the former group than in
the latter. It is not merely that people live longer there;
morr significant is the fact that the northern part of N
England has lost industry during the past twenty years,
and with the drying up of employment opportunities the
young men and women are obliged to migrate in search
of a livelihood. A relative lack of modern industry means
relatively less wealth to tax. This fact, taken in ami unc-
tion with the heavier proportion of aged people, has
sinister connotation for the future ability of local and st.ue
governments to participate in the financing of old age
assistance and relief. In all probability every successive
\car will see these industrially declining areas of northern
New England faced with increasing demands tor public
H stance from an aging population. These costs, how-
ever, will have to be met out of steadily declining local
and state tax resources.
Merely breaking up the familiar political pattern of the
United States into industrial and agricultural sections —
interesting though it be — is not a sufficient basis for plan-
ning a better balanced system of production and consump-
tion. Unemployment is not a static condition, nor does
it grow out of a static economic system. Sectional eco-
nomic research is a philosophy as well as a method. Men-
tion of a few of the points in this system will show how
badly we need an alternative to our traditional state-by-
state viewpoint for the scrutiny of economic problems.
If the stability of employment depends on the stability
of the vital productive industries, it is equally true that
the stability of productive industries depends on the
competitive stability of their vital products. These vital
products are few in number. In each vital industry
194
SURVEY GRAPHIC
OHIO
PA.
product group there are dynamic products, whose char-
acteristics arc changing at rates likely to cause changes of
magnitude in employment. Stability of employment in
any industry is affected by significant changes in the
secular production of its vital products, and the most
influential of these are changes in price or quality. How-
ever, price-quality changes do not "just happen"; they
come about as a result of technology applied to the aim
of producing something better or lowering the unit price.
The automobile is the outstanding example. It is impor-
tant to note that
far - reaching
price-quality
changes do not
always originate
with the pro-
ducers. For ex-
ample, the great
improvement in
the quality of au-
tomobile tires,
resulting in the
long life of the
present product,
did not in the
first instance
come from the tire makers, but from the manufacturers
of autos. Likewise, technological advance in the generat-
ing ami transmission of electrical current came, not from
the public utility companies, but from the m.mulacturcrs
of electrical equipment.
Knowing the changing ch.ir.ictcristics of each vital in-
dustry, the inherent employment stability of any industrial
section dominated by particular vital industries can be
approximately derived. However this stability is subject
to divergences in particular localities, due to technological,
corporate or political causes. The copper industry in gen
eral may (or may not) be in a comparatively prosperous
condition at the moment, but the Keweenaw Peninsula in
Upper Michigan can expect no re-employment of its idle
copper miners because of the exhaustion of the local
deposits after seventy years of mining activity. This is an
example of how a technological condition may create a
special unemployment problem in one section.
Corporate policy may affect the employment stability
of a particular section, especially where it is a dominant
factor. For example, Rutte, Mont., is not only subject to
Western New York-Lake Erie Heavy
Industry: Iron and steel, building,
chemicals (including oil refining, lum-
ber and allied industries, mining, 8
counties in New York; 7, Pennsyl-
vania; 6, Ohio
ALA
t\ VFLA
C-/0
Delta and Coastal Plains: (see page 196)
APRIL 1937
the uncertain-
ties that sur-
round the cop-
per mining in-
dustry nation-
ally; employ-
ment in that
city is rend-
ered even
more precari-
ous by the
fact that the
c o m m u n -
ity depends on
one company
and on one
mine of that
company
(Anacon-
da) — which
must compete
,11 -.1 New England Manufacturing: (see page 194)
mines of that
same company elsewhere. Butte is an example of a highly
"vulnerable" rural industrial section.
Vital industries also have varying degrees of vulner-
ability. The clothing industry is not vulnerable because
of the large number of corporate units scattered over the
United States. But a community in which employment
is largely dependent on one clothing plant may be exceed-
ingly vulnerable. Or a particular community may be
vulnerable because of the inroads competition is making
on a product responsible for a considerable part of the
local employment; for instance, rayon versus silk. Coal
mining towns need to be concerned for the stability of
their employment not only because of the competition
from fuel oil and natural gas, but through technological
advance, resulting in economy in the use of coal under
boilers. Important generalization: The causal agents for
the stability changes of an industry reside in large degree
outside the industry.
Furthermore, the employment stability of sections may
be influenced by political action — local, state, or even fed-
eral. A mounting local tax rate, an increasing cost of
municipal debt service may unfavorably influence a local
industry. State laws — even those aiming at strengthening
the economic security of the wage earner — may prove in
the long run to be unstabilizing to employment in indus-
tries that must meet competition from states with less
advanced ideas of social legislation. The federal tax on
undistributed earnings may be a good thing in principle,
but its application to particular industries may adversely
affect the stability of employment in certain sections.
Sectional economic analysis also discloses a large num-
ber of what are termed "Low Stability Sections"; those
subject to large transitory unemployment and slow
recovery. They are not necessarily the sections termed
vulnerable. They are the ones dependent on vital indus-
tries that have shown a relatively poor "depression be-
havior" or were more susceptible to the depression forces.
Sectional economic research shows a rather wide varia-
tion in the degree of recovery experienced by different
industrial sections of the country. Which suggests that
in the next downward turn of the business cycle, the
195
federal government should have dependable information
as to which sections of the country are of relatively high
employment stability and which are of low. Government
spending — assuming that to be the indicated remedy in
the next depression — might be canalized in varying vol-
ume into different industrial areas, depending on their
probable reaction to the forces of deflation. Our flood,
hurricane and drought regions supply many examples of
sections afflicted with transitory instability, and we accept
these "Acts of God" as justifying prompt federal inter-
vention for purposes of aid and rehabilitation. On the
other hand, we tend to ignore the fact that there are
many industrial sections of inherent low employment
stability, and that in these communities the total income
out of which unemployment relief must be financed
dwindles in almost the same ratio as the number of per-
sons employed. Our permanent federal relief policy
might well take these sectional variations in employment
stability into account.
Colorado will serve as a good example of a state in
which the causal agents for the significant stability
changes lie beyond the reach of state legislation. Re-
assemble that state in terms of its most important eco-
nomic sections, and the small extent to which the state
lives within itself is strikingly revealed. Except for hun-
dreds of tiny gold and silver mining camps scattered
on both sides of the Rocky Mountain axis, and a con-
siderable number of other camps given over to coal
mining, the economic basis of Colorado is agricultural.
Denver, the capital and chief city, is principally engaged
in "servicing" the productive industries. Pueblo, the only
other city of considerable size, has the one large steel
works between the Mississippi River and the Rockies.
Manufactured goods, and much of the food supply must
be brought into Colorado from the outside, and gold and
silver, coal, live-stock, beet-sugar and other agricultural
products are sent out. Being dependent on so few pro-
ductive industries for the purchasing power of her
inhabitants (counting agriculture as the most important),
Colorado is peculiarly sensitive to changes in consumption
habits outside her borders. Gold and silver mining is
prosperous because of the artificially high price which the
United States government at present pays for the precious
metals. Colorado coal, however, cannot go very far
beyond the boundaries of the state without feeling the
competition of more favorably situated mines, and of
natural gas and fuel oil. Recently the Colorado Fuel &
Iron Company closed down some of its Colorado coal
mines because of the greater economy realized from the
utilization of gas from Rockefeller-owned wells outside
the state.
THE TWO PRINCIPAL IRRIGATED SECTIONS THE ONE
watered by the Platte tributaries in the north, the other
by the Arkansas in the southeast — enjoy a relatively high
degree of economic stability, so long as the purchasing
power of eastern and middle western city dwellers is
maintained. On the other hand much of the south-
eastern portion of the state lies within the "Dust Bowl"
of the High Plains dry-farming region, and farmers in
that section suffer from the instability of production that
derives initially from the meagerness and undependability
of rainfall, and is merely dramatized by such severe
droughts as have been experienced during the past four
years. The root causes of the economic insecurity which
is today the daily lot of the "Dust Bowl" farmer must
be sought for far outside the confines of Colorado, and
at least as far back in history as the World War, one of
the effects of which was to create a need for wheat that
could not be met from lands then under cultivation.
How futile to expect Colorado to cope with agricultural
and industrial instability that is so largely due to the
changing patterns of consumption and of competition
determined by conditions outside her own borders.
THE GULF OF MEXICO COASTAL PLAIN, STRETCHING FROM
Galveston, Tex. on the west to Mobile, Ala., on the east,
comprises at least eight fairly distinct economic sections —
three primarily agricultural, five primarily industrial. One
rural industrial section takes in a parish in western
Louisiana and several counties in eastern Texas. The
oil and gas industry, and what is left of a decaying lumber
industry, form the economic mainstay of the population.
Another rural industrial section takes in three parishes in
eastern Louisiana, two counties in southern Mississippi
and one in western Alabama. The inhabitants of this
area make their living in the local sawmills and in food
industries built around the fishing resources of the nearby
Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana has a low standard of living,
and relatively little of what it produces is consumed within
the state. The products of its farms and fisheries, notably
raw sugar, rice, strawberries and sea food; its raw mate-
rials, cotton, lumber, furs, crude oil and so forth, must
be exported from the state in order that the necessary
supplies of manufactured goods, including much food,
can be brought in from outside. The stability of its spe-
cialized culture and of its limited manufacturing indus-
tries is governed by a demand for its products which
originates largely outside its own borders. Moreover, the
stability of its cotton growing industry and the economic
well-being of its cotton planters and sharecroppers is
affected by increasingly severe competition from foreign
countries. Only the federal government's system of quotas
on domestic sugar cane and sugar beet production main-
tains a precarious balance between the output of Louisiana
raw sugar and the demand originating within the United
States. Nothing Louisiana's government can possibly do
by way of legislation can effectively reach the causal
agents of economic instability that almost wholly reside
outside the state. "Glass walls" the state boundaries are,
but apparently possessing the magic quality of becoming
opaque when one stands at the center of state govern-
mental authority and tries to see the train of causes con-
necting local employment instability and the causal forces
outside.
The unreality of state lines for defining economic prob-
lems will be demonstrated more clearly in 1938 after
the system of separate state funds for unemployment
compensation has been in operation for awhile. Although
it was hoped by many who supported the present plan
that experimentation by states would be encouraged, in
fact general uniformity has resulted, at least so far as the
rate of contributions by employers is concerned. In all
of the thirty-five states (and the District of Columbia) the
rate is approximately that indicated in the federal Social
Security Act: 1 percent for 1936, 2 percent for 1937 and
3 percent for 1938 and thereafter. In ten of these states,
the funds out of which benefits will be paid beginning
in 1938 will be somewhat larger because of a tax of
approximately 1.5 percent (Continued on page 240)
196
SURVEY GRAPHIC
SHARECROPPER
Weyhe Gallery, New York
Howard Cook is rolling up a backlog of acquaintance
with people and industries in the United States and with
the technique of true fresco painting that should give
us many excellent murals. He was offered the oppor-
tunity to make his first fresco in Mexico during a
Guggenheim fellowship year. Recognition came to him
at home when the short-lived Public Works of Art
Project in 1934 set him at making panels of local scenes
for the courthouse at Springfield, Mass. He has recently
finished a large panel of workmen in Pittsburgh indus-
tries— coal, iron and steel — for the federal courthouse
in that city, under the Treasury Art Project. Between
DRAWINGS BY HOWARD COOK
these two assignments, Mr. Cook spent a second fruitful
Guggenheim year in the southern states.
The drawings reproduced on this page and the three
pages that follow are among hundreds of studies, some in
color, made in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky,
Alabama and Texas: white renters, Negroes, moun-
taineers, poor whites, cattle-men. Though the artist has
concentrated on accurate characterization, the face of
each individual tells something of his background. Who
needs more to know that the grim man above has lost out
on farm after farm? The vigorous, large-scale drawings
are notes for murals that this country should have.
CHURNING (Spruce Pin*. North Carolina)
VAQUERO (Texas)
The Rise of the Democratic Idea
in the United States
by CHARLES A. BEARD
Had the founders foreseen modern industrialism they could not have devised
a more flexible scheme of government to cope with it. The first of the
Bronson Cutting Lectures at the National Capital
ACCORDING TO A REPORT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, ON
February 2, 1937, Mussolini, the Italian dictator, shouted
at Anne O'Hare McCormick, a representative of that
newspaper: "You make me impatient when you talk of
democracy. ... I tell you democracy is only a mask for
capitalism, which clings desperately to the outmoded
forms that allowed it free play." If this were a passing
remark by the temperamental ruler of Italy, whose writ-
ings and sayings are strewn with confusions and contra-
dictions, it would scarcely be worth a moment's notice.
But the view he expressed has often been set forth by
other observers of contemporary affairs — observers more
thoughtful, more consistent, more informed. With the
copious literature of the season before us, citations would
be superfluous.
Is it true that democracy is only a mask for capitalism,
that it contains no humane values forever defensible in
themselves, that it offers no methods for the solution of
grave problems of state and for the continuous adjust-
ments so necessary for social living? Surely no other
question is more fundamental, more worthy of our con-
sideration. It is not academic. Our lives and welfare hang
upon the answer to this question and upon our willing-
ness to defend and develop democratic institutions by
every sacrifice of fortune and comfort that may be
required.
The true answer to this question is not to be found in
the fogs of metaphysical and dialectic debate. It lies
written in the history of the centuries and in the plain
experience of the hour. Whoever runs and reads may
find it in the papers and documents that record the past
and in the practices of legislatures, executives, and courts
now open to general observation.
Is democracy merely a mask for capitalism? Is it true
that capitalists originally conceived the idea of democracy
in western civilization, that they put it forward in Amer-
ica, that they championed it, fought for it, and embodied
it in constitutions and institutions — all for the purpose of
providing a mask for their system? If it is true, then the
records of history should disclose the supporting facts.
What do the records reveal?
At the outset two preliminary definitions are neces-
sary, unless we are to grope in the dark. If by capitalism
is meant the mere private ownership of land and other
instruments of production, then capitalism is far older
than anything that may be correctly called democracy and
has existed under many forms of government. But cap-
italism is not to be identified with private property as
such; nor is it one and the same thing in all times and
places. It is only to be identified with the use of property
for the prime purpose of making profits out of it, as
distinguished from its use for the prime purpose of secur-
ing a livelihood. Moreover, capitalism is a matter of origins,
growth, degree, and change. Certainly in the middle ages
the great majority of the people and the major part of
the instruments of production were employed primarily in
the production of commodities for use, not for the profit
of the owners in any exact sense of the term profit.
It was only during three centuries of change that the
production of wealth for profit became what may be
called a major concern of economy in western nations.
The degree of that concern varied from nation to nation.
If we take 1850 as an arbitrary date we may say that the
degree was higher in England than in Germany or Italy
or France. It was about this time that the value of manu-
facturing enterprises, railways, ships, and urban property
generally in the United States rose above the value of the
land and capital employed in agriculture where produc-
tion was extensively carried on for domestic use. It is fairly
accurate to say that the general triumph of capitalism in
western civilization came in the closing decades of the
nineteenth century. In human matters the exactness
of mathematics and physics cannot be attained, but
the weight of historical evidence supports this broad
conclusion. If an arbitrary date must be chosen we may
venture the judgment that capitalism did not become the
dominant mode of production in the United States
until after 1865, the year that marked the downfall of
the planting class.
NOW LET US DEFINE DEMOCRACY PROVISIONALLY AS A
government resting on a popular base and controlled di-
rectly or indirectly by all adults without distinction of
property. Certainly that is a justifiable definition of democ-
racy in the political sense of the term even though the
social implications of democracy are as broad as life.
Here too we find matters of growth and degree. The
steps by which this system of government was approxi-
mated may be traced in the records of history as posi-
tively as the story of the earth in the findings of geology.
Leaving antiquity and the middle ages out of account,
for lack of time, we may open the record of democracy
in England in the seventeenth century. There were rum-
blings and grumblings long before that period, but it is
in the seventeenth century that we encounter on a large
scale systematic demands for "natural rights" and for the
right of all men to share in government. Were these de-
mands put forward, approved, or fought for by the
201
property owners and incipient capitalists of that cen-
tury? The record is plain. They were not. These demands
were advanced by obscure, humble persons called "level-
lers" who were thoroughly despised by the possessing
classes of the time. The system of political democracy
was attained in England by repeated struggles extending
over three centuries, culminating in the suffrage acts of
our own day. In these struggles we do not hnd either
capitalists or landlords as a class looking with favor on
universal suffrage. They were ready to demand the ballot
for themselves, but their philanthropy was limited. In-
dividual capitalists and landlords, sometimes for the pur-
pose of partisan triumph, aided in the movement. But
to say that the capitalist owners of property gave the vote
to the propertyless for the
sake of protecting property
— as a mask for capitalism
— is to falsify the facts of
English history.
The generalization also
applies to American his-
tory. The property owners
who voted under the Brit-
ish system in colonial
times did not give the bal-
lot to the propertyless
when they threw off the
British yoke in 1776. On
the contrary the first state
constitutions adopted after
the revolution began, kept
generally property qualifi-
cations on voting and of-
fice-holding, for the clear
purpose of keeping gov-
ernment in the hands of
property. It was only
through innumerable local
struggles that the suffrage
was widened to include
substantially all adult white
males. That state of affairs
was practically, but not
completely, achieved by
1835, years before the
triumph of capitalism in
the United States.
And who led in these
struggles to democratize
our American government ?
Did capitalists as a class
originate them, approve them, and carry them to triumph,
all for the purpose of providing a mask for capi-
talism? Here too the records of American history are
clear. In the main the movement for democracy in Amer-
ica received its impetus from mechanics, industrial work-
ers and farmers, who can scarcely be called capitalists by
any stretch of the imagination. Leaders in this suffrage
battle, men and women alike, derived some aid and com-
fort from individuals who may be called capitalists, but
the establishment of democracy in the United States was
not the work of capitalists.
Apart from the cold historical facts, a glance at the
theory makes it absurd on its face. Property owners and
capitalists, it maintains, turned the government over to
BRONSON CUTTING
"IN EVERY AGE THERE HAVE BEEN MEN OF WEALTH
and talents who have devoted their energies mainly
to increasing their fortunes and promoting their in-
terests. These may be called private men. Branson
Cutting did not choose this way of life. In every age
there have also been men of wealth and talents who
have dedicated themselves mainly to the general
good, to the welfare of the body politic. These may
be called public men. With the world of ease and
evasion before him, Branson Cutting chose to assume
the burdens of public service in the interests of the
great democracy in which his lot was cast. It seems
fitting, therefore, that an opening lecture on the foun-
dation established in his memory should be devoted
to a consideration of democracy, its meaning and
prospects. Indeed long before his untimely death,
Mr. Cutting saw the principles of democracy rudely
challenged at home and abroad, and on more than
one occasion, while serving the Senate of the United
States, he valiantly combatted efforts to restrict that
freedom of thought, press, and speech which is the
very life and hope of democratic institutions. This
fact lends the weight of his authority to the selection
of such a theme."
Dr. Beard's lecture, from which the above para-
graph and this article were drawn, was the first of a
series by noted liberals — a unqlue form of living
memorial suggested by a friend of the late Branson
Cutting and endowed by the senator's mother. With
two halls filled and the speakers doing a double turn,
Senators N orris and La Follette and Mayor La Guar-
dia too\ part at the opening early in March.
the propertyless majority for the sake of protecting
their property, providing a mask for capitalism. Common
sense logic makes the idea preposterous, while the facts
of history demonstrate its falsity. The rise of capitalism
coincided roughly with the rise of democracy in' some
respects; but capitalism did not originate the democratic
idea, deliberately promote the realization of the idea,
or welcome its triumph. All through the long struggle
for democracy, spokesmen of great wealth warned mem-
bers of their class that democracy was incompatible
with the prevailing concentration of property. If outstand-
ing examples need be cited, Lord Macaulay and Daniel
Webster may be chosen to illustrate the proposition.
No, the rise of democracy represented a movement of
humane forces deeper than
capitalism, deeper than the
accumulation of profits.
Yet the idea of democracy
has never been entirely
disassociated from the
forms and distribution of
wealth. Thomas Jefferson
did not choose the label
"democrat" for himself or
the party he founded, but
he may be called, with
some justification, the
leading promoter of the
democratic idea in the
early days of the American
republic. And Jefferson
associated popular govern-
ment with a wide distribu-
tion of property. He be-
lieved that the true basis
of such a government was
an agricultural population,
composed of freeholders
and their families — not
capitalists, but tillers of the
soil who looked to the
labor of their own hands —
not to profits — for their
sustenance, and thus pos-
sessed liberty and inde-
pendence necessary for pop-
ular government. Jefferson
thought that the safety of
the republic was assured
as long as there was an
abundance of land for oc-
cupation, and that when Americans were piled upon one
another in cities, as in Europe, they would start to eating
one another up, as in Europe. This is what President
Franklin D. Roosevelt must have meant when he quoted
the old saying that necessitous men are not freemen.
So today American democracy, in seeking to preserve
its institutions, does not offer itself as a mere foil or
mask for capitalism and the poverty and degradation that
have accompanied its triumph. It is not true that democ-
racy originated or is identical with the creed and practice
of laissez-faire which capitalism and its professors have
sought to impose upon the people as public policy. Raw
and unregulated capitalism was far advanced before the
mass of the people were allowed to vote in Great Britain
202
SURVEY GRAPHIC
and the United States. Adam Smith, Ricardo, Nassau Se-
nior, and Herbert Spencer had elaborated the doctrine of
capitalist anarchy plus the police constable for labor before
democracy was well launched upon its career; and the
impetus to social legislation mitigating the evils of capi-
talism and subjecting it to conceptions of common wel-
fare came from the same sources as the impetus to democ-
racy— from leaders in the democratic movement. If capi-
talism has succeeded in delaying and beating off such legis-
lation, it has been generally against the forces of democ-
racy, not with the sanction of its thought and policy.
At this very hour in the United States it is the spokes-
men of democracy, not the spokesmen of capitalism, who
inquire into the present concentration of wealth, demand
security for all, enact social legislation, seek to prevent
additional concentration of capitalist power, and strive to
effect a more equitable distribution of wealth. To be sure,
enlightened capitalists recognize the justice and necessity
of such demands, but the center of gravity of capitalism is
not on the side of this emphasis in contemporary democ-
racy. It is democracy that now tears the mask of economic
theory and legal fiction from the face of historic capi-
talism and proposes to state the terms on which it may
continue to exist and operate. The resolve of democracy
to do this is largely responsible for the tensions of the time,
for the criticism of democracy in respectable circles, and
for the demand that fascist dictatorship be substituted.
No LESS SIGNIFICANT FOR HUMANITY THAN THE DEMOCRATIC
ideal and its economic aspects is the method which
democracy offers for making the political and economic
adjustments required by change in the production of
wealth, the advance of knowledge, and the eternal urge
of the human spirit. Democracy proclaims that these
changes are to be effected by the processes of inquiry,
discussion, deliberation, popular decision, and continuous
appraisals of results. It offers a way of enlightenment and
peace under rules of law, and thus stands in eternal con-
tradiction to government created by force, maintained by
force, and unchangeable save by force. It asserts for the
human mind freedom of inquiry, without which knowl-
edge cannot be advanced. It upholds freedom of the
press and communications, without which intelligence is
crippled and discussion is a sham and a farce. It throws
about the individual the protection of civil tribunals. It
allows no leader hoisted into power by sheer force to im-
prison or shoot down citizens without trial, without a
hearing, without the right to have the truth sifted by
witnesses and judicial scrutiny. Its law and custom are yet
far from perfect; in practice ignorance and bigotry pervert
their purpose; and their principles are often violated.
Yet with all the shortcomings, delays, and confusions duly
admitted, the ideals and achievements of these institutions
stand in flat and eternal contrast to the institutions and
practices of governments founded on sheer force.
The very substance of all discussion under this head
turns upon the relation of government to change. Cer-
tainly the very essence of history is change. Men and
women die. New generations arise. The sickle of time
cuts down dictators as well as their victims. Ideas appear
and exfoliate. Material and spiritual interests alter. Old
values are discarded. New values are created and cher-
ished. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Stalin is im-
mortal. No government is fireproof against change. If
confirmation be sought, look at the wrecks of states,
APRIL 1937
empires, kingdoms, principalities, dictatorships scattered
along the path of more than seventy centuries. Those
that do not bend, adjust, or adapt, surely perish. Even
despotisms are tempered by assassinations.
All despotisms, under whatever name they masquerade,
are efforts to freeze history, to stop change, to solidify
the human spirit. There is only one way by which a
despotism can be altered; that is, by revolution, by the
kind of violence employed in its establishment. Such
government may last many years. Cromwell created
one; it passed. Napoleon I established one; it passed.
Napoleon III established one; it passed. Diaz established
one; it lasted longer than Napoleon I's; but it too passed.
It may be that none of us assembled here will live to see
the passing of the new dictators now preening themselves
for their brief period on the earthly stage. But history is
merciless. The more they strut, the more they proclaim
the eternity of their systems, the more certain we may be
of their decay and doom. If there is not a Brutus for every
Caesar, there is an old man lying in wait for him.
The institutions of democracy, on the other hand, pro-
vide for change and depend not upon the life of any per-
son or self-constituted group of persons. They do not
form a closed system of economy or culture. They are
devised to cope with the rise, flow, and alteration of so-
cial and economic systems, with the creation, modifica-
tion, and adaptation of systems. They rest upon human
ideals, interests and judgments more eternal than systems.
They do not deny the role of leadership in history; nor
prevent masses of people from rallying around leaders.
Indeed they are designed to facilitate this process through
discussion, deliberation and matured decisions.
ALL THIS THE FOUNDERS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
understood. They were familiar with the history of des-
potism in the Old World. Between 1780 and 1787 hun-
dreds of Americans believed a republic impossible and
popular government of any kind a chimera. In 1782 a
colonel in the American army wrote to General George
Washington: "The war must have shown to all, but to
the military in particular, the weakness of republics."
He then proposed that an immense territory be set
apart as a distinct state to be governed under such a
mode as the military men who moved to it might decide
upon. In reply to this letter, Washington wrote a sting-
ing rebuke which will forever stand among the landmarks
in the history of American institutions.
No, the founders of popular government in the United
States and the leaders among the men and women who
have sought to extend democracy in every direction have
not been ignorant of history, of the nature and fate of
despotism and dictatorships. Nor have they been unaware
of the difficulties, risks, and perils of self-government.
After independence was declared the way was opened for
a military dictatorship and there were many who would
have walked therein; but that choice was deliberately re-
jected and the other course was deliberately taken. With
these traditions and these instructions imbedded in the
very substance of their civilization, Americans may be
pardoned for refusing to accept at face value the old
maxims of new upstarts and for renewing their de-
termination to preserve the democratic processes of gov-
ernment. In so doing they need not undertake to give
Europe or the Orient any gratuitous lessons, save inso-
far as tending their own garden may seem instructive.
203
Dykstra of Cincinnati
PORTRAIT OF A SCHOLAR IN ACTION
by GENEVA SEYBOLD
IN CINCINNATI IF THE GARBAGE TRUCK DOESN'T COME
around on time it is not unusual for a housewife to
telephone to Clarence A. Dykstra, the city manager —
just named to head the University of Wisconsin — and
get Dykstra himself on the wire. He is not a politician,
with an open door. But a city manager doesn't have to
turn a city hall into an icebox in the name of efficiency.
Every Cincinnatian who comes to Dykstra with some-
thing to say is sure to reach a sympathetic ear, if not his,
then some one's not far down the line. If a complaint
seems unjustified, he can usually break it down with
facts. But sometimes he dispels it with sheer personal
charm. Once, for instance, when an old lady was leaving
his office still dissatisfied as far as a grievance was con-
cerned, Dykstra said to her, "Mrs. , you remind
me so much of my mother." Overcome by this filial com-
pliment, she reached up and patted Dykstra's cheek.
Most Cincinnatians are a little bit spoiled by the charter
government that they fought so hard to get after years
of political misgovernment. They pay less and get more
for their tax money than residents of any other city of
comparable size in the country. The small council elected
by proportional representation chooses one of its number
as mayor and appoints a city manager. When the council
selected Dykstra it was a ticklish choice, for the first city
manager of Cincinnati had been Colonel C. O. Sherrill,
who had served for more than four years from the date
the city's modern charter went into effect on New Year's
Day 1926. Formerly director of public buildings and pub-
lic parks in Washington, D. C., Sherrill had come to a
city which in many respects was not unlike a wrecked
area in a war zone. There were holes everywhere in the
pavements, public buildings were falling for lack of
repairs. Under Sherrill the streets were rebuilt, new
thoroughfares were opened. The ancient workhouse was
rehabilitated, the general hospital reopened its doors.
The city acquired an airport. Then, the engineer's job
finally accomplished, he left the public service.
A wrong choice for his successor could have plunged
Cincinnati's charter government right back to a scratch
start. When the councilmen picked Dykstra, then effi-
ciency man for Los Angeles, doubling as a college pro-
fessor, the Cincinnati Post said: "For Dykstra's hands
there is new work. It has to do with social problems,
with slums, with prison reform, with race relations, with
police methods, with public recreation, with all those
matters that concern the welfare of the largest number."
It was a conception of government which exactly met
Dykstra's views. "We live in communities," he said,
"and a community is the sum of our lives. This is an
age of cities, of ever expanding growth and multiplica-
tion of functions. The proper carrying out of these func-
tions with the least possible expense, with the most effi-
cient personnel and the most appropriate appliances is
the task of municipal statesmanship."
In this expansion and improvement of services, it
would not have been surprising had the tax rate shot sky
high. But, instead, from 1930 on the rate in Cincinnati
204
has been the lowest in the country for cities between
300,000 and 500,000 population— with the sole exception
of Washington, D. C., which has a unique kind of gov-
ernment and cannot be compared with other cities. The
total tax rate for city, school, county and state purposes,
adjusted to show the actual amount of taxes per $1000
of full value reads like this, beginning with the year
1930: $21.60; $19.89; $20.70; $21.96; $18.22; $14.33; and
$16.10. The lowest rate in Mayor Hague's Jersey City in
the years 1932-1936 was $37.39 a thousand. Last year it
was $45.81. That is, during these years the tax burden
in Cincinnati was only half and in some years only a
third of that in Jersey City.
The city manager, of course, did not accomplish this
businesslike result single-handed; he was the executive
hired to carry out the council's ideas and ideals. But his
tall, six-foot-three figure, his ready smile, became part ot
the civic landscape everywhere, as if municipal magic
was done with mirrors. Will Reeves, director of recre-
ation when Dykstra came to Cincinnati, who often was
among the first arrivals at the scene of a conflagration,
complained soon after Dykstra came, "I don't get the
kick out of going to a fire anymore. Dykstra is always
there ahead of the engines."
YET THIS UBIQUITOUS HUMAN DYNAMO REALLY IS HUMAN.
He cancelled the order forbidding workhouse prisoners
from seeing a daily paper. He enforced civil liberties —
telling the police that they were to serve the people, not
master them. He lifted a ban on radical meetings on the
Market grounds. When the Communists objected to
having the police present, they were withdrawn. But
then, when some of their opponents tried to break up
their assembly, the Communists asked Dykstra for police
protection for their next meeting and got it.
The police of Cincinnati have a cordial respect for the
city manager government. Once Dykstra called a patrol-
man on the carpet for being intoxicated while on duty.
Expecting instant dismissal, the frightened policeman
hardly credited the news that he would be given another
chance, and the quiet, friendly suggestion of the city
manager, "Don't you think you can confine your drink-
ing to after-hours or your day off?" He stayed on the
wagon after that. Dykstra brushes aside ceremonious
courtesies from the force. When he arrived in Cincinnati
to take his job he was met at the station by a police auto.
As he stepped into the car the driver saluted smartly.
"Oh, cut it out," said Dykstra, and he has not been sa-
luted since.
This informal air of being a neighbor conceals a lot
of hard executive work. However, the city manager
knows how to delegate authority, so that, in the manner
of a modern business executive, he can be free of frus-
trating details. The present administrative code gives
him immediate contact with only four directors instead
of some twenty individuals with whom he formerly
had to keep in touch. Recently he told an audience that
never in his years of service had he been asked to make
SURVEY GRAPHIC
a political appointment.
In Cincinnati the man at
the top of the examination
list gets the job, and does the
job. Zoning ordinances, the
waterworks, waste collection,
the accounting and billing system,
all reflect scientific management. *r#
Joint purchasing includes everything
bought for Hamilton County, the mu-
nicipal university and the library. Cin-
cinnati is the only place in the country
where this common sense and highly eco-
nomical system is in operation — a central
purchasing office doing the buying for city,
county, schools and library. Such a course must
depend upon continuous planning, based on
factual data and research.
When the federal government was ready to coop-
erate with municipalities on the relief problem, Cincin-
nati was prepared. Research had been done, projects were
ready to spring into action. While other cities were still
preparing plans, Cincinnati embarked on a civil works
program that put more than 20,000 of its unemployed to
work and gave the city more than a million dollars a
month in new purchasing power. Bridges, buildings,
sewers and streets were built. The number of commu-
nity centers more than doubled. The citizen got two
splendid golf courses on which he can rent clubs for
fifteen cents. For seventy-five cents including carfare he
can have a whole day's recreation on a municipal golf
course.
Yet, during years of depression when many cities were
defaulting, Cincinnati did not borrow a penny from the
banks, and issued no deficiency bonds; all current bills
and payrolls were met with cash. Since early in 1931 the
city's gross general bonded debt has been reduced.
A thrifty housewife with pocket money for bargains,
Cincinnati was not pinched like most cities by hard
times. Take, for example, the zoo. With unemployed
families needing bread it was understandable that in
most places the eye searching the budget for possible
economies should light accusingly on the lion that was
eating sixteen pounds of meat a day on the town. Not to
speak of the elephant that casually could swallow two
hundred pounds of hay, a half bushel of carrots, beets
and potatoes and still have room for more. As a result,
in some cities animals were going for a song and you
could take your lion home with thanks. But Cincinnati
was different. The city bought a zoo in 1932, taking it
off the hands of private owners. Dykstra started right
away to fix it up — to build an African veldt and rocky
caves surrounded by a moat so the lions, tigers and bears
could gaze at their admirers without the interference
of bars. More than 600,000 visitors annually in the midst
of the depression forgot their troubles for a while, watch-
ing monkeyshines in the now celebrated Cincinnati zoo.
If accused of being a bit on the so-called brain trust
side, Dykstra has to plead guilty— after all, he was a col-
lege professor and now goes back to the campus. As city
manager he has often been didactic, always ready to ex-
plain the public business. His annual report to the
council issued a few days after the first of the year (pos-
sible only in a city which has daily bookkeeping) and
Photo from International
the city's report which
contains a longer account
of the city's services and
\finances, are models of clar-
W ity. In an annual appraisal of
municipal reports conducted by
the National Municipal League,
only seventy-four city governments
in the country today are preparing
for citizens reports of the city's busi-
ness that they can understand, and Cin-
cinnati is always at or near the top.
At the council meeting every Wednesday
Dykstra is usually the last arrival — not late but
just under the line. He slips into place, smiles,
studies his notes, apparently oblivious to all that
is going on. When his turn comes to speak he
seems to release the whole of his tremendous force
of energy at once. For the audience of citizens there
is always dramatic reassurance in the impact of his first
words. His sentences are terse, direct; his speech deliber-
ate; his voice resonant. He never makes use of a humorous
anecdote. Much to be said, little time in which to say it, no
time to be wasted. But he is a good listener. His knack of
guiding conversation so that time is not wasted often
brings him out on top of an argument. Irate men have
gone to the city hall to beat him up and emerged smiling,
only to reflect in puzzled fashion that what they got was
what Dykstra wanted and that somehow or other they
had refashioned their own demands.
Why, it is sometimes asked, does a city with a manager
need a mayor at all? The mayor is the most important
man on the policy-forming council — comparable to the
chairman of the board of a corporation in his relation to
the executives who carry out decisions. Too, he does the
ceremonial honors, speaks for the city, welcomes distin-
guished visitors. He can speak with authority on the mu-
nicipality's plans and policies. The line between city man-
ager and mayor is sharply defined. Murray Seasongood,
distinguished Cincinnatian who was in the vanguard of
the fight for charter government, and the first to serve as
mayor under it, believed that the city manager should re-
fuse to pinch-hit for the mayor at any public function. The
question has probably never been discussed between May-
or Wilson and City Manager Dykstra. The mayor, an ex-
cellent speaker, handles the city honors, and his position
as spokesman for the council, admirably. But there is left
over, and within the manager's province, those speeches
to citizen groups explaining to them the conduct of the
city's business.
THERE is SOMETHING ADAMANTLY DUTCH ABOUT DYKSTRA 's
crisp, factual statements that Cincinnatians like. Sipka
Dykstra, his grandfather, and his grandmother, Anne
Doedema, emigrated to this country from Holland where
Dykstra is a distinguished name. (The present poet laure-
ate of Holland bears it.) The name means dweller at the
dike. That little boy who discovered a trickle in the dike,
bravely stopped it with his finger through the long night
and thus saved Holland, family tradition has it, was an
ancestor.
Sipka's son Lawrence, after an excellent college educa-
tion, became a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church
and during a period of more than fifty years served in
many pastorates in New York, Illinois, Michigan and
APRIL 1937
205
Iowa. He and his wife, Margaret Barr, were the parents
of six children. Clarence Addison, second eldest, was born
on February 25, 1883, when his father's pastorate hap-
pened to be in Cleveland.
He was educated in the public schools of Chicago and
graduated from the University of Iowa, became a fellow
in history and assistant in political science in the Univer-
sity of Chicago. Then a teaching job in Florida; back
to Ohio where he taught history and government at
Ohio State. Next to Kansas University, where eventually
he became head of the political science department and
drafted the first city manager law passed in Kansas.
His first real experience in governmental affairs came as
executive secretary of the old Cleveland Civic League.
Later, as secretary of the militant City Club in Chicago,
he stayed in that city eighteen months, then went to Los
Angeles where he became secretary to its City Club. The
mayor appointed him Commissioner of Water and Power.
As a commissioner he was a member of the board which
built the $300 million aqueduct that brings water into
Los Angeles from a distance of 270 miles and which con-
structed hydroelectric plants to supply power to the facto-
ries of the city. An enthusiastic Californian, with a
tremendous capacity for getting things done, at the ex-
piration of his term he was named director of
personnel and efficiency of the Department of Water and
Power, a position for which he qualified in a competitive
civil service examination.
There, a part time school that he started for the per-
sonnel of the department, was one of the first examples
of that important feature today known as "in-service
training." He arranged his own work so that he had time
to give courses in political economy at the University of
California at Los Angeles. It was at this stage that he
was asked in 1930 to come to Cincinnati.
IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT THE ACADEMIC WORLD SHOULD KEEP
its eye on this professor of public administration who has
practiced what he taught. When the regents of the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin offered him its presidency in mid-
March of this year, they recognized, however, not only
his administrative ability, but his philosophical grasp of
American life. The scholar in action, he does not typify
the leisurely reflection of campus life. The American syn-
thesis could scarcely be better illustrated than in the career
of a college professor winging his way to distant class-
rooms in airplanes, as Dykstra has done in the past; then
taking hold of Cincinnati's government to show that
democracy is not a theory but downright reality. It has
always been a truism in government that a man who was
an able executive elsewhere could take hold of a knotty
government job and perform it. But that process works
both ways. Public problems are eternally the same — to
achieve the finest human result that the total of human
experience can contribute. Cincinnati, realizing that the
driving force of men of ability is to achieve financial com-
petence as well as civic ideals, has paid Dykstra a salary
of 125,000 a year. It is reported that the University of Wis-
consin will pay considerably less. But salary never has been
a gauge of Dykstra's industriousness.
Schooled to the strenuous life, Dykstra has put into his
Cincinnati job all his energy and time. Once an athlete —
in college days he played basketball, was a broad jumper,
went out for track and played a good game of tennis —
he no longer takes time even for golf, for years his favo-
rite sport. He sings and plays the piano, and he and Mrs.
Dykstra miss few of the concerts and operas that are
presented in Cincinnati. Mrs. Dykstra has made for her-
self a place in the civic life of the city and state quite
apart from her position as wife of the city manager. She
was dean of women of the Riverside School in Califor-
nia when Dykstra met and married her. She has been
chairman of the city League of Women Voters and now
is state chairman for the Ohio League.
After a strenuous day, the tireless city manager some-
times sits up late reading economics, history, biography,
political science, magazines of opinion. Once in a blue
moon he reads a detective story. But he prefers good con-
versation to most other entertainment. His close friends
call him "Dyke." Dyke was a curiously appropriate name
this winter when the angry waters of the Ohio were
rising three and four feet a day toward an all-time high
of 79.99 feet. When Governor Davey rode down from
the capital in his Packard to survey the situation, the
calmness of Cincinnati's citizens in the face of the city's
worst flood in history seemed almost to annoy him. Es-
pecially did he express the hope that the city officials
would not delay in declaring martial law. His parting
words were, "I'm afraid you're waiting too long."
"Martial law!" exploded one man in a corner drug
store. "They'll never declare martial law here. Not in
Cincinnati!"
A provision of the Cincinnati charter gives the mayor,
with the consent of council, authority in time of public
danger or emergency to "take command of the police,
maintain order and enforce the law." City Manager
Dykstra moved his headquarters to the public safety de-
partment in the city hall. A government with centralized
responsibility, with well trained and experienced em-
ployes and coordination in every day practice maintained
public services and met the relief emergency by simply
stepping up its stride.
On the day of the high water peak the Cincinnati
Times-Star noted that City Manager Dykstra had been
vested with powers like those given in time of peril to
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus whose name is borne by
the city. The editorial added, "It took the Old Roman
sixteen days to mop up. Perhaps his local successor can
cut that period in two." Eight days after the high water
peak it was announced that shops and factories could
open again; city water was flowing through the mains,
electric power was working back to normal.
Thus, in emergency as well as in workaday times,
the largest city manager city in the United States sets
an example of what to Dykstra is "the highest form of
art" — public administration. Looking at their tax bills
and their services, citizens in other cities are urging the
adoption of manager government. Pittsburgh, Philadel-
phia and Chicago may in the not too distant future fol-
low Cincinnati's lead, if their states pass the necessary
legislation. In Philadelphia the mayor himself is one of
the strongest advocates for supplanting the present city
government with a city manager form. New York City,
too, may one day be seeking a city manager of experience
and ability. A provision of the new city charter adopted
last fall enables the people by petition to put the mattei
of changing the present government to the city manager
form on the ballot at any general election.
Cincinnati and Clarence Dykstra have demonstrated
that if cities want good government they can have it.
206
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Farewell to Bohemia
by EDUARD C. LINDEMAN
What have the federal art projects meant to American artists, actors,
writers and musicians? And, particularly, what have they meant to
American communities?
IN EACH RESPECTIVE NATION THE BOHEMIA OF ARTISTS HAS A
name — The Left Bank, Soho, Greenwich Village — but in
reality these are not places; the names are mere localisms.
Bohemia is primarily a mechanism of escape designed to
liberate artists from the controls of a competitive system
which are oblivious, if not antagonistic, to esthetic values.
To live in Bohemia is to issue a declaration of indepen-
dence from a crass society and at the same time to indi-
cate contempt for its standards.
But like all artificial escapes, the Bohemias of the world
have failed. In spite of glorification of the artist's garret
and the romantic fiction which associated creativeness with
poverty, artists turn out to be organisms needing requisites
to life which may be had only in exchange for money.
And so it comes about that the artist who remains an
artist is obliged to compromise with the society from
which he thought he had fled; or else become associated
with a small maverick group and devote his art to the
purposes of complaint and protestation. In either case in
exchange for temporary security or for a doubtful liberty
in the sphere of personal conduct, the artist sacrifices his
natural audience; and allows himself to be detached from
the only soil which can permanently nourish true art,
namely the people.
The exciting thing is that the American version of this
story can begin to be told in the past tense.
Broadway, which is the other side of the shield of which
Bohemia became the counterpart, placed its monetary
stamp upon the drama. The symbol of American music
became high priced seats in Carnegie Hall or the Diamond
Horseshoe. The arts tended to become so "fine" and so
expensive that their products were stored in museums
which were slow to open their doors at hours suitable for
the people who do the work of the world. If contempo-
rary examples of valid painting and sculpture broke
through their walls, if there were creative links in the
speculative sequence of patronage and portraiture, deal-
ers, museums, orchestras, operas and theaters, these may
be taken as evidence of the essential strength and charac-
ter of the esthetic impulse even when it is made subservi-
ent to a faulty economy. For the most part the artist was
caught in that chain, dissociated from the life and experi-
ence of the American folk. In the end the folk developed a
thorough-going suspicion with respect to both his prod-
ucts and his purposes, and lent themselves to the exploit-
ers of commercial vulgarity.
The great mass of citizens of the United States who
have not yet seen a great work of American art, who can
not come to Broadway, who have not yet heard good
music save as the radio has brought it to their ears, who
live in ugly houses pushed back from the center of com-
munities where stand atrocious public buildings and still
more atrocious public monuments, who live in country
homes the walls of which are decorated with shiny litho-
graphs advertising life insurance or patent medicines, these
have been the major sufferers whose lives were detached
from beauty.
But, something has happened!
American artists have come out of the alleys of Bohe-
mia and are now trudging the highways of the American
continent. They are shaking hands with farmers, work-
ers, technicians, politicians, teachers; they have seen a
"slant ray of quick, American light" leading toward new
vistas; they are painting American "stuff" on the walls of
American buildings, acting plays before audiences who
can pay only 50 cents for a theater seat, furnishing music
to farmers and workers in school buildings paid for out of
public taxation.
Visitors from foreign lands who sense what has hap-
pened seem to apprehend its meaning more accurately
than those who have participated in it. Thus Ford Mad-
ox Ford used, perhaps, a superlative when on a recent
visit he said: "Art in America is being given its chance
and there has been nothing like it since before the Ref-
ormation."
WHAT, THEN, HAS HAPPENED? STATED IN BALD, STRAIGHTFOR-
ward and quantitative terms this is the startling and mo-
mentous event: During the past two years well over 150,-
000 painters, sculptors, designers, actors, musicians, special
instructors and writers have received salaries from the
Treasury of the United States Government. Nothing but
a crisis could have brought this about. The crisis in turn
may be expressed in simple words: In 1933 American
artists in increasing numbers applied for unemployment
relief. The term "unemployment" does not apply pre-
cisely to artists. Most of them have never been employed
in a strict sense. Actors and musicians ordinarily work
under contracts but even under such circumstances there
exists a wide area of uncertainty and speculation. What-
ever security actors and musicians have attained may be
credited to the fact that they operate under the discipline
of organizations- of a trade union type. But, most artists
have labored on a fee basis, which has meant in the past
that art was considered a luxury. In the beginning of the
economic crisis school boards sought ways of economiz-
ing; they did not hesitate to eliminate first of all courses
in the arts — an indication that art had not yet found its
place in our national budget. In the midst of this crisis
theaters remained closed; concerts were diminished in
number; the demand for paintings and works of sculp-
ture dropped sharply. In Greenwich Village artists dis-
played their wares on the curb.
In short, the American artists were cast adrift upon the
APRIL 1937
207
sea of economic uncertainty. Their patrons deserted them.
Their market collapsed. Hence it came about that many
of them received assistance under the Civil Works pro-
gram of the Federal Relief Administration in 1934. In 1935
when the national administrator, Harry Hopkins, an-
nounced that President Roosevelt had agreed definitely to
experiment in supplanting work for other forms of relief
it was already evident that artists as well as other so-called
white-collar workers would need to be provided for. Spe-
cific projects including drama, music, painting and sculp-
ture, and writing were formulated and became an integral
part of the government's program of work under the
Works Progress Administration. For the first time in our
history, the various arts had become a responsibility of the
federal government. In a short time this unique venture
will have come to the close of a two-year demonstration.
WHAT is HERE ATTEMPTED is, OF COURSE, NOT OF THE NATURE
of a critical evaluation. The writer is biased; he has been
involved in this program and what he says should be par-
tially discounted. Also, he is extremely enthusiastic with
respect to this new alliance between government and the
arts: in the first place, he believes that our basic frustra-
tions are not economic nor technological in nature but
rather cultural, and hence he counts heavily upon the arts
as guides to a new sense of value; in the second place, he
firmly believes that it is a proper function of government
to furnish channels within which all the arts of life may
freely flow. This conception does not seem to conform
to the notion of government held and projected by most
legalists. What is here attempted should be regarded as
prolegomena, an introduction to a more thorough-going
appraisal which seems definitely called for by reason of
the significance of the event.
The principal consequences thus far discernible which
have resulted from the government's entrance into the
sphere of the arts seem to be :
First : art in general has at last become a topic of public
discourse. I do not go so far as the English author already
quoted above when he says, "America is a land for artists"
but I do say that at last art is becoming democratized and
if this process continues, America will soon become a
land in which all the arts will thrive. The moment art is
seen as a derivative of the people's environment and their
experience it ceases to be the possession of the elite: it
steps down from the atmosphere of rarefied isolation and
identifies itself with the speech of the folk.
Second: artists of many varieties have discovered both
possibility and enjoyableness of collaborating with each
other. Art is a form of communication and communica-
tion is many-sided. In some instances the highest form of
communication results from the inward brooding of the
artist isolated from external stimuli; at other times art has
something important to say only because the artist has
touched life at vital points. But, always true art tends to
become a shared experience; its direction of flow is out-
ward. Under government projects artists — painters, design-
ers, musicians, dancers, writers, actors, sculptors, architects
— have been obliged to work in concert.
Third : the various arts have entered the life of the peo-
ple at two new points, namely in education and in recre-
ation. Much of the adult education sponsored by the
Works Progress Administration is already colored by the
introduction of both elementary and advanced arts and
crafts. And the government's recreation program has
tended to center about the arts as an appropriate expres-
sion for the people's leisure. In this manner a vast new
audience for professional artists is being created.
Fourth: the participant, as contrasted with the perform-
ance, idea in art is gaining ground. Most artists entertain
the dream that their aspirations will have been completed
when audiences are induced to come with money in their
hands to watch them perform. Now thousands of artists
are beginning to learn that another consummation awaits
them, namely audiences will also come to participate, not
merely to watch.
Fifth: through the government's program, especially
through the instrumentality of the Index of American
Design, we are at last beginning to learn that art has
always had a natural although concealed home in this
country. There is an American initiative which has not
exhausted itself in material striving. It has been hesitant,
true, and its roots have been well-nigh lost, but they are
there. The esthetic impulse to create valid design lives in
the American tradition and one day we shall know it for
what it really is; at that moment we shall also summon
the courage to follow it toward a fairer future.
THE ABOVE EFFECTS, ALTHOUGH STATED IN THE MOST GENERAL-
ized terms, seem to me to be patent and readily observa-
ble. But there are also deficits and these need not be
evaded. There was no experience upon which we could
call for an enterprise of this sort and naturally numerous
errors have been committed. We learned, for example,
that many of the best artists managed somehow to re-
main off the relief rolls and because of the necessary
strictness of government procedures it was not possible to
utilize the services of some of them who might have en-
riched this program. We have also learned that a great
many individuals who called themselves artists and in-
sisted upon earning their way as artists had never passed
through a rigorous testing process and that surprising
numbers of them were definitely incapable. And the alli-
ance between art, politics and relief has proved itself to be
a /MZ>alliance. These are, however, remediable.
To remove the impediments which stand between the
people and the arts, to make room for a valid expression
of beauty arising from the people and returning again to
nourish the people, and to hold forth promise to the youth
of the future whose talents and inclinations urge them
toward the arts as occupation — these are the clearly-re-
vealed tasks of this generation. Stated otherwise the need
appears to be that of making an honest attempt to give
art its place within the democratic process. Certainly, this
is not an appropriate undertaking for private philanthropy.
To be healthy, the arts must be made integral to democ-
racy. The responsibility must be shared by those whose
labors support all other functions of government. But,
just as art tends to dissociate itself from the people when
it becomes centralized in metropolitan areas — in Bohemias
— so it will also suffer if, for example, the federal govern-
ment should undertake to make art subservient to Wash-
ington. We do not want a regimented art, nor do we de-
sire a politicalized art. What the federal government can
do is to build the channels and to furnish the initial re-
sources which will permit the growth of a national cul-
tural movement for which the arts will supply tone and
depth and quality. Then will arise a new freedom, not
founded upon insulation, but a truly democratic freedom
which evolves from relatedness.
20«
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A mural for Ellis Island
WPA symphony orchestra
ART GOES TO
MAIN STREET
Under federal work projects in art,
music, writing and the drama, men
and women have been painting
American stuff on the walls of our
buildings, giving the public classical
and popular music free or at low
prices, compiling a huge illustrated
Baedeker for the United States, and
acting plays in theaters, halls, parks
and institutions.
At work on sculpture for public buildings
Bight-year-old Eddie from a boys' club learns
to paint
Instruction m elementary and advanced arts, crafts and
HUSK ,n the neighborhood centers under the projects has
given employment to teachers of those subjects and pro-
vided young people and adults with new interests for their
leisure.
Grown-ups study the piano on dummy keyboards
It does happen in Doremus Jessup's office on a Broadway stage
Among the many novelties offered by the Federal Theater was the
dramatization of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. It was
played in twenty-three cities. Tampa saw a Spanish version;
Seattle a performance by a company of white and Negro actors,
the white actors in the roles of authority to emphasize the help-
lessness of a minority people under a totalitarian state. New York
and Los Angeles had Yiddish as well as English companies. Three
hundred thousand people have seen the play.
Above: Cartoon for a stained glass window
at West Point on the life of Washington.
Left: Many nations and races are represented
in the racial survey group of writers.
Uncle Sam Takes the Stage
by HIRAM MOTHERWELL
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOW IN
what the trade papers call show busi-
ness, and in up to its neck. WPA
Administrator Hopkins, biggest theat-
rical producer in the world's history, has
his smashes and turkeys, same as any
modest Broadway producer. But Federal
Theater is not competing with the com-
mercial theater. It draws few patrons
who could buy a seat costing two dollars
or more. It is drawing a new audience,
one which has rarely or never seen a play
with living actors, which surprisingly
often assumes that the play offered will
be a film, and which might otherwise
have lived its life oblivious of dramatic
literature. Federal Theater has an audi-
ence of ten million, as compared with a
million who were able to see a play two
years ago. Upon such a base the Ameri-
can theater may well become more sig-
nificant, more truly American, than it
has ever been.
Some two years ago, Actor's Equity
offered to stake unemployed actors to
their equipment and traveling expenses
if the government would pay subsistence
salaries. As the need for work relief
grew, the idea of taking professional
theater people from the relief rolls and
placing them in a planned theater pro-
gram gained headway. A reasonable ap-
propriation was provided for scenery,
costumes, electrical equipment and travel.
The plan was approved in conference
with the theatrical trade unions. Hallie
Flanagan, then director of the Experi-
mental Theater at Vassar, was appointed
national director.
But nobody knew exactly how many
actors there were and where they could
be found. Entertainment people had been
demoralized and scattered by the depres-
sion, and it took patient digging and per-
sonal canvass, at first, to round them up.
But when the word got around, they
bobbed up from everywhere; from
domestic service, road building, white
collar projects, dreary rooming houses.
Many were names which had once been
household words.
The leading ingenue of one of the
New York Federal Theater companies
had been working as a waitress in a
Miami restaurant. The best character
actress in Seattle came from a job with
mop and broom. Another leading lady
had been doing general housework. One
actress, when she received her first pay
check — $52 for the fortnight — announced
that she was "going to get her daughter
out of hock." All through the depres-
sion her daughter had been "checked"
on a farm with relatives. In Connecticut
a talented organist had accepted work
with pick and shovel. His hands were
in danger of being permanently ruined
for music when Federal Theater took
him on to supply much needed inci-
dental music. In another state, a once
prosperous vaudeville performer was dig-
ging ditches on relief. Today he directs
500 vaudevillians who entertain 20,000
people weekly. In all, more than 12,000
Audience in a 25 -cent hotel for men sees Sherlock Holmes (marionette version)
troupers have been put back into their
craft.
One of the most striking things about
Federal Theater is the high morale of its
performers. Their skills, long rusted in
work not suited to them, come back.
They play to youngsters in crowded city
districts, to elderly persons in the room-
ing-house sections, to cripples in govern-
ment hospitals, to homes for the aged,
CCC youths and hard-boiled inmates of
New audience
prisons. They do their stuff with all the
gusto they would give a Broadway audi-
ence, and invariably the applause is
tumultuous.
They rehearse where they can, for all
but a small percentage of government
funds must go to salaries. One company
rehearsed in the safe deposit vault of a
defunct bank; a Los Angeles troupe
went over the script in a church, open-
ing each rehearsal with a prayer — not
because they were so strongly religious,
but because a church by-law required it.
Basements, abandoned lofts and barns
serve nicely. A Buffalo company builds
its scenery in the hayloft and paints it in
the stables of a former police station.
New York marionette companies re-
hearse in a room under Brooklyn Bridge,
attuning their voices to the pandemon-
ium with which the kids greet their
shows in congested neighborhoods.
The job calls for enterprise and re-
sourcefulness. In Dallas a ballerina and
a tent showman — good troupers both —
were assigned to provide amusement for
youngsters in the parks. Rather than
wait for materials, they gathered pack-
ing cases from the city dump, built a
marionette theater and fashioned eight
puppets with a pocket knife and scraps
theatc
of cloth. They gave five shows daily,
and repeated curtain calls at every per-
formance.
These companies go to distant granges,
hospitals, and CCC camps by bus or in
their own cars, through mud, snow and
flood. On an extended camp tour the
men spend the nights in camp, the wom-
en at nearby tourist accommodations.
One night in New Jersey snow and ice
held up a bus until after midnight. The
camp boys would not leave the recreation
hall. The curtain rang up at 2 a. m. In
Families come from neighboring flats for drama played in the portable theater
California the actors once pushed their
balky truck three miles to keep a date
at a tuberculosis hospital. Near Peoria,
111., the Lightnin' company found itself
hopelessly stalled in the snow. So it
trekked on without its scenery, and im-
provised a vaudeville bill. In twenty-
seven states this sort of trouping goes on,
with adrnission fees ranging from
nothing at all to 50 cents.
Every company has at least one of
those classic stories to tell proving that
the show must go on. In a New England
vaudeville troupe the leading singer was
engaged to a local policeman. Shortly
before the intended wedding, her fiance
died. The entire company attended the
morning funeral and was, by special per-
mission, a half hour late to rehearsal.
The singer did not come to rehearsal.
But she was on hand for the perform-
ance that night.
Like any other theatrical venture, Fed-
eral Theater has its failures and its whop-
ping successes. Murder in the Cathedral,
which had been considered hopeless as a
commercial venture, sold out night after
night, and had its run repeatedly ex-
tended; Chalk Dust, which had 12 min-
utes of curtain calls after its first per-
formance, built up a long run of sold-
out houses and was almost, but not
quite, sold to the movies; the all Negro
Macbeth, with its voodoo witch scenes,
drew a first-night audience which tied
up traffic for an hour on Seventh Ave-
nue in New York. One meets every
kind of play in the various state pro-
grams— recent Broadway successes like
Post Road, The Old Maid, Valley Forge;
old stock standbys like Seven Keys to
Baldpate; new plays like Class of '29
and The Dance of Death.
There are scores of vaudeville troupes
in fifteen states. Twenty-two marionette
companies give, besides the fairy-tale
classics, dramatizations of history and
biography. A Buffalo puppet troupe
dramatized the danger of reckless driv-
ing as part of a local safety campaign.
There are dance groups, minstrel shows,
and even a circus. Research groups
gather information for the working units
and work out technical problems of the
theater. In all, more than 200 companies
and projects have been playing to audi-
ences totalling 350,000 weekly.
A good quarter of this audience is
composed of a group which is little writ-
ten about, but which benefits most rich-
ly— the sick, the aged, the criminal and
the young in institutions. Entertainment
is a problem closely allied to the very
life of such institutions. A recent in-
quiry brought the almost unanimous re-
sponse that entertainment is essential to
the maintenance of morale and disci-
pline, and in some cases to the reestab-
lishment of health. Good entertainment
is hard for them to come by, as funds
for the purpose are limited or non-ex-
istent.
Considered at large, the greatest differ-
ence between Broadway playgoers and
Federal Theater audiences is the funda-
mental one pointed out by the dramatic
critic Richard Lockridge: audiences at a
Federal Theater show may hiss or they
may applaud; but they never watch the
play with a frozen face.
Layoffs with Pay
by CAROL and BOYD C. SHAFER
Wisconsin, first state to pay as well as collect unemployment insurance,
becomes a real-life laboratory, here described in terms of Janesville, a
typical manufacturing community of 50 industries and 5000 workers
ON AUGUST 17, 1936, THE FIRST STATE UNEMPLOYMENT
benefit check ever issued in the United States was mailed
to an engraver temporarily laid off by a firm in Madison,
Wis. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia now
have unemployment compensation measures, most of
them passed in December 1936. But Wisconsin, which
enacted its law in 1932, three years before any other state,
is actually paying unemployment compensation, and what
this pioneer state is learning in the process has significance
for employers, workers and all the rest of us in every
state which has or contemplates an unemployment in-
surance measure. What do Wisconsin people think of this
experiment? What is the actual experience of employers
and employes covered by the measure? Of public officials
responsible for administering it? Is the law actually re-
ducing unemployment as well as cushioning its effect?
Seeking answers to these and other questions, we went
to Janesville, Wis., in December and January. We talked
with all sorts of people in that typical middle western
city. And we shall try to bring together here the replies
and the impressions we gathered in two busy weeks.
Needless to say, Janesville is not unanimous in its
opinions: "Land sakes! Why wouldn't people be in favor
of unemployment insurance!" exclaimed a woman who
clerks in a chain grocery store. "It's as inevitable as life
and death," said a philosophical employer. "No, sir,"
declared an old Scotch automobile worker, "the company
owes yuh nothin' except the wages they pay yuh." These
are fair samples of what we were told when we asked
people what they thought of the new law.
The Wisconsin act was not the hurried result of an
attempt to take advantage of the federal tax credit pro-
visions of the Social Security Act, although the present
law does meet federal standards. Unemployment com-
pensation has been soberly discussed and heatedly debated
by Wisconsin legislators, employers and workers for fif-
teen years. By 1932, it was generally felt that Wisconsin
industry and business should pay at least a part of the
heavy social costs of unemployment occasioned by their
own irregular operations. Hence an unemployment com-
pensation act was designed which was to serve two
primary objectives, (1) "the stimulation of more regular
employment," and (2) "the systematic payment of cash
benefits" to those workers who become unemployed
through no fault of their own.
Under the Wisconsin plan, every employer covered by
the law is required to build up an unemployment reserve
fund by setting aside a percentage of his payroll for that
purpose. Types of employment not covered are: workers
in firms with fewer than eight employes; farm labor;
domestic service; various types of governmental employ-
214
ment; employes of non-profit institutions; teachers;
loggers.
From 1934 through 1937, the fund is built up at the
rate of 2 percent of the payroll. From 1938 on, the "nor-
mal" rate will be 2.7 percent. But this basic rate will be
raised or lowered as the employer's reserve decreases or
accumulates, according to the amount paid out of it in
benefits. It is possible for an employer to be completely
exempt from payments for an entire year if his balance
in the fund reaches 10 percent or more of his last calendar
year's payroll. On the other hand, contributions up to 4
percent may be required. Employes do not contribute.
THE RESERVE BUILT UP BY THE EMPLOYER DOES NOT GO INTO
a state pool, but is held for him in a segregated account
by the state. From that fund, benefits are paid only
to his own employes. Each employer must pay into his
reserve for two years before his employes can accumulate
any benefit rights. The worker's right to benefit is based
on the length of time he has worked for that employer.
After a four-weeks' probationary period he is entitled to
unemployment compensation of half his "full time
weekly wage," with a minimum of $5 and a maximum of
$15. The length of time he can collect benefits is in
proportion to the length of time he has held his job, and
to his rate of pay. Benefits do not begin until three weeks
after layoff. The law also provides compensation for
partial unemployment. Although benefits may in a few
cases exceed $200 within a single year, total payments for
any one period of consecutive unemployment are limited
to $130. Most of the workers interviewed became unem-
ployed during the early months, and could receive benefits
for only a few weeks because their rights had been build-
ing up only over a short period.
Delayed because of the continuing depression, the
Wisconsin law really went into force in July 1934 when
contributions from employers to their reserve funds be-
gan. Workers first became eligible for benefits in July
1936, after the funds had been accumulating for two years.
On February 28, 1937, the law covered about 427,500
workers and over 6500 employers. The unemployment
reserve funds held a net balance of $20,317,674.05, after
39,635 benefit checks, totaling $276,658 had been sent to
Wisconsin workers, totally or partially unemployed.
Janesville, which we used as the laboratory for a study
of the Wisconsin plan, is a middle western industrial city
of about 26,000. Business there is on the upturn. Janes-
ville's manufacturing industries employed about 5000
workers in 1936. Its fifty manufacturing establishments
produced about $125 million in goods, and paid about
$10,250,000 in wages. At the last election Janesville failed
SURVEY GRAPHIC
to go Republican for the first time since 1856. Since the
unemployment compensation law went into effect last
summer over 2500 wage earners have made one or more
of the weekly registrations necessary to obtain benefits, a
total of more than 25,000 calls at the Janesville office;
and in one month, October 1936, over $15,000 was paid
out in benefits.
The chief industrial enterprises in Janesville are the
Parker Pen factory, and the Chevrolet and Fisher Body
plants. There are also a number of smaller concerns, a
woolen mill, a sugar beet company, a steam laundry, two
creameries, factories making window shades, shirts and
overalls, and the businesses common to middle western
cities of the same size, including two chain groceries and
a newspaper. Except for the auto plants, few Janesville
employers had to pay unemployment compensation in the
first six months of the law's operation.
While we were in Janesville we talked with repre-
sentative employers, large and small, producing and dis-
tributing, individual and corporate. We talked with work-
ers whose names were picked at random from the files
of the employment office. We talked with staff members
of the Unemployment Compensation Division of the
State Industrial Commission. We tried to take advantage
of chance contacts as well.
From the point of view of those who drafted and
worked for the Wisconsin law, those who administer
it and many of those covered by it, stabilization of em-
ployment is more important than benefit payments. The
adoption of the "reserve" instead of the "pool" system is
considered a means to this end. Wisconsin authorities
hold that when an "employer's liability is limited to his
own employes," and when he "knows that his contribu-
tion rate will vary directly according to his own benefit
experience," there will result a "clear cut incentive to
stabilize and increase the annual earnings of his men."
It is too early as yet to obtain significant statistics on
stabilization, but to the writers, it seemed clear that the
law is at least partially obtaining the results desired by
its proponents. At the last Wisconsin Manufacturers As-
sociation convention, Wisconsin employers voted 212 to
2 in favor of the present reserve law (as opposed to
pooled "merit-rating"). During the discussion preceding
the debate, B. J. Meyers of the large Fairbanks Morse
plant at Beloit declared that in this plant "more has been
done in the last six months to regularize employment than
in the last ten years." Hugo Kuechenmeister of Schuster's
Department Store in Milwaukee reported that big retail
stores were trying to meet the problem of irregular work
and wages by training people for more than one depart-
ment so that in slack periods workers could be trans-
ferred. R. W. Leach, the head of Unemployment Benefit
Advisors, Inc., recently stated:
It has been our privilege to serve, in a consulting capacity,
about 500 employers subject to this unemployment .compensa-
tion law, and among them are many who for the past two or
three years have been trying to provide more regular em-
ployment for their workers. They freely admit that their at-
tention to this matter has been largely the result of the Wis-
consin Unemployment Compensation law.
As an example of this, he cites the case of a manufac-
turing concern operating four plants, with a force of
about 2300 workers. Unemployment Benefit Advisors
were called in two years ago to make a survey of the firm,
and found that if benefit payments had already started,
"the company would have had to pay out in benefits ap-
proximately $40,000 a year. It has been the practice of this
company to let the department foremen make the lay-offs
and do the necessary re-hiring. A general office for em-
ployment was established and the foremen were given
the information and instruction necessary to obtain their
full cooperation with this office. The training of employes
for interchangeability was begun. The net result is that
for the first six months since benefit payments have actu-
ally started, only $26 in benefits have been charged to
this employer."
Mr. Leach adds, "The establishment of a central em-
ployment office and training for interchangeability are
Courtesy Janesrille Gazette
Janesville, Wisconsin, is a comfortable midwestern city with an annual payroll of some ten million dollars
APRIL 1937
215
INDUSTRIAL COMMISSION OF WISCONSIN
UNEMPLOYMfNT COMPENSATION DEPARTMENT
MADISON. WISCONSIN
THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK 7*-**
MADISON WISCONSIN
UNBMW.OYMCNT HMCWVt ru«O
N? 37550
•«7L5 DOLLARS 0g CENTS
WF. Z "31 FLOYO PALMER
9257 N TEUTON I A AVE
MILWAUKEE HIS IT
A o SMI™ CORP
38 39 40 41 42 43 / u> «
INDUSTRIAL COMMISSION OF WISCONSIN
VMIHT WITHIN em v»*
The check received one week in March
by a jobless Wisconsin worker entitled
to maximum benefits under the state
unemployment compensation law. It is
drawn upon the reserve fund of his
employer by the Unemployment Com-
pensation Department of the state
'first things' done by all employers who are endeavoring
to meet their problems under this law."
Another method of regularizing employment under
the incentive of reducing benefit payments is that worked
out by a Wisconsin paper mill. This firm has determined
to avoid all unemployment by providing work and wages
at least equal to the benefit rate for all its employes. In
some cases it has been necessary to transfer a man from
his regular job to temporary work which he would not
ordinarily accept. For example, a mechanic paid 75 cents
an hour may be put to work washing windows. He is paid
at his regular rate for his window washing and is given
enough of this work so that he at least earns his benefit
rate for the week. Naturally, a skilled mechanic would not
want a steady job as a window washer; neither would
the company want to pay 75 cents as a regular price for
getting its windows washed. But as a temporary expedient,
the mechanic is better off washing windows than he
would be if he were temporarily unemployed, because he
has received at least part time wages without using up
any of his benefit credits, and the employer profits be-
cause he has received some value for the compensation
paid. One of the union leaders in this mill stated: "This
law is really working because for the first time in ten
years I was not laid off at any time between July 1 and
January 1."
The most noticeable evidence of the stabilizing effects
of the law in Janesville is seen in the increasing reluctance
of employers to hire and fire without first considering the
probable duration of the job and the probability of ben-
efit payments. New workers are not laid off as readily.
As an alert owner-manager of a small clothing plant put
it, "We hire and fire with more caution. In rush periods
there aren't as many taken on as formerly. In time we will
be able to anticipate the rushes to a greater extent."
Not all companies can regularize their work. An offi-
cial of the beet sugar factory remarked, "Our plant can't
stabilize in any way. Sugar beets grow only at one time
and the work can be done only at one time, like the
canning industry. But we've tried to keep men on long
enough in a week to avoid paying partial benefits." Sea-
sonal industries, this man pointed out, may attempt to
avoid benefit payments by hiring workers not eligible for
benefits such as small farm owners ordinarily self-em-
ployed but even so they cannot build up sufficient reserves
to pay full benefits to all when the rush is over.
Still another hindrance to stabilization was indicated by
a man with thirty-eight employes:
The employer will look to do everything he can to keep
employment on an even keel but whenever possible he'll work
short term employes for less than the four weeks probationary
period and then fire them and get others. I'm sure I'd have
paid out $1000 more in wages myself this year if no act had
existed because now I don't hire as many part time workers.
But while it is too early to draw final conclusions, and
while the present picture is decidedly "spotty," it is clear
that Wisconsin employers are thinking and planning in
terms of stabilization. As the district examiner for the
act said, "The employers watch the size of their funds
closely." If business continues good for a few years, con-
tinued effort to stabilize may reasonably be expected.
WORKERS WERE INCLINED TO GIVE UNEMPLOYMENT COM-
pensation most of the credit for the steadier work they
have had this fall and winter. "The insurance keeps
'em from layin' you off. I was called back sooner this
year after the lay-off, too. A year ago I had three months
off, this year only six weeks," said a worker on the
Chevrolet assembly line. A paint inspector in the same
plant felt that the law would force stabilization because
it would be to the employer's advantage to do so:
"Nothing is too small in a big corporation to consider.
Why they even pick the solder drippings from the sweep-
ings and sew the wool sponges together when they get
too small to use alone. When those wear down they pass
them on to the window washers. They even weigh the
rags they use. You can bet they will certainly try to keep
men employed to guard their funds."
One of the women who had worked at Parker Pen
when laid off at the Fisher Body plant declared em-
phatically, "If you've got a job you can be sure they
won't lay you off so soon as they used to. It sure gave
me steadier work this year even though it was at another
plant." And one of her fellow-workers added, "This year
none of us were laid off after the Christmas rush. We
used to be put off but now we're kept on half time even
when there's hardly any work to do. Everyone knows they
keep us so they don't have to pay benefits on us."
The second objective of Wisconsin's Unemployment
Compensation Act is "the systematic payment of cash
benefits to those workers who become unemployed
through industry's inability to provide steady work."
Though the benefits paid thus far have been meager, com-
pared with what they are expected to be in future years,
when workers have had time to accumulate more exten-
sive "rights," the psychological effect of some measure of
security is already evident.
"The unemployment money sure helped a lot. We
didn't get so far behind this lay-off," said a father of
four children. "If we can just keep up the store bill," added
216
SURVEY GRAPHIC
his wife. "Otherwise we get a good start, then comes the
lay-off and we use up all we saved and get way behind."
A young mother whom we interviewed in her home, told
us, "My man and I planned on the insurance and felt
much safer. I think it's grand. It's the best kind of in-
surance you can have." "My benefits bought us a ton
of coal. Every little bit helps," said an automobile as-
sembler as he warmed his hands on the heater in his
cottage. A housewife told us, "You can keep up your
store credit till you get back on now, if you tell 'em you
have the insurance comin'." And at another home, an old
lady looked up from her darning to say, "Without the
unemployment money we'd a had to go on relief. Pa is
sixty-three and too old to work at the plant and we de-
pend on the children. Two of my boys is working at
Chevy, and my girl is at the store. They all got benefits
when they was off this time."
Everyone questioned believed that unemployment com-
pensation is preferable to relief, although one young man
asked shrewdly, "They both come out of the taxpayer
in the end, don't they?" Said an arc welder, "Insurance
keeps a man self-respecting." "You earn your benefits,"
claimed another, "while relief is something you have to
ask for." A woman who worked at the Fisher Body
thought, "Insurance is an entirely different thing than
relief. It's a matter of pride. People prefer some kind of
a fund they have helped raise to protect them, rather than
have it handed out." Most of the workers with whom we
talked felt strongly that the unemployment reserve is not
"contributed" by the employer, but by the plant or busi-
ness in which they themselves are "working partners."
When unemployment compensation was first being dis-
cussed its adversaries claimed that it would discourage
industry and thrift. Employers were unable to produce any
evidence that such has been the case. Several answered
wisely, "It all depends on the man and on human nature.
Some will lay down on the job but the majority won't."
In fact, one employer thought, the act increased the work-
er's responsibility "because if he's discharged for good
cause now, such as drunkenness or dishonesty, he may
lose all the benefits he would have had coming." A man
who employs over a hundred workers and who was much
annoyed by the amount of "paper work" required of him
under the law, thought that a plan which would "compel"
each worker to save until he had $250 on hand would be
much more practical than the present system and would
be a surer incentive to thrift.
AFTER THE PASSAGE OF ANY LAW QUESTIONS OF CLARIFICATION,
administration and possible amendment continue to arise.
So it is with Wisconsin's unemployment act: Should
workers as well as employers contribute to the fund?
Should the coverage be extended ? Should the benefit rates
or waiting period be changed? Should fewer or more
reports be required from employers? Is the administra-
tion treating all interested parties fairly? On one or all
Swapping a Lay-off for a Rush
Tying Springs for Fisher Bodies
Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of how the
Wisconsin law stimulates the ingenuity of an em-
ployer in preventing lay-offs occurred in Janesville
last fall. Two of the most important industries in
town — Chevrolet and Fisher Body — customarily shut
down in late summer, leaving the employes of both
jobless until the seasonal "pick up" late in the autumn.
But with the unemployment compensation law
in effect, this would have cost money to the employ-
ers who would have been called on to dip deeply
into their unemployment reserves to pay compensa-
tion. So this time the annual shut-down in the Chev-
rolet and Fisher Boy was dovetailed into the annual
Assembly Line
Courtesy Janesville Gazette
-Parker Pens
pre-Christmas rush of the Parker Pen Company. By
agreement, about sixty girls laid off by the automo-
bile factories were hired by Parker Pen. In two
months they were taken back by their usual employ-
ers. Thus through the desire of Chevrolet and Fisher
Body to avoid benefit payments these girls were given
steady jobs. True, no new part time girls were hired
by the pen company this year. Hence the group of
town girls who usually count on "pin-money" work
during those two months had no employment. But
this, employers and employes felt, was more than
balanced by the fact that the regular working forces
of two plants were spared the usual seasonal lay-off.
APRIL 1937
217
of these questions employers and employes gave opinions.
Though ten states require employe contributions, most
Janesville workers believed that they could not afford
this, especially since one social security tax (for old age
benefits) is already levied against them. Several, how-
ever, expressed a willingness to pay a percentage of their
wages into the fund if it would materially increase com-
pensation. "I would be willing to put in as much as 2
percent of my pay if the benefits would be high enough
to do some good. You'd hardly miss it when the check
comes in and you'd save it that way. The benefits'd be
big enough to carry you and there'd be nothin' to worry
about," declared a spray mixer from the Fisher plant.
An English woman who had worked in England as well
as in United States, said, "I tell you, all three parties
should contribute, the employer, the employe, and the
government, the way they do there at home. That would
give us better benefits."
A majority of the Janesville employers interviewed
thought that workers should contribute as it would "make
them more interested in the government"; or "make them
tax conscious"; or "make the people save." None objected
that it would be difficult for the worker to contribute from
his wages. One factory comptroller who believed in thus
"spreading the base of taxation," added, "The actual in-
surance wouldn't gain much by having employe con-
tributions."
As TO BROADENING THE PLAN TO COVER WORKERS NOW EX-
cluded, most employes questioned believed, "Everybody
who works ought to be included." The general sentiment
of both employers and employes, however, was "Guess
it would be too hard to keep track of everybody." Small
businesses find reporting and bookkeeping a great chore.
The state administration itself, being new, is not now
prepared to handle an increase in its load. If the act
were extended to smaller firms the number of employ-
ers covered would increase far more rapidly than the
number of employes. For all these reasons, there is some
doubt whether wider coverage is at present worth the
effort necessary to effect it.
"Should the benefits be changed?" Workers were not
always agreed but in general they hoped for increased
rates. "Half a meal is better'n none," commented one
chap. And another meditated, "Guess they're as high as
can be expected." But others thought the five to fifteen
dollar rates too low. Declared one father of four chil-
dren, "We can't live on $15 a week when we usually
have $35." A garage mechanic fairly exploded, "We're
goin' to git rid of the damn thing! What's it amount to?
A few cents a week. You can't live on that. Tops is only
$15. Don't amount to nothin'. Insurance's o.k. if the
benefits was big enough." Of course these comments are
based on experience with the limited benefits payable
during the early months.
Workers also object to the length of the waiting pe-
riod— not so much the stated three-week waiting period
as to the added two and a half weeks usually required at
present before benefits actually begin. After the waiting
period the unemployed worker must re-register the fourth
and fifth weeks to verify his being unemployed and com-
pensable. There is further delay for reports from the em-
ployer, for necessary bookkeeping, and to allow oppor-
tunity to contest the claim before the check goes out from
the central office. As one elevator man put it, "The ben-
efits helped a lot of fellas during the lay-off at the plants,
but some of "em had wrinkles in their bellies before the
checks come." Relief agencies reported that only three
or four families applied for relief during the last lay-off,
but they had no comparable statistics for previous years.
If the employes complain about some aspects of the
present law, small employers have grievances also. Though
Wisconsin requires fewer reports from employers than
most states, still the keeping of accurate payroll records,
and the necessity of filing a "Low or No Earnings Re-
port" and a "Benefit Liability Report" take more time
than small business men feel they can give. With evident
feeling one manufacturer declared, "There's too damn
many reports. I've got to hire an extra man to take care
of them. If you ask me I don't like it."
A chain grocery owner was more explicit:
A fellow doesn't know whether he's coming or going.
I've got all kinds of forms to fill out for a thousand taxes and
licenses. There's the social security tax, the federal surplus
tax, the federal and state income taxes, the state capital gains
tax, the real property tax, the capital stock tax, the federal tax
on unjust enrichment, and a hundred others. I can't afford
to take the time from managing the business to fill out all
the forms or even to read all the instructions. And then some-
body comes in to tell me I haven't filled out one of the blanks
according to paragraph forty-seven, page fifty-two. I pay so
many taxes, I fill out so many forms that I haven't got time
for my business and it suffers. I ought to spend my time
running my business.
Larger businesses find this problem much less perplex-
ing. They have adequate records, perhaps subscribe to a
tax information service and often have a legal department.
The small business men feel the reporting, as one of them
asserted, "Quite a headache."
REPORTING MIGHT BE IRRITATING TO EMPLOYERS, CHECKS
might be slow in coming to workers, yet both groups in
Janesville were agreed that the administration of the act
was fair and as efficient as could be expected for the pres-
ent. Workers and employers are both represented on an
advisory committee to the Industrial Commission under
the jurisdiction of which the act is administered, and all
significant steps in amending or clarifying the law have
thus far been taken with the unanimous consent of this
advisory committee. Disputed claims are heard before an
appeal board on which the state administration, the em-
ployer and the employe have representatives. In Janesville
at least there was no claim by the workers that when
they were eligible for benefits they had been forced to take
jobs to which they might reasonably object. Nor did they
feel that in the few contested claims there had been dis-
crimination against the worker. In spite of inexperienced
district managers, the smell of fresh paint in the offices,
the administration of the Wisconsin Law has avoided
serious mistakes.
In Janesville, where the first system of public unem-
ployment compensation in the United States is in full
swing, employers are either reconciled to a trial of the
law or thoroughly convinced of its saneness. Actual steps
toward the stabilization of employment are being taken.
Most workers are staunchly loyal to the plan. They feel
a new sense of security. Though, as one of them said,
"There's gotta be a lot of details ironed out yet," Wis-
consin again has reason to be proud of its efforts as a
pioneer in social legislation.
218
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Is the World Going Mad?
by FARNSWORTH CROWDER
CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST SERIOUS
and alarming of predictions being made
by social prophets is that, if the present
rate of increase holds, the population of
the civilized world will some day be
insane. A group of British statisticians
has figured out that this will have come
about by the year 2139. An American
student of the problem imagines us,
seventy-five years hence, when "half the
population of the United States will be
in asylums and the other half will labor
solely to support them." A worried Can-
adian, examining figures for the Domin-
ion, sees "mental cases increasing four
times as fast as the general population.
Of all the children now going to school,"
he says, "a greater number will enter
mental institutions than will graduate
from college."
To support their prophecies, the alarm-
ists point out that of the million beds
in American hospitals, one half are occu-
pied by mental cases; that the capacity of
state mental institutions is not up to the
demand upon them, whereas in general
hospital beds run 10 to 30 percent unoc-
cupied; that, during the half-century pe-
riod that the national population has
doubled, the mental hospital population
has jumped nine-fold. And there are other
indications. There is the suicide rate.
There is the high incidence of crime and
delinquency. There is the low average
intelligence of the population. There is
the reported increase in homosexuality.
And there is the prevalence of the "ner-
vous breakdown."
With such material a black and hor-
rible picture can be painted. What is
our spectacular civilization, with all its
potentialities for physical health and
physical comfort going to avail us if; in
the end, our nervous systems cannot
stand up under its pressures, changes and
uncertainties? What is fine about a hu-
manitarianism which, in the person of
charity, medicine and public health,
tends to keep alive the weak and the un-
fit that they may people the earth with
their kind? Is the task of acquiring an
education, finding a job, founding a
home, making an adequate living, "get-
ting to the top," too much of a challenge
for the human organism? Is it true al-
ready, as certain eminent psychiatrists are
contending, that whole populations, led
on by maniac dictators, are developing
national psychoses?
What, if anything, can be said by way
of rebuttal to these dismal predictions?
Are we bringing our children into a
potential mad-house? Is hell now busily
in the making on earth? How right is
the philosopher's superman from Mars
who finds in modern men not intelli-
gence but "a low-grade cunning — a cun-
ning that hits on discoveries, inventions
and techniques with which "this noxious
species, through its own unaided mis-
chievousness, is preparing to exterminate
itself altogether"?
ONE WAY TO INCREASE ANY DISEASE IS TO
discover it. This is not to say that dis-
eases are fads — although to an extent
they are — but to say that identifying a
thing brings it out of hiding. This has
been happening, and happening rapidly
in the field of mental illness. What were
demons and devils to our ancestors are
psychoses to us. What was acceptable as
a troublesome or endearing eccentricity
in great-uncle Abner is a "compulsion"
in his nephew. In short "mental case" is
becoming, with advancing research, a
term that blankets more and more of us
— and accordingly enlarges the statistics.
As some new abnormality is brought to
light and given a name we may well
find that we have been secreting one of
them in our own mental closet. I defy
anyone to read through a text on abnor-
mal psychology and not experience again
and again a queer shudder of recogni-
tion— "Heaven help me, I've done that!
I've felt that way — I'm like that some-
times— "
For, in you and your wife, in your
son John and his wife, there are bents
and tendencies that are neurotic, even
psychopathic. To what degree they assert
themselves may depend on some "pre-
cipitating factor." All of us are some-
what like restless balloons anchored to a
base of sanity; and whether or not we
are snipped loose and go floating off into
clouds of lunacy depends on a variety
of circumstances over which we have
only limited control.
It may be then that we are not be-
coming alarmingly abnormal; probably
we always have been so. What we are
doing is finding it out.
And another thing: these abnormalities
which are being exposed and named are
being increasingly treated under hospital
conditions. The population of state men-
tal institutions may have increased nine
times in fifty years; but may not this
mean that facilities for care have grown
nine-fold, that nine-fold fewer families
have afflicted relatives hidden away in
the attic or the back bedroom?
It is a mistake to draw the sorriest
possible conclusion from the fact that
half the hospital beds are occupied by
mental patients, a mistake for this
reason: mental patients average twelve
to eighteen months in bed, while general
medical and surgical cases average two
to three weeks. That is, the turnover of
mental patients is relatively slow. Dr.
Neil A. Dayton of the Massachusetts De-
partment of Mental Diseases has esti-
mated that "if the general cases remained
as long as mental cases, the 500,000 beds
now occupied by mental cases would
have to be balanced by 12,500,000 beds
for patients in general hospitals."
ALONG WITH THIS MORE INCLUSIVE DEFIN-
ing of mental illness and the bringing
of more and more cases under treatment
has come an improved medical and pub-
lic attitude — an attitude that lags but
still tracks in the general path being cut
through horrible jungles of prejudice,
ignorance and cruelty. The insane until
very recently were treated with extreme
brutality, were beaten, chained, impris-
oned, straight jacketed, tortured and
killed. For instance, the popular treat-
ment for echololia (the senseless echoing
or repetition of words) was to tear the
sufferer's tongue out by the roots. The
understanding and mercy that have en-
tered the best institutional corridors with-
in a very few years can be judged by
comparing the shameful inhumanities
reported in Beers' famous book, A Mind
That Found Itself, with the decent scien-
tific treatment described in William
Seabrook's Asylum.
Slowly, too slowly, the shame that has
always attached to a mental disorder is
going down. That shame has even had
the support of law. More than once
damages have been collected by persons
placed a short time under observation in
a mental hospital on the grounds that
their good name was ruined. But we
are beginning to realize that it is cruel
and false to assume that a mental case
is a revolting or disgraceful freak, be-
yond hope and help. People are being
encouraged to submit voluntarily to
APRIL 1937
219
treatment rather than be forcibly com-
mitted. Families and friends are more
cooperative. Cases are being caught in
earlier stages. And the figures reflect all
this improvement of attitude.
There is yet another thing that makes
the statistics look more discouraging
than they are, and that is the increase
in the relative proportion of old people
among us. Dr. Dayton, after studying
61,000 admissions to New York and
Massachusetts hospitals, concluded that
much mental disease must now be
"placed squarely in line with failing
physical processes . . . may be considered
a degenerative disease." For example, he
found that "in ages over seventy, the
admission rates are four times as high
as those of middle age." Which means
that as life is prolonged, the maintenance
of a sound mind is, like the maintenance
of a sound heart, liver and muscles, more
and more difficult as the years add up.
Now IN TAKING ISSUE WITH THE ALARM-
ists and their figures, these factors we
have mentioned help to show that the
reported increase in mental illness is
more apparent than real and cannot be
accepted without qualifications.
Such figures as we have go back only
a few decades. We simply do not know
how normal, poised and serene was the
human soul under the Pharaohs, or in
Athens, or Elizabethan London or Civil
War New York. But not only are our
statistics very recent, they are fragment-
ary. Probably as complete a set as exists
in the United States are those relating
to the army. The surgeon general's office
possesses full data going back to 1899.
This material has been analyzed by Ellen
Winston, sociologist of the University of
North Carolina. Her report is long and
technical but her conclusion brief and
understandable. "Occurring in spite of
careful examination of recruits (there is)
a high rate of mental disease" . . . but
. . . "the rate of the incidence in the
U. S. Army is not increasing. It may
actually be decreasing."
You may of course object that the
army does not reflect in miniature the
general situation. After all, the army is
made up of picked men. Mental cases
are not recruited for service.
Miss Winston has anticipated your ob-
jection. She gathered all data available
on the rates of first admissions to men-
tal hospitals in the United States over
a period of more than twenty years. This
data she related to figures collected from
Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden,
Norway, Australia and New Zealand.
That is, the material she examined cov-
ered a sizable section of western civiliza-
tion. Her analysis stands as probably the
most comprehensive made to date. And
what is the picture? It is uneven; there
is wide diversity in rates and trends —
some rising, some stationary, some fall-
ing. Noticeable increases she found due
to increases in hospitalization rather than
to a rise in the actual incidence of men-
tal disorders. Standing far back and
looking at her organized data as a whole,
she was forced to conclude that "the
theory of a progressive increase in men-
tal disease as civilization becomes more
complex is definitely open to question."
Notice the phrase, "as civilization be-
comes more complex." One of the com-
monest observations about contemporary
society is to the effect that the pace, con-
fusion, pressure and uncertainty of twen-
tieth century existence quicken the rate
at which people crack up mentally. We
hear that life, as it bears upon the ner-
vous system has never been so merciless
and damaging.
If it is true that the fears, frustrations
and strains of modern existence are driv-
ing people crazy, we should find in our
great depression experience a perfect
demonstration of the thesis. For if ever
millions of people were put on the men-
tal rack, it has been during the past six
years. Admittedly they have suffered, but
have they been able to take it? The
National Committee for Mental Hygiene
has questioned 104 institutions and stud-
ied the records of the 168 hospitals which
report regularly to the Federal Census
Bureau. And the conclusion? "Our in-
quiry does not show that the depression
has produced a notable increase in men-
These two decorative mural panels, made
by Emilio Amero under the Federal Art
Project, give color to the lobby of the
Psychiatric Building of Bellevue Hospital
in New York
tal disease requiring hospital treatment.
The most than can be said is that it has
been an important contributing factor."
Dr, Dayton asks the question: "If men-
tal disease is purely a reaction ... to
social, environmental and emotional situ-
ations, why do we find the close linkage
between mental diseases and old age?'
From his enormous experience, he an-
swers: "Mental disorder is quite removed
from those diseases which are supposed
to be due to the many strains imposed by
our present civilization. ... In the
younger and middle ages, when the
stresses of life are more pronounced, the
population does not present a large pro-
portion of mental disease."
THE TRUTH SEEMS TO BE THAT MENTAL
disorders are no respecters of levels of
culture, race or environment. John M.
Cooper of Catholic University made a
study of the material in the literature of
anthropology on mental disease among
primitive peoples and found that they
too, even in the simplest and most static
of societies, go mad and have their break-
downs. "Most derangement among pre-
literate people," he says, "has fundamen-
tally the same patterns and probably the
same causes as among civilized peoples."
A mental illness is usually a slow-
growing, cumulative, even abiding, ten-
dency; its roots may strike back to in-
fancy, or back, through the germ plasm,
to ancestors now dust. Insanity belongs
to man, to the human race, not simply
to certain periods and civilizations.
Modern psychiatry, by shedding light
in murky corners of the human soul, has
shown us alarming things, but it has not
shown us doom. Rather, by giving under-
standing, by providing humanized, scien-
tific care, by shaming shame, by stirring
up the mental hygiene movement, psy-
chiatry makes us moderns the gainers —
not the fated losers — in the immemorial
fight for sanity and happiness.
220
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Farce of the Chandelier-Players
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
THE COMMON COUNCIL WAS DISCUSSING THE REFURNISHING
and redecoration of the aldermanic chamber. Someone
proposed to install a splendid chandelier. Whereupon
Alderman Rafferty, sleepless watchdog of the city treasury,
especially against expenditures promising no benefit to
his own district, instantly was on his feet to protest:
"A shandy leer is it? More waste of the people's money!
Supposin' we get one — there's not a man in this here
Board of Aldermen, least of all meself as knows not wan
note from another, that would know how to play on it!
I move to refer th' resolution to the Committee on Useless
Instruments."
This very old anecdote comes to mind in beholding the
insane rush to purchase armaments and munitions of war,
in which now the whole mad world is engaged. Latest
comes the announcement from Italy that the Fascist
Grand Council, provoked particularly by the British
$7,500,000,000 rearmament program, has decided to devote
all Italian efforts to that enterprise, calling not only for
"more intensive militarization," and "attainment of the
greatest possible economic self-sufficiency as regards mili-
tary outlays," but even "a complete sacrifice of civil to
military aims." A five-year plan is projected in this
behalf; but Premier Mussolini specifically announced that
the future as he foresaw it precluded any hope of arms
limitation. He previsioned "eventual aggression by
countries rich in capital and natural resources," — such
for example as Italy's upon Ethiopia? — and the resolution
adopted calls upon science and technology to devote them-
selves exclusively to the program, to which all other
endeavors must be subordinated.
This is only Italy. Germany during the past year, ac-
cording to information announced in London and notori-
ously true in substance if not in detail, has trebled its air
force, and the German people have been called upon by
Goering, the Hitler factotum, to welcome the substitution
of cannon for bread. Japan is at the edge of internal tur-
moil because of the enormous increase of expenditures for
military equipment. The mania is world-wide, afflicting
our own country like the others. Just now the Foreign
Policy Association has published a report * giving figures
as authentic as possible as to the increase of armament
expenditures during the period since and including 1913-
14. The figures and estimates show beyond misunderstand-
ing how the normal life and needs of the people have
been sacrificed to these demands. From this point of
view it is not the figures of expenditure that count with
greatest significance, but the relation they bear to the
budget total. For example, in the last fiscal year Italy's
military expenditures are shown as being 52.7 percent of
the budget. No telling what they will be now! Japan's
in 1935-36 were 50.5 percent. There is no way of knowing
Germany's percentage. France's figure for 1937 is esti-
mated as 29.7; Soviet Russia's as 20.7; Great Britain's as
•THE RISING TIDE OF ARMAMENT, by William T. Stone and Helen
Fisher. Foreign Policy Reports, vol. XII, No. 23, February 15, 1937. 10
pp. Price 25 cents postpaid of Survey Graphic.
APRIL 1937
"A shelter in the time of storm"
20 (that was of course before the announcement of the
stupendous program now proposed. The same may be
said of the 12.9 percent accredited to the United States.)
The exactitude of the figures is relatively unimportant;
we need no statistics to support the common knowledge
that the whole world has gone mad with fear.
AND WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH ALL THESE THINGS, MOST OF
which are more or less obsolete by the time they are
delivered? Every government thus wasting the people's
treasure at the expense of their standard of living pro-
tests (for what the disclaimer is worth) that it desires only
peace; that it contemplates no aggression anywhere; that
it desires only "adequate defense" against other peace
proclaimers. And the farce of it all lies in the fact that
not one of them can afford even the upkeep of these naval
and military establishments, to say nothing of the use
of them in a war that would absolutely beggar all par-
ticipants. The United States, on the face of things best
able . . . President Roosevelt has just declared, as these
words are written, that "one third of the people of this
nation are ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed— now!"
Not one of these nations knows what it will do with all
these weapons of war. Richard Freund, in a thought-pro-
voking book * exploring the conditions in Europe, re-
minds one of the fabled Alderman Rafferty, in his declara-
tion that:
There is not a single great power that has made up its
mind how to react to the new situation. In nearly every
capital alternative policies are being prepared for distinctly
contradictory possibilities.
I have seen no better or more informing description of
the international tangle than this book, whose final chap-
ter points to the tremendous opportunity and "noble
responsibility" lying upon Great Britain alone — now that
the United States has "withdrawn from the international
stage, leaving an empty place."
An empty place, because in every way we have aban-
doned the moral initiative and withdrawn from the
world's resources the one influence which would be
'ZERO HOUR: POLICIES OP THE POWERS, by Richard Freund. New York.
Oxford University Press. 256 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
221
decisive against war. Fortunately, the "100-percent-neu-
trality" legislation now nearing enactment can be repealed
under the pressure which any large scale international
conflict would inevitably excite; but our moral position
now is fixed. The logic of it gives our aid to the powerful
aggressor in every case regardless of its merits. So far as
we are concerned no revolt against despotism can suc-
ceed; struggling democracy in Czechoslovakia for exam-
ple can be gobbled up; there can be other Ethiopias . . .
we shall be safely under the bed — like the New Hamp-
shire man I used to know who crawled thither, with his
Bible and a plate of doughnuts, during every thunder
storm. Not only shall we give no aid; we may not even
sell medical supplies or food. Let them stew in their own
blood. Yet where and what would we have been today,
without Lafayette and Kosciusko?
One of the favorite arguments of the neutrality extrem-
ists is that it is both legitimate and desirable to rope off
a fire and keep rubber-necks and bystanders away from
it, for their own sake and in the interest of the fire fighters.
Plausible, no doubt, but what of the policy of excluding
the chief part of the fire department, and letting the fire
take care of itself, on the ground that "it isn't our fire"?
Let it burn itself out — or spread. Safety first! In our place
in the League of Nations we might have been an abso-
lutely decisive factor in the prevention of wars. No
nation would have dared to risk it. ...
EVEN AS THINGS ARE NOW, ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND THE
resulting social tension everywhere are doing it for us
willy nilly. The new "chandelier" is almost ready, but
nobody will dare to play on it. Least of all those who
know how. Starved by the reckless waste for armaments
that has given them cannon and warships instead of
bread, the peoples are in no mood for further sacrifices.
Thomas Mann, in a stirring letter to the dean of the
University of Bonn, depriving him of his honorary doc-
torate (and reprinted in The Nation of March 6) puts
his finger on it:
\
No, this war is impossible; Germany cannot wage it. ...
No other people on earth is today so utterly incapable of war,
so little in condition to endure one. That Germany would
have no allies, not a single one in the world, is the first con-
sideration but the smallest. . . .
Walter Millis, author of Road to War, has just pub-
lished an even more compelling book * in which he sets
forth the conditions all over Europe tending to forbid the
use of the armaments with which the so-called civilized
nations .are cluttered. Yes, he says, there is universal talk
of war, oceans of hateful propaganda — but it stops with
the drilling and the production of lethal stuff. "All dressed
up, and no place to go." And meanwhile, there appears a
definite setting in of an ebb tide. As I write these words
I note news dispatches. . . . One from Tokyo, quoting
from the inaugural address of Foreign Minister Sato dis-
avowing any Japanese territorial ambitions in China and
calling for a "fresh start" with China on a basis of
equality — "we must do something definite to improve
our present unfavorable relations with China." Another
from Berlin, hinting that Germany is ready to join in a
"western European" peace pact. "Western" European,
mind you — still reserving Hitler's avid grudge and land-
lust to the east, against Soviet Russia. And there are
numerous indications that the Balkan peoples have taken
note of what can happen when, as in Spain, a luckless
small country becomes the battleground for the conflict
between Nazi-ism and its Fascist twin, and democracy.
Another straw is the announcement that as of January 1,
1937, visas upon passports between Czechoslovakia,
Rumania and Yugoslavia have been abolished.
A WHOLESOME SIGN APPEARS IN THE RECENT ANNOUNCE-
ment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that it
will exempt conscientious objectors to military training
from the requirement of such training for a degree (pro-
vided their reasons are approved by the faculty), if they
substitute therefor certain studies in international law and
the history of arbitration and diplomacy; though the de-
tails of the alternative courses have not yet been definitely
determined. This, if carried out in good faith, is a sub-
stantial advance. Nothing is more effective toward inter-
national understanding than informed intelligence about
"how we got that way." And as I say that, my eye falls
upon another little bookf which ought to be within
hand-reach of everyone desiring to understand the tangle
of history and the conflict of territorial interest making
up the world problem. A wealth of notably simple maps
with brief explanatory notes is presented to show the
geographical spider-web that "empire" has woven over
the face of the earth. Along with it on one's reference
shelf may well be Mr. Horrabin's other and similar
Atlases of Current Affairs and European History, issued
by the same publisher.
But let us take hope from the multiplying signs of a
better day, as slowly, timidly, in spots here and there, the
underlying common sense of mankind rears its head amid
the clamor of folly, and we realize that however splendid
and expensive the "shandyleer" no member of the Board
of Aldermen can play on it.
Marcus in the N. Y. Times
The "Substitute"
•VIEWED WITHOUT ALARM: EUROPE TODAY, by Walter Millis. Boston,
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937. 79 pp. Price $1.25 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
tAN ATLAS OF EMPIRE, by J. F. Horrabin. New York. Alfred A. Knopf.
1937. 144 pp. Price $1.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
222
SURVEY GRAPHIC
•
•
LILLIAN D. WALD
A Great Neighbor
Arnold Gtnthe
Radio transmitters, loud speakers, moving picture cam-
eras, powerful electric lamps and the latest type of flash-
lights entered into the modern paraphernalia through
which the tributes paid to Miss Wald on her seventieth
birthday were transmitted to the House-on-the-Pond,
Westport, Conn, and to friends and well wishers through-
out the country. But, after all, when it came to the mes-
sages that were sent, they fell into the oldest and simplest
of words, such as love and work, her vision and her faith
in mankind.
That afternoon, in the hall of 99 Park Avenue, New
York [headquarters of the Visiting Nursing Service of the
Henry Street Settlement she founded] Mrs. James Roose-
velt, the President's mother, read a letter from her son
expressing the "homage and admiration of all who value
disinterested public service" because of "the many years
you have spent in unselfish labor to promote the happi-
ness and well being of others." A kindred message came
over the radio from Governor Lehman at the Executive
Mansion at Albany. And Mayor La Guardia was there
in person to present the distinguished service certificate
of the City of New York. Miss Wald's telegram of re-
sponse was characteristic of her indomitable spirit: "I
have spent my years of service thus far with a sense of the
original faith of mankind in the readiness to accept
unknown adventures."
That evening, one of the oldest members of the
Mothers' Club lit the candles of a great birthday cake
before a gathering of neighbors of all generations who
filled the gymnasium of the "House on Henry Street."
LIFE AND LETTERS
Arches Over Time
by LEON WHIPPLE
THE SOURCE OF CIVILIZATION, by Gerald Heard. Harper. 431 pp.
Price $3.50.
THE HUMAN COMEDY, Ly James Harvey Robinson. Harper. 394 pp.
Price $3.
A DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE, by H. A. Overstreet.
Norton. 284 pp. Price $3.
IN 1936, by A. C. Eurich and E. C. Wilson. Holt. 620 pp. Price $2.50.
Postpaid of Survey Graphic
THE TIME-SPAN OF OUR PRINT RECORDS IS BECOMING INFIN-
itesimal. We digest every cycle of the calendar, with a
newspaper per day, a news-digest each week, the book
of the month, and a new panorama of the year, called
In 1936. It is no doubt useful to know what is going on,
but can you know what is actually going on by viewing
time as atomic? We get an intense, almost crushing con-
sciousness of today that is at once superficial and terri-
fying. The velocity of print-records makes me feel as if
I were spun in one of those whirligig machines for test-
ing aviators. I lose the horizon. But I need the horizon,
and I need orientation in time. As James Harvey Robin-
son says: "To become historically-minded is to be grown-
up."
This concern with the present has curious effects on
our letters. The book of the month is often just that. It
is often repetitious of other books, naturally enough, for
a month does not add much to our facts, and less to our
wisdom. We do not, moreover, find the familiar ideas
given a new clarity and charm by the grace and distinc-
tion of a personal style. Why should an author take rev-
erent pains with the language of his annual report on
changing facts and ephemeral situations? Some of these
books should bear the note our quicksilver executives
add to their epistles, "Dictated but not read." An author
must also have the discouraging sense that another book
will be blotting his out almost instantly. It is not worth
while to do more than add some teaser slogans and smart
chapter heads. Finally, humor and high irony, preserv-
ing salt for serious ideas, are not easy to come by in the
current chronicle. The human race, by the month or year,
is not humorous. It is just incomprehensible and silly.
Irony comes from detachment and the long, long view.
These atrabilious comments on current print-stuff are
not really a denial of their usefulness, but a prelude to
explain our grievous need for the peace of those rarer
books that lift us above today and restore our heritage
from yesterday. You will find in The Source of Civili-
zation and in The Human Comedy, wisdom, courage,
faith in the dignity of life, distilled by patient study and
expressed in words that reveal a respect for language as
itself a victory. Heard is a mystic who believes that vio-
lence may not only destroy civilization, but even extin-
guish the thin flame of conscious life as it has flowered
in man. The single hope is the conquest of a rampant
individualism by some conscious restoration of a lost
subconscious awareness of our unity with all life and all
224
men. He admits the paradox: his book is a rational
seeking for the means of reconciliation.
Robinson is the historian "with his eye on the present"
who retells the story of mankind in a luminous, simple,
and human fashion to show how we arrived at our pres-
ent mastery over Nature, paralleled by a vast and perilous
ignorance of man himself. Harry Elmer Barnes in a
foreword says Robinson's message is, "We have not
brought our thinking up to date." We are crusted with
surviving falsehoods. His hope is that we can yet devise
an education that can so arrange our new conceptions of
man's origin and history, as to save us.
One grave satisfaction these books bring is that they
define our dilemma — the dual nature of modern life. It is
heartening to know that we other folks are not queer in
our sense of living in two worlds: one of science, control,
the promise of abundance, and of peace; the other of
social ignorance, frustration, conflicts that threaten war.
Some division line cuts through every human plan. Of
nature we seem to have enough knowledge, but as hu-
man beings we cannot plan, only struggle. It is an age of
pressure groups. Heard centers on our "fissured psyche"
that has split because our over-powerful conscious indi-
vidualism has left us isolated in a material universe
with no link to our subconscious unity. He says:
"A creature who makes deliberate inventions and dis-
coveries in the outer world can no longer leave the
growth and development of its inner world — its con-
sciousness— to nature or chance. That illusion has been
the great fundamental mistake of liberalism." We have
practiced laissez-faire in psychology as well as economics.
Robinson says: "We must, after all, come to terms in
some way with the emotions underlying mysticism.
They are very dear to us, and scientific knowledge will
never form an adequate substitute for them." We must,
both say, build a bridge across the chasm.
HEARD is A MYSTIC-POET WHO SEEKS TO WEAVE A SET OF
rational arguments against violence, and individualistic
materialism, that common sense view that we see reality,
all reality, and nothing but reality. His argument runs
that man did not survive by his specialization for vio-
lence, but by his undifferentiated sensitive awareness
and consciousness, thin-skinned to change. The cave man
was not a killer. Then he enlists archaeology to show that
of the three "proto-civilizations" the Egyptian and Su-
merian developed war techniques, and passed through
similar cycles to decay. "The collapse of empires is the
most striking fact of history." But the Indus civilization
that seems not to have weapons discovered a psychologic
wisdom that preserved it, changed indeed, until now.
This wisdom is traced in the Egyptian Book of the
Dead, the Tibetan Bardo to the Yogic disciplines that
enable men to change "the aperture of consciousness"
and pursue the way of peace with an inner awareness of
their unity with all their fellows. The theme is difficult;
the final design of schools of teachers and disciples in
the Yogic psychology may be smiled away as the familiar
escape faith of all mystics; the anthropology and archae-
ology may be unconvincing to experts. The claim that
SURVEY GRAPHIC
religions have been twisted by the growth of individualism
("Immortality is an individualistic conception") from their
faith in the Inner Light such as for a period gave the Friends
their powerful fellowship, will not seem true to many even
outside the creeds.
But somehow you cannot forget the book; it is beautiful,
solemn and rich, to be measured by the criteria we used for
Breasted's Dawn of Conscience, or Ortega's Revolt of the
Masses. It spans, as a great arch, man's history and growing
consciousness, and some of the blocks in the structure are
certainly granite. It seems to offer new wisdom, perhaps be-
cause we have forgotten the old. It stirs levels of emotion and
thought that have fallen into disuse. As Aldous Huxley says:
"His interpretations have a curiously exciting quality . . .
stimulating, original, significant." It does not mistake a month
for an epoch.
Nor does The Human Comedy, that fresh, wise, posthu-
mous gift of a great teacher, who covers the panorama of
history with such simplicity that to follow his re-telling of
man's story and folly is a delight and an illumination. Read
the chapters, Science Fumbles Along, Entering the Age of
Plenty, On Governing Ourselves, and The Arrogance of
Nationalism. Note how revealing is his breakdown of
Medievalism into three inter-connected periods, or his ap-
appraisal of what gifts the Greeks bore. Note too how a wise
man may be skeptical of the past, yet hopeful of the future,
and how mastery and high seriousness add grace to style.
"We need to believe that humanity was apparently a curious
incident in the universe and its career a recent episode in
cosmic history. . . . Francis Bacon added to all the previous
conceptions of God that of man's playfellow, for the Divine
majesty seems to take delight in hiding his works from his
Children and rejoice in their finding them out. This was a
gracious method of settling the conflict between science and
religion." Reading such history is good for the soul.
OVERSTREET SEEKS ALSO SOME WAY OF OVERCOMING OUR DUALISM
and restoring our kinship as the title word "Interdependence"
shows. But his kinship is not mystical in nature, but social
and economic in the here and now. He repeats much that is
not new but which may need constant iteration to that popu-
lar audience the author is skilled in reaching. Here is a kind
of compendium of current problems and proposals, especially
the control of money and credit. It covers too much to be close
knit, and the style is diffuse. The volume seems aside from
Professor Overstreet's special metier that gave us those bril-
liant studies, About Ourselves, and Influencing Human Be-
havior. The best parts are his study of culture patterns, folk-
ways, and group ideas that divide us, such as the old rural
pattern versus the later urban pattern. Such acute studies
help toward the answer of the central question which is again,
"Can we achieve the mentality adequate for the task of taking
this difficult world in hand?"
How difficult that world is seems proven by the 600 pages
and 100 pictures that In 1936 uses to digest the news of a
single year. The authors have given us a useful memorandum-
book, based on excellent divisions of fields of interest, that will
be of real value to students and teachers for reference. There
is little "slant" though some of the judgments respecting
cultural offerings are personal. The authors leave the reader
to make his own synthesis and his net conclusion might be
that a lot of things happened in 1936 and that it is very hard
to discover what they mean. The faults of the Age are not
the responsibility of its chroniclers. But the sense of flux ex-
plains this plea for books that view man as more than a
fruit-fly.
Moulton Scrutinizes Recovery
THE RECOVERY PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES. Brookings
Institution. 709 pp. Price $4 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
DR. MOULTON is OUT WITH SWORD AND GUN, FIGHTING VALI-
antly to protect us from a new boom and collapse. He has
medicine for conservatives and medicine for liberals, hard to
take but wholesome.
For conservatives he has the unpleasant thought that they
must not raise prices or the devil will get them. Now that
recovery is unquestionably here, the temptation to make
money on the upswing is strong. But recovery depends on
buying power, and buying power depends on low prices.
Actually prices have held steady since the NRA, until a couple
of months ago, when they began to rise in an alarming way.
Business men are fixing to cut their own throats again.
For liberals the doctor also has medicine. First, he explains
patiently once more the ancient doctrine of John R. Commons,
that high wage rates do not give high incomes to the working
class. Dr. Moulton calls attention to the fact that what really
happens is concentration of wage income. Wages rose, rela-
tively to prices, right through the depression, so that the fast-
vanishing wage payments went to fewer and fewer lucky em-
ployes, the rest being left with "high wages but no jobs."
Dr. Moulton emphasizes also the fallacy of shorter hours,
by proving that even the standard of living of 1929 would
require full employment now, on account of our deterioration
in plant and skills.
Economic problems are so massive, and so tangled in detail,
that when an economist like Dr. Moulton struggles through
with some valuable ideas, it is not fair to criticize him for his
omissions. Not in criticism, therefore, one may remark that
higher taxes, if laid on incomes, will solve the problem which
he rightly says can't be solved by higher prices, higher wages,
or shorter hours.
Washington, D. C. DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE
Three Justices and Interstate Commerce
THE COMMERCE CLAUSE— UNDER MARSHALL, TANEY AND
WAITE, by Felix Frankfurter. University of North Carolina Press. 114
pp. Price $1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN WITH ALL OF THE CHARM AND INCISIVE-
ness that is implicit in everything that comes from the pen of
Felix Frankfurter. He discusses for lawyers the concepts of
interstate commerce held by three great Chief Justices — Mar-
shall, Taney and Waite. There is no question that the Supreme
Court has "directed the stream" of our national economic
history and that such stream was colored by the personalities
of these great jurists. They presided over the Supreme Court
during a span of years beginning when "power" was merely
steam emitted from the spout of a tea kettle up to the days
when a TVA was on the horizon.
Professor Frankfurter analyzes each important interstate
commerce case which came before the Supreme Court during
the regimes of these Justices. Marshall reached his results by
esoteric reasoning. He never missed an opportunity to educate
the people of the land to broad national powers. His concepts
of a national economy were far in advance of his day. Taney,
appearing to many as a man of limited provincial vision, dif-
fered from Marshall's central doctrine that the commerce
clause operated to impose restrictions upon state authority
"which it was the duty of the Supreme Court to define and
enforce." Taney was keenly alive to the concentration of
wealth and power which the corporate form was instilling.
The present Brandeis philosophy, based on the fear of eco-
nomic elephantiasis, is not totally unrelated to Taney's philoso-
phy. It was Taney who declared that no hands are less worthy
to be trusted with the accumulation of power than "those of a
moneyed corporation." Waite held power during the period
when those weasel words of "due process" were being invoked
at every legal corner. We must remember that Marshall had
no such clause to contend with. Personally, I prefer Waite in
spite of the fact that he was considered mediocre and wrote
with a stuffy pen. Consistently he felt that the court is not
the maker of policy. He urged judicial self-restraint. The
ermine did not seem to distort him.
This book is, of course, invaluable for lawyers. In these
APRIL 1937
225
days, when the Supreme Court is vetoing legislation which
leads to a national economy, the book should be a legal best
seller. It does not pretend to go into the economic background
of the three Justices or the economy of the nation during their
regimes, and being concerned with law causes only, it is pre-
cise and logical but no doubt entirely un-understandable to
laymen who deal with realities instead of fictions of life. Pro-
fessor Frankfurter shows the ever swerving legalistic course
run by interstate commerce directed and steered by great
judges.
The book is so neatly objective and factually written that it
is even difficult to find out where Felix Frankfurter stands on
the present issues of the commerce power. A monograph on
that subject would be an even greater accomplishment.
New Yorf( MORRIS L. ERNST
Leadership in a Democracy
LEADERSHIP IN' A FREE SOCIETY, by T. N. Whitehead. Harvard
University Press. 266 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS BOOK CONTINUES THE EMINENT TRADITION AND INTELLEC-
tual emphasis earlier made familiar to us by such writers as
Carleton Parker, Helen Marot, Thorstein Veblen, Whiting
Williams, Elton Mayo and numerous others. It is a study of
the relation of the individual and his satisfactory self-
expression to the life and needs of society in its highly or-
ganized aspects, especially those of industrial activity. The
urgency of the problem of personal fulfillment in a day of
complex and unassimilated institutions, chiefly economic, is
cogently argued.
The role of leadership under such conditions and in rela-
tion to the aspirations of a democracy is discussed; and the
conclusion is reached that leadership at many levels, and
leaders who come spontaneously to the front no less than
leaders selected from above, must be nurtured and encouraged.
"The essence of democratic leadership is that it shall be so
exercised as to promote opportunities for the fitting initiative
of those within the society, and in the manner which these
latter desire."
The book properly treats of many related phases of its sub-
ject— of management, of labor unions, of other social systems;
and the point of view throughout is organic, evolutionary and
democratic in the finest philosophical sense.
It is unfortunate that the author does not see fit to compress
his theme into somewhat shorter compass, and in doing so to
simplify his vocabulary. The rightful audience of this book
is the oncoming generation of leaders in the world of cor-
porate executives, union heads and of legislators who are
concerned about the laws governing organized human rela-
tions. They will probably be drawn to this work by tens in-
stead of thousands. It is to be hoped that in articles, speeches
and university courses Professor Whitehead will be able to
popularize the timely and wise message here presented.
New Yor% ORDWAY TEAD
The Odyssey of a Red Cross Man
IN WAR'S WAKE, by Ernest P. Bicknell. American Red Cross. 273 pp.
Price $1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS RECORD OF 1914-15, THE FIRST YEAR OF THE WORLD WAR,
based upon contemporary letters and the diary of an impartial
observer, should be compulsory reading for our present-day
dictators, newsmongers, and war-inclined patrioteers. It is
wholly admirable in spirit, written with restraint and without
bitterness. Reviewing his documentary material twenty years
later, Colonel Bicknell wisely decided not to allow his story to
be "mellowed by the softening touch of time," as would no
doubt have happened if he had written "from memory alone."
Here is the reproduction of extended extracts from his own
journal and reports made at the moment when the unrelieved
horrors, the unimaginable frightfulness of the war, were vivid
in his mind, sometimes too sickening even for this objective
record. To be sure, being "rather conservative by nature" the
"clamorous propaganda of hate" which he encountered
affected him "most disagreeably." What an accurate self-
appraisal this is, and what a blessing it would be if conservat-
ism in general were exhibited in the same way. Equally re-
vealing is Bicknell's reply, when asked to mention the most
surprising of the war's effects on human nature — that it is "to
be found in the amazing overthrow of just plain common
sense."
The tragic and dreadful immediate consequences of the war
in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia have never been more clearly
or eloquently portrayed. Always this disillusioned and experi-
enced observer recognized that they were not to be laid to the
charge of one country or another but at the door of war itself.
Colonel Bicknell's first assignment, in association with Wick-
liffe Rose and Henry James, Jr., as members of the Rockefel-
ler Foundation War Relief Commission, was to investigate
and report upon, an enterprise known as the Commission for
Relief in Belgium, which was understood to be under the
chairmanship of an American named Herbert Hoover. Later
he had to investigate the epidemic of typhus in Serbia. As a
result of these inquiries huge sums became available from
America for Belgian relief and for the sanitary commission in
Serbia of which Dr. Richard P. Strong was chairman.
Important people — doctors, generals, correspondents, cardi-
nals, queens and a regicide — appear in these pages, but they
keep their place. Nothing interferes with the serene, alert,
conscientious performance of the Red Cross task. The only
story which appears twice (page 79 and page 198) is that of
a charwoman who scrubbed the floors of a London office
building many years and was discharged because of her Ger-
man birth. After tramping the streets for work in vain she
appealed to a charitable society and it was found that her four
sons, all born in England, had enlisted and were then serving
with the English army in France.
Although some of those in whose judgment Colonel Bick-
nell had great confidence advised against his undertaking this
journey, it must be agreed after the event that it had rich
results in the relief of the Great War's most innocent and
pathetic victims.
New York EDWARD T. DEVINE
War and the "Welfare Bloc"
NEUTRALITY AND COLLECTIVE SECURITY, by Sir Alfred Zim-
mern, William Edward Dodd, Charles Warren, and Edwin deWitt Dickin-
son. Lectures on the Harris Foundation, University sf Chicago Press.
277 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE HONORS IN THIS VOLUME ARE SHARED BY SlR ALFRED AND
Mr. Warren. In brilliant terms the former argues that col-
lective security is possible only among constitutional democra-
cies— states of an utterly different character from dictatorships
which exalt considerations of power over considerations of
welfare. "While standing firm against threats," he holds, the
members of the "welfare bloc" should "develop to the farthest
possible extent the applications of the cooperative principle as
between one another." A laudable aspiration! But perhaps Sir
Alfred is intoxicated by the political philosophy of democratic
liberalism. How many of the disparities between dictatorships
and democracies, when stripped of their ideological panoply,
are differences not of kind but merely of degree? Unfortunate-
ly "welfare," though it may be prevalent within states, seems
largely to stop at the water's edge. There can be no hope for
the cooperation sought by Sir Alfred until opportunism and a
narrow concept of national interest cease to dominate the
foreign policy of the democracies.
In the interim, the United States seeks to avoid embroil-
ment in the well-nigh inevitable conflict for which none of
the participants will be without fault. With admirable clarity
Charles Warren depicts the insecurity of our status as a poten-
tial neutral and analyzes the opposition to remedial legislation
aired at .Congressional hearings in 1936. Mr. Warren is thor-
oughly cognizant of the precarious character of neutrality in
any form today. But if the country will stand aloof, he is de-
226
termined to render the "national safeguard law" as effective
as technical skill can make it.
Ambassador Dodd despairingly reviews the development of
the dark vista confronting western civilization in terms which
— doubtless without conscious intent — suggest that a new
social order is a prerequisite for future progress. Finally, Dean
Dickinson assures us, in a series of ponderous platitudes, of
the eventual triumph of righteousness in international rela-
tions and American foreign policy. Mention should be made
of a useful appendix containing documents relating to the
League Covenant and the Italian-Ethiopian war, and to Quincy
Wright's excellent preface.
Foreign Policy Association DAVID H. POPPER
Conservation and the Common Man
OUR NATURAL RESOURCES AN'D THEIR CONSERVATION, by A.
E. Parkins and J. H. Whitaker. Wiley. 650 pp. Price $5 postpaid of
Survey Graphic.
THE DRAMATIC NATURE OF RECENT FLOODS AND DUST STORMS,
and the hardly less dramatic activity of the administration in
attacking the problems of which they are symptoms, have
directed public attention to our natural resources and their
conservation. Students, who in that connection have desired to
consult a comprehensive treatise, have not found such a work
available. This book fills the gap. It suffers the disadvantage
of being a product of thirteen authors, but one author could
not have met the need so promptly. Nearly every contributor
is a distinguished authority in some part of the field, and each
treats his subject seriously. The book is the best available for
one who seeks a comprehensive, informing view of the con-
servation problem. Soil, water, minerals; erosion and floods;
agriculture, grazing and forestry; water supply, navigation
and power; wild life, recreation and the relation of men to
environment, are among the subjects discussed.
The work is strongest in its descriptive and historical fea-
tures. This was necessary in a pioneer, comprehensive treatise,
but it did not leave space for adequate consideration of some
of the deeper elements of the problem. Evaluations of public
works are in terms of conventional business rather than
social accounting. Comprehensive programs of conservation,
multiple-purpose works and allocation of joint costs are not
considered adequately. The function of power as a coordinat-
ing factor is not discussed. The St. Lawrence project is ob-
served through the eyes of a business man rather than through
the eyes of a social scientist. The book provides, however,
a suitable foundation of historical and descriptive reference
for later intensive consideration of such problems.
New York HARLOW S. PERSON
Money and Competition
AN INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND POLICY,
by J. E. Meade. Oxford. 392 pp. Price $3.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
}. E. MEADE HAS ACHIEVED TWO WORTH WHILE ACCOMPLISH-
ments. In the first place, he has synthesized marginal eco-
nomics with the new developments in the fields of money
and competition. The trained economist will quickly sense the
influence of such writers as Wicksell, Vom Mises, Keynes,
Durbin, Harrod, Chamberlin and Mrs. Robinson.
The second and major contribution is one of procedure.
Against a background of economic theory, the author suggests
economic policies for solving most of the pressing economic and
social problems of the times. At the beginning, Meade asks,
"Can the Economic System Work?" After answering in the
affirmative, he attacks unemployment. Drawing continually
on economic theory, the author proceeds to analyze and offer
ways of improving competitive conditions, the equitable dis-
tribution of income, and international conditions.
In his attempt to solve a particular problem, it is to J. E.
Meade's credit that he separates economic and ethical consid-
erations. His first concern is the economic aspects of a prob-
lem. Meade keeps economic matters on an economic plane;
"what economic science dictates as right" is his foremost con-
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OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY
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AMERICAN COMMUNITY
By PERCY E. DAVIDSON, Professor of
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Indicates the amount and kind of occupational
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workers. Determines how this movement is
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in the state which registered the largest number
cared for under the federal plan. A practical
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Stanford University, California
A Treatise and Casebook for Court Workers, Pro-
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By PAULINE V. YOUNG, Ph.D.
The University of Southern California
MCGRAW-HILL PUBLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY — $4.00
Considers the problem of juvenile delinquency and probation from a so-
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Stresses the "how-to-do-it" from the point of view of every agency
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sideration. The author recognizes that, under conditions
favorable to competition, the free working of economic forces
provides the greatest benefits to society. However, he is sensi-
tive to the forces which restrict free competition and suggests
methods of overcoming or alleviating such hindrances.
Relative to the ethical implications inherent in the solution
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state intervention. Yet his objective is admirable. Meade advo-
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working of competitive economic forces, provide the greatest
social welfare, and remove many of the existing inequalities.
As an economist, he believes in the working of competition
where competitive conditions prevail. As a practical idealist,
Meade supports state intervention as a means of removing
inequalities and improving social welfare. Economists and
people interested in the solution of major economic and social
problems facing the United States will find Meade's approach
interesting and his ideas stimulating.
Economics Statistics, Inc., New Yor^ G. OGDEN TRENCHARD
Kirby Page's Religion
LIVING COURAGEOUSLY, by Kirby Page. Farrar and Rinehart. 319 pp.
Price $'1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
LIVING COURAGEOUSLY, BY KlRBY PAGE, FOR ALL ITS HEAVY
wording is impressively lively in movement.
In ten chapters an earnest and clear-seeing Christian, dis-
cusses three "imperishable principles" which "offer hope of
salvation from social suicide." Thus is the issue drawn
between life and death for contemporary civilization. The
salvation principles are basically Christian: "reverence for
human personality, recognition of kinship with every other
person, and the sovereignty of Eternal God, our compassion-
ate Father."
One hundred daily readings, circling ten times about the
ten chapter subjects make up the second half of the book.
Mr. Page heroically states the faith, "if God be for us who
can be against us," then, like so many brave and able Christian
leaders, turns inward on "living courageously." God must
be acknowledged but he cannot or will not do anything Him-
self beyond human effort or through it!
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Working Women
IF WOMEN MUST WORK, by Loire Brophy. Appleton-Century. 153 pp.
Price $1.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE SOUNDNESS IN THE BASIC PHILOSOPHY OF LoiRE BROPHv's
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Mrs. Brophy's experience in vocational guidance and place-
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go forth to land a job. She discusses how one should dress and
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suggestions given for growing with and on the job.
Mrs. Brophy faces facts. "My feeling is that women should
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The listing in the appendix of trade, class and technical
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magazines is valuable. This is no new idea but it adds to the
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proach the employment officer.
There is need for such a book as this. The chief criticism is
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getting the desired job and that she is not sufficiently realistic
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the book justifies its publication and should prove of use to
young and old realists.
Washington, D. C. CATHERINE FILENE SHOUSE
What Men Have Worked For
MAN'S WORLDLY GOODS, by Leo Huberman. Harper. 349 pp. Price
$2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS IS A MOST REFRESHING BOOK, ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE OF US
who ordinarily have difficulty in reading anything in eco-
nomics. In an informal, almost casual way, which takes noth-
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going through important and normally incomprehensible eco-
nomic issues against an illuminating and entertaining back-
ground of economic history.
We learn what was really back of knighthood in the middle
ages — who paid the bills; we witness the change in attitude
toward paying interest on borrowed money, from the day
when all such interest payment was regarded as usury and a
sin, down to a period when it became the accepted basis for
economic and social life. What the Guilds and free towns
actually did; how laissez-faire developed; the historic back-
ground for free trade; monopoly and imperialism yesterday
and today; and how, in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx
took the theory of surplus value and made it into an expla-
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these and many other things are set forth in Mr. Huberman's
pages in so skillful a fashion that we are hardly aware of the
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The illustrations are especially good. They include full page
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ledger accounts from most of the countries of the then known
world; a contemporary copper engraving showing a gold-
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century woodcut showing children working in a paper factory
and an engraving by Dore depicting London slums. For the
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Carnegie Foundation for the W. CARSON RYAN, JR.
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THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SOCIALISM, by John Strachey.
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Of the revolutionary group, which would mold as well as
inform public opinion, Mr. Strachey is a leading spokes-
man. His conviction is aided by talent and industry. He
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... an invaluable aid to
handling and understand-
ing difficult personalities
FOR DOCTORS, TEACHERS,
SOCIAL WORKERS AND EVERY-
QNE INTERESTED IN PSYCHOLOGY
THE ANATOMY OF
PERSONALITY
By HOWARD W. HAGGARD, M.D.
Associate Professor of Applied Physiology at Yale
and CLEMENTS C. FRY, M.D.
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and
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HOW much can you tell about people's personal-
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is as intelligently aware of the past as he is intimately
familiar with the present, so that his exposition has
depth and dignity as well as immediate point. The present
volume, while treading much ground that is known to his
past readers, makes advance in two particulars. In the first
place, Mr. Strachey here makes a special effort to have us
understand the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. He
necessarily attempts to give their reasoning in tabloid, but
constantly urges that the reader go to the sources for him-
self, and gives many helps in this direction. In the second
place, Mr. Strachey comments on recent developments in
the economic conflict all over the western world and in
China, Japan and India. Insofar as this involves the dif-
ferences within radical ranks, the author's report will be
news to the average reader, for even the most important
factional divisions are apt to remain too long confined to
the socialist and communist press.
Mr. Strachey throws his whole force behind the united
front movement in Britain and America, and insists that
widely and compactly organized labor parties are necessary
to the supplanting of production for profit by production for
use. His is not a comfortable belief in the likelihood that
capitalism will turn into cooperation without the determined
agency of political reinforcement.
Those wanting information on the background of the re-
cent Moscow trials will find competent help in the explana-
tions of this stout Stalinist.
Johns Hopkins University
BROADUS MITCHELL
A University in Tribal Seclusion
HEIDELBERG AND THE UNIVERSITIES OF AMERICA. The Viking
Press, 61 pp. Price 50 cents postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IN THIS SMALL VOLUME CHARLES C. BURLINGHAM, JAMES
Byrne, Samuel Seabury and Henry L. Stimson present to the
American public the interesting controversy in letters to the
London Times, Spring 1936, as to whether English universi-
ties should participate in the celebration of the five hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of Heidelberg University. The issue
boiled down to two points: Are the German universities still
institutions in which free study, free research, free teaching
prevail or are they subjected to servitude, with political
dogmas enforced upon them?
Second: Would participation in the celebration work to
the political advantage of the Nazi regime and would it be
"manipulated by authority to indicate condonation of their
actions."
To put these questions is to answer them — hence came
refusal of invitations (suggested at first in letters of Bishop
Herbert Dunelm-Durham and Charles Grant Robertson,
the Chancellor of Birmingham University) by Oxford and
Birmingham and then others.
It is remarkable that the British universities could see the
truth though the German government tried to disguise it.
Even that cautious scholar, Josiah C. Stamp, was deceived at
first by his personal impressions in Heidelberg on the occasion
of his lectures. He stated later, that "the evidence of the
most drastic and indefensible control from outside of every
detail of university life ... is dreadfully cumulative," and
concluded, that "refusal to attend can thus fairly be deducted
as our responsibility." . . .
The record of the dismissal of forty-seven members of the
staff out of 189, in Heidelberg alone, of more than 1300 in
the whole of Germany, of 7000 teachers in the twenty-three
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scholars who were spared. No resistance was offered because
of the elimination of personalities who would have been in
the forefront of opposition. So suddenly fell this blow on
the dignity and independence of the academic institutions that
not even the slightest expression of solidarity was voiced.
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A great number of the German scholars certainly long for the
return of their old freedom — -another part persuaded them-
selves that this suppression is for the common good; but
German universities do not exist any more and will not
under this regime. Heidelberg University itself decided to re-
move the inscription from one building (built by American
endowments and largely by the help of benefactors of Jewish
origin): Dem lebendigen Geist (To the living spirit), replac-
ing it by: To the German spirit. The words of the script:
The wind bloweth where it listeth . . . are not valid any more
in Germany — it went down the path to a tribal seclusion.
New York EMIL LEDERER
Covering the World
I FOUND NO PEACE, by Webb Miller. Simon and Schuster. 332 pp.
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DURING HIS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OF JOURNALISM, WEBB MILLER
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He has interviewed many great men, among whom were
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JOHN T. WHITAKER HAS BEEN AN OBSERVER OF MEN AND EVENTS,
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results in disarmament conferences — he began his search for
the reasons behind those failures. From country to country he
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street. This book is the result of his search.
In 1932, six months before Hitler became chancellor, the
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was to be dedicated to fear of Hitler. He was in Germany
during Hitler's rise, saw the 1934 "purge," and realized that
fear of encircling enemies, political and economic, was the
inspiration for the blood-bath. He saw fear in Austria after
Dollfuss had paid the price of resistance to nazism. Sent to
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ultimatum sent to Hungary as a warning to Italy to keep
hands off the Balkan Entente. Returning to Geneva, he wit-
nessed the battle that was being fought: "The idealism of
Geneva vs. the cynicism of Rome." Mussolini's 1935 war spell-
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the last act of the drama, its mise en scene and players.
This splendid book gives a vivid picture of personalities
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New Yor{ i V. F. JAMES
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Sex Life and Nervous Dis-
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Sexual Difficulties
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Sex Life of Unmarried Adults
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Sex Happiness
Age and the Sexual Impulse
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Love Rights of Women ;of Men
The Choice of a Mate
Esthetics of Coitus
Expression and Repression
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Relationship of Sex to Happi-
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Chastity: the Primitive Atti-
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OUT OFW,f PREJUDICE!
Who is flooding the mails in this country with anti-scmitic propaganda?
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the same mistake in America and help fascism to be ushered in here?
Don't miss this thought provoking article by a famous author, scholar
and lecturer, Mr. James Waterman Wise.
SPIES IN INDUSTRY!
Have you a little fink in your home or shop? You may have even if you
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O'/v ami Slate. . .
sr,i
HUMAN INVENTIONS:
Pick-and-Shovel Holiday
by JOHN F. REICH
LAST SUMMER FORTY-FIVE YOUNG MEN AND FOURTEEN
young women, chaperoned by several college professors,
pitched their tents along the Clinch River in Tennessee
to spend a new kind of vacation. Instead of a month of
idle play, they set to work. The boys toiled like beavers
eight hours a day building a masonry dam to form a fish
rearing pool. The girls cooked and washed and ran the
camp. At night the campers sat up late discussing serious
subjects— labor unions, the coal industry, the TVA, for-
eign affairs.
All of them visited in the nearby mountain homes.
One day — the temperature a hundred degrees in the shade
— the boys piled their battered old truck with firewood
and delivered it up the "draw" to the cabin of an old
mountain woman to whom life had brought little more
than trouble and children. At the close of the summer,
they set up their discarded toolshed at her place, explain-
ing that it might come in handy for a chicken house.
"Chicken house, indeedy," she said in dignified protest;
"Ah'll be movin' into it myself in the mawnin."
These warm-hearted youngsters were volunteers in
one of the work camps organized by the Quakers to
offer young people, in the construction of peace, the sense
of adventure that war sometimes gives. The objective
of the camps is more than just doing good deeds and
keeping busy. These pick and shovel peacemakers have
inherited an idea evolved by a Swiss pacifist during the
war — Pierre Peresole, who established work camps in
Europe while the war was still raging. Like Peresole, the
American Friends pick an area of actual or potential
conflict, and try to do a neighborly job that would never
have been undertaken without the voluntary labor of
the campers.
THROUGH HARD PHYSICAL LABOR, FELLOWSHIP WITH THEIR
neighbors, and serious study of the social and economic
difficulties with which they come in contact, the youthful
campers try to demonstrate the positive value of good
will. They enjoy the hearty rigor of army life combined
with the impetus of a good cause. Today's tensions and
problems, in depressed areas of the country, are nearly
as acute as those the war left in Europe when the first
groups of young men and women went into devastated
areas and, paying their own expenses, lived and worked
among the people. Then ex-soldiers from Germany joined
work camps in the coal fields of Wales to demonstrate
the ideal of brotherhood and English students at their
own expense leveled and drained an Austrian swamp.
The first such work camp in America was organized in
1934; fifty young men and women dug a pipe line and
reservoir for the water system of a homestead community
of stranded coal miners sponsored by the Quakers in
Western Pennsylvania.
Projects are organized in mining "patches," in city
slums and industrial centers, as well as in the woods.
Working shoulder to shoulder with men and women
(In answering advertisements please n-ention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
232
less privileged than themselves, the volunteers learn to
appreciate people for what they are.
The neighbors, usually bashful at first, always get
around to appreciating the campers. In a southern camp
last year, when the campers held "open house," they found
their guests stiff and unresponsive. Songs, dances, quips
and stunts failed to draw the faintest ripple of amuse-
ment. Even the ice cream was accepted and eaten only
after assurance that it was free. It seemed a flat failure.
But the score of mountain men returned the compliments
of the evening by serenading the camp.
LAST SUMMER THERE WERE SEVEN CAMPS IN PENNSYLVANIA,
New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee, enrolling
190 volunteers. Campers came from thirty states and
three foreign countries, from sixty-six colleges and thirty-
four high and preparatory schools. Of the total number of
campers, fifty were members of the Society of Friends —
with twenty other denominations represented. There were
Protestants, Catholics, Jews and others who claimed no
religious affiliation. Several of the number were Negroes.
The campers pay their own expenses, which aver-
age from $50 to $60 for the eight or nine-week season.
They do their own work. Almost no paid employes help
manage the camps or ease the labor. The leaders, for the
most part, are teachers and their wives. They, too, pay
their own expenses and share in the work and adventure.
The boys work regularly eight hours a day. In addi-
tion to the camp chores the girls sew, organize nursery
schools, become friends with the neighboring families. In
one community they repaired the books in the local
library.
At least six camps are planned for 1937 by the Amer-
ican Friends Service Committee. One at Hull-House,
Chicago, where the campers will live in the settlement
house, has for its project the wrecking of several dilapi-
dated houses, to make room for a playground for the
children of the crowded Halsted Street neighborhood. At
the Delta Cooperative Farm, in Mississippi, started two
years ago for dispossessed cotton sharecroppers, this sum-
mer's work campers will build a workshop and a road,
and clear land for farm development. About thirty men
and ten women will work in the coal fields of Fayette
County, Pennsylvania, laying a water system for a com-
munity of displaced miners.
Members of the three religious groups historically
dedicated to peace, Friends, Mennonites and Brethren, will
join in a work camp at the Tunesassa Indian School, near
the Allegheny reservation in southwestern New York
State. Their task will be to paint and renovate the build-
ings and assist in building a community center for the
Indians.
ACCORDING TO THEIR TEACHERS, THESE SEASONED STUDENTS
return from a summer in a volunteer work camp with
new insight and real zest for serious studies. More than
one diffident, awkward college boy has already "found
himself" through the maturing influences and the fellow-
ship of a pick-and-shovel holiday. The greatest magic tonic
of all comes in remembrance — not only of blisters, and
sunburn and hardened muscles, but of humble friends
and workaday problems known first hand. As the mother
of one student ditch-digger wrote: "Since his summer in a
work camp John is not only healthier, but happier, than I
have ever known him to be."
(In answering advertisements please
233
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See SOVIET RUSSIA
with
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WALT CARMON JOSHUA KUNITZ
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Trips which show you more than tourist
sights at least cost of time and money.
Circulars on request.
Independent arrangements for those who
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Cooperating with Intourist
round trip New York with *ftftr
a month in Soviet Russia. \nQn
Other tours up to «f U U U
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and Brewer Eddy; British Isles by private motor with Mrs.
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Bailey Farnum; Alaska Cruise with Dr. John B. May; Grand
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Sfnd /or thirty-two page booklet E
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RUSSIAN SURVEY TOUR
Leader: Dr. Tredwell Smith, Dalton School
COOPERATIVES STUDY TOUR
Leader: Dr. Roy V. Peel, New York University
BUREAU OF UNIVERSITY TRAVEL
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RAMPTRIpS
Specializing in
FREIGHTER VOYAGES and CARGO LINER CRUISES
Booklet (No. 2) of Voyages Up to 50 Days, on
request, 44 Beaver St., N. Y. C. BO. 9-8850.
Russia's "Four Hundred"
RUSSIA'S GIRL GUIDES SPEAK IN THE PLURAL. "Wfi" THEY SAY.
"Our" factories. "Our" farms. Four hundred strong, they are
your interpreters in a strange, unpronounceable-language-
speaking world. You are dependent on them to introduce you
to a local factory or a Czarist palace. If you wish you can ar-
range for one to be your personal guide, and always a girl
accompanies your party when you leave one of the main cities
for an extended tour. Last year 24,000 foreign visitors came to
the Soviet Union, 60 percent of them in the summer months.
So more guides are constantly being trained in the schools of
foreign languages attached to the universities.
Two hundred Intourist girls work in Moscow, which gets
at least 80 percent of the travelers to the U.S.S.R. Leningrad
has one hundred, and the remaining hundred are divided
among Kiev, Odessa, Tiflis and other cities where tourists go.
Vera, Ella, Tatiana, Efimova were some of my guides last
year. I remember them more for their charm, friendliness and
pride in their jobs than for their pretty speeches about sights
and events.
Vera told me much about the Intourist girls' working con-
ditions. Born in Kiev twenty-six years ago, she studied English
at the university in that city. Coming to Leningrad five years
ago, at first she worked as an interpreter for an English tech-
nical expert from Manchester at the Elektrosilo plant. For the
past three years she has been with Intourist. She likes her
work, particularly her contacts with foreigners, the opportuni-
ties for study and education as well as the trips throughout
the breadth and length of the U.S.S.R.
The salary of an Intourist guide is 300 roubles a month at
the start, plus 10 percent more for every foreign language she
knows in addition to one which is a requisite. On tour she
receives additional pay. The Intourist girl always travels second
or "soft" class on the trains even when you travel third.
Sixty percent of the girls are English speaking, 20 percent
German, and 15 percent French. The other 5 percent is
divided among Italian, Spanish and the Scandinavian. Twenty-
five percent speak two languages, 10 percent three, a few
four, and there is one who knows five in addition to Russian.
They have the standard Russian six-day week — five working
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
234
days and one free day. In the winter the week is divided into
three work days and three free days. They get vacations of
from two weeks' to a month's duration, with full pay; longer
periods at special Intourist rest houses and sanitoria if their
health requires it. They receive free medical care, and each
girl is examined thoroughly by a specialist once a year. The
regular provision calling for two months' rest before and two
months after childbirth, as well as the use of mother and child
welfare stations applies to them as to all Russian working
women.
They tell you that though their salaries may seem small,
they get "other things free." These other things mean in
addition to medical and educational benefits, free clothing —
at least two dresses and two pairs of shoes a year. There is
also a store operated especially for the girls in which they can
buy clothes and other necessities at reduced prices. Lower
rates are theirs when they take meals in special employe
dining rooms of Intourist hotels and also if they should wish
rooms in those hotels. All this makes the girls' 300 roubles or
more go a long way.
We were on a long bus ride one rainy afternoon returning
from the palaces at Detskoe Selo and I occupied the seat next
to Ella, having by that time become very adept at beating the
other tourists to it in grabbing the seat near the guide —
always the most interesting seat in the vehicle.
Did she like her work? Yes, but — she had other ambitions.
What were they? Well — finally she told me — she wanted to
be a scenario writer. To write movie stories for children. One
script had already been accepted, but she had been asked to
make changes in it. That night she would go to a club where
experienced writers gather; she would talk it over with them
and they would help her.
Ella was thirty years old, and she could remember the "old
days." She was born of poor parents in a small town near
Minsk in White Russia, one of many children. What, she
asked, awaited her in those days? Poverty, no chance for an
education, marriage at sixteen to some petty shopkeeper or
enslaved worker, a drove of children, a fear-ridden existence.
Tatiana was our guide in the lofty halls of the Hermitage.
She amazed us with the knowledge of the great art treasures
which she had crammed into her twenty-three-year-old head.
But she knew more than art. She later told me about the
Intourist girls' union, the "Politprosvet," to which belonged
educational workers — teachers, scientific workers, librarians,
guides, and so on. The girls also had their own shop com-
mittee.
It had become a routine question by that time, so I asked
Tatiana how she liked her work. She said she liked it, but
hoped she would not be sent out of the city on tour, as she
had a three-months-old baby. Husbands (or wives) and babies
are seldom discussed in Russia, and Tatiana was the only girl
who ever disclosed anything to me about her private life.
Efimova, a sweet girl of barely twenty years, was the young-
est girl guide with whom I came in contact. Her English was
shakier than all the others and I was convinced that I was
her first tourist since graduation from the School of Lan-
guages, but she assured me that no, I was the second, the
first having been an Englishman who had presented her with
a volume of Shakespeare which she clutched in her hand
everywhere we went on sightseeing trips.
She was a worker's child, born on the outskirts of Moscow,
probably simultaneously with the revolution. Her direct little
comments were worth volumes on Soviet life and manners.
Because of our speech difficulties I could not find out very
much about Efimova so I finally asked her if it would not be
easier for her to express herself if she wrote down for me
something about herself. In the paper which she brought me
the words "we" and "us" seemed to her an important, integral
part of the history of her life and the total of her aspirations.
— RUTH V. MORSE
(In answering advertisements
COMPASS SPECIALS
to the
SOVIET UNION
• 3rd SOVIET TRAVEL SEMINAR
Leader — Prof. Bernhard J. Stern
Editor Science and Society
• 2nd SOCIAL CHANGES TOUR
Leader— Dr. Clinton J. Taft
Director C. L. U. of S. Calif.
• 2nd OLD AND NEW WORLD TOUR
Leader— Prof. Bernhard Ostrolenk, C.C.N.Y.
• SOCIAL SECURITY SEMINAR
Leader— Charlotte Todes
Labor organizer and journalist
Also a Selection of Other Outstanding Individual and
Conducted Tours
For descriptive pamphlets SR apply
COMPASS TRAVEL BUREAU
5.S West 42nd Street, N. Y. LOngacre 5-3070
for 1937 EDUTRAVELERS
Also Individual Edutravelogs to Europe and Mexico
ffi^v,^ SS.-SSS! wuw&ss M
Survey Graphic.
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Telephones: GRamercy 7-3284-3285
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EUROPEAN AND ORIENT STUDY TOURS 1937
FOR THE INTELLIGENT TRA VELLER
WHO WANTS SOMETHING MORE
THAN SIGHTSEEING.
Write for information
POCONO STUDY TOURS, Inc.
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with MRS. ALLEN JOHNSON
From New York Juris 29th In S. S. Statendam
92 Days — 8 Countries — $750.00
For Descriptive Literature and Delaili Aptly to
BAXTER TRAVEL SERVICE, Inc.
522 Fifth Avenue
New York City
A SUMMER HOLIDAY TO
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Visiting unusual places in the Aegean Sea, Adriatic and the
Mediterranean.
Personally conducted by Mr. Elliot Taylor of the Near East
Foundation.
Descriptive folder on request
FARLEY TRAVEL AGENCY, 535 Fifth Ave., New York
INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP TRAVEL
Cruises and Tours West Indies South America
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Suffer the Little Children
by KEN CAMPBELL
LITTLE BROTHER HAD BEEN PUNY AND FRETFUL SINCE SUNDAY,
so Mollie Hawkins told Henry, who was six years old and
dependable, to sit under the tree on the big road and stop
the doctor as he passed on his way to town.
"It's a mercy it's Wednesday, an' he goes in regular, else
you'd have to walk over to 'is place. Yore pappy and me shore
ain't got no time to go fer "im. I'll be pickin' berries over on
the Simpson lot, so you holler right loud when he comes.
An' Henry, you take Little Brother with you. There ain't no
good place to lay him in the berry field. Keep the flies off him
good. They aggryvate him consider'ble, sick like he is."
As Henry took up the crying child, and began picking his
way carefully down the path from the cabin, Mollie called
after him.
"Now don't you miss Doctor, Henry. I ain't skeared Little
Brother's much ailin', but I'm jest a mite fearful it's some-
thin' more'n the heat. He's broke out thick all over, an' awful
hot."
Henry laid Little Brother in the coolest shade he could find,
and fought the flies manfully. Yet by the time Dr. Brown
drew up in his old Ford, Little Brother seemed hotter, and
his crying had died down to an exhausted whimper. The
doctor knew scarlet fever when he saw it, and told Mollie
what to do for Little Brother's comfort.
"I'll drop in regularly to see him till he's better," he prom-
ised as he closed his medicine bag. "And of course I'll have to
report the case to Dr. Wharton, the health officer in town,
you know. He'll probably be out today to quarantine you."
"What's that mean, Doctor?" asked Mollie.
"Why, that means you and your entire family must stay at
home till the baby is — well, much better. You see, Henry
might come down with the fever, and before we knew it,
give it to someone he comes in contact with. He doesn't have
it yet, and maybe he won't, with the serum I'll get for him
in town. But we can't be too careful."
Mollie let the doctor go without asking what "serum"
meant. She was thinking. She didn't like to run up against
the law, and what the doctor said about staying home sounded
mighty like law to her. But she reckoned she and her man
Jim couldn't keep to the house any big piece of time. Jim
was working by the day in the hayfields, and she had to
gather berries while they were plentiful. She wiped her tired
face once on her apron, and rocked Little Brother a spell
before she took up her pail and trudged back to the Simpson
lot.
Dr. Brown regretted the prospect of an epidemic, but wel-
comed an opportunity to remind Dr. Wharton of himself,
for when he had come to the county six months before, Dr.
Wharton had promised to see, if all went well after a short
time, that he should be appointed county doctor for the in-
mates at the Poor Farm. This wouldn't mean a great deal,
but with no assurance of fees being paid by his patients, the
certain money from the county would take care at least of the
taxes on the homeplace his uncle had left him.
HE FOUND DR. WHARTON IN THE POOLROOM. WHEN THE CAME
was finished the old man slapped him resoundingly on the
back and led him upstairs to his office.
"Sit down, Doctor, sit down," said Dr. Wharton. "Here,
wait'll I brush the dust out of that chair — that's better — I'm
glad to see you, Doctor, I am indeed. Why, only last night it
was, I was a-talkin' 'bout you to my wife. 'Sarah,' I said, 'that
new doctor out Whispering Hope way is all right, all right!
Not like most of these young squirts just out of medical
school; think they know it all, they do. He's willin' to learn
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
236
by watchin* some of us old-uns who've been practicin' since
Hector was a pup.' We mightn't be up on all the new-fangled
ways, I told her, but we've kept a fair-to-middlin' number
above the ground! An' what d'you s'pose Sarah said to that,
Doctor? She said, 'Too many of the triflin' cattle, if you ask
me!' Now, Sarah, she . . ."
Dr. Wharton paused to gnaw off a big chew from a plug
of tobacco, and Dr. Brown took the chance to say what he
had come to say.
"Well, now, that's too bad," announced Dr. Wharton heart-
ily. "Damn it, I missed that spittoon, an' tobacco juice on the
floor sure is nasty, it sure is." He squirted another stream
accurately, and settled back in his chair, his thumbs in the
armholes of his vest, his composure restored. "You tell 'em,
Doctor, to stay home, an' soon's I can, I'll run out an' quaran-
tine 'em. They won't pay much attention, they won't, but it
ain't right I shouldn't scare 'em 'gainst runnin' loose long
as there's danger."
"Perhaps we should give Henry the serum, Doctor," sug-
gested Dr. Brown, "and the neighbor children, too."
"Now that's another shame." Dr. Wharton grinned. "But
the truth is, I'm plumb out of it, an' there ain't any in town.
But tell you what I'll do— I'll write to Frankfort right away
for a supply. I ought to have it on hand, but dad burn it, I
just can't seem to keep stocked up with everything^ Science is
gettin' to be almost too much for us, these days."
As he rattled homeward in his old car, Dr. Brown thought,
yes, there should be serum on hand. The least to be done now
was to get some as soon as possible, and he knew one of Dr.
Wharton's "right away's" came nearer meaning a month than
tomorrow. He gave the car almost more gasoline than it
could stand when he thought why he had not pressed the
urgency of the situation. Young doctors who needed work
at the Poor Farm did not try to hurry Dr. Wharton.
TWO DAYS LATER, BECAUSE THE BABY WAS BETTER, DR. BROWN
did not call at the Hawkins' cabin. The next morning, Henry
appeared at his back door, flushed from his three-mile walk.
The doctor led him round front and seated him in the porch
swing before he spoke.
"Henry," he said severely, "haven't I told you several times
not to come out on the road? Do you want other children to
catch scarlet fever?"
Henry hung his head and drew one bare foot slowly along
a crack in the porch floor. "No, sir, Doctor, I shore don't. But
I was the onlies' one could come. Mammy says the medicine
for Little Brother's run out, an' she wants some more to help
'im git well quick."
Henry spoke with apparent difficulty, and Dr. Brown
looked at him thoughtfully. "How do you feel yourself, Hen-
ry? Throat sore?"
"Well, Doctor, jest a little. An' I been kinder hot sence last
night. But I didn' tell mammy, she's so tired nussin' Little
Brother."
After he had driven Henry home, Dr. Brown reported the
new case to Dr. Wharton by letter. He did not remind him
of his failure to come out and quarantine the Hawkins.
Things had been taking their time long years in Kentucky.
Five days later Dr. Brown was summoned to see Emmie
Jenkins, and when he told her mother Hattie what the trouble
was, Hattie broke down and cried.
"Emmie won't live through it, Doctor, I know she won't.
She's been delicate all her days. An' fer the life o' me, I don't
see how she ketched it. I knowed Mollie Hawkins's young 'un
had it, and told Emmie special not to go over there. T' other
mornin', when little Henry sot out to see you, he rested here
a little with Emmie, but I sont him on his way soon's I
knowed he was here. I declare to gracious, this ailment must
be a jedgment on me."
{Continued on page 238)
USSR
Greeting the peoples of the u. s. s. R. is a
thrilling travel experience — especially in this 20th anni-
versary since the revolution of 1917. They proudly
show their advances in industry, the successful collect-
ivization of their vast farm areas, and their cultural
achievements. Intourist makes it possible to witness
this progress either independently or in special -interest
groups being organized by travel agents. Tours usually
begin at Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev or Odessa. They
may extend down the Volga, through the Caucasus
mountain region, along the Black Sea coast to sunny
Crimea and colorful Ukrainia.
CONSULT YOUR TRAVEL
AGENT
Select from the many itineraries available at
inclusive rates of $15 per day first class,
$8 tourist, $5 third . . . providing all trans-
portation on tour in the U. S. S. R., fine
hotels, meals, sightseeing and guide-interpreter
service. For map of the Soviet Union and
Booklet SG-4, write to
INTOURIST, INC.
545 Fifth Avenue, New York
360 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 756 South Broadway, Los Angeles
(In answering adrertisements please mention SURVI y GRAPHIC;
237
CONSUMERS UNION
reports —
for APRIL
on:
COLD CREAMS
". . . . a particularly blatant example of cosmetic
quackery," says the American Medical Association's
Bureau of Investigation of a widely-advertised and
grossly over-priced cold cream. Find out which
brand this is in the April issue of Consumers Union
Reports. Fifty-four brands of cold creams, ranging
in price from 2.6^ per ounce (dry weight) to $1.53
per ounce, are rated.
GARDENING
Special knowledge and skill are required to raise
vegetables which compare favorably with market
produce. You won't get this knowledge from seed
salesmen or fertilizer manufacturers. A report on
Gardening in this issue tells you how you can acquire
this knowledge; gives you valuable hints on such mat-
ters as when to start planting, and which soil condi-
tions are most favorable to which kinds of vegetables
and fertilizers, and rates several brands of fertilizers.
And for ratings of seeds you can consult the Yearly
Buying Guide.
RADIO SETS
Supplementing a report in the November issue on
lower-priced radios, this report rates twelve models
(including the Stromberg-Carlson and Zenith) rang-
ing in price from $60 to $200. Early issues will con-
tain reports on automobile radios and on tubes.
AUTOMOBILES
Concluding the report on 1937 automobiles begun in
the March issue, this report gives you automotive en-
gineers' opinions on cars delivering in the $1000 —
$1500 price range — including the Buick, Packard,
Studebaker, Hudson, LaSalle, Oldsmobile, Lincoln
Zephyr, and Nash. Ratings are given by name.
WASHING MACHINES
Which of ten brands of widely-advertised washing
machines cleaned clothes most effectively in a test
made by Consumers Union technicians? Which were
safest, most convenient, most durable? For the
answers see the April issue of Consumers Union Re-
ports, monthly publication of Consumers Union of
United States. It rates the Maytag, Thor, Universal,
Apex, and other leading makes as "Best Buys," "Also
Acceptable," or "Not Acceptable."
MEN'S SHIRTS
Twelve brands of men's shirts, ranging from mail
order brands to the higher-priced Manhattan, Van
Heusen, and Arrow brands, were subjected to labora-
tory tests for shrinkage, thread count and wearing
qualities. The results of this test and of tests on
other products are given in this issue.
USE THE COUPON
in the advertisement on the opposite page to order
this issue of Consumers Union Reports and to become
a member of Consumers Union. On receipt of your
application the April issue (or any previous issue or
issues with which you may wish to begin) will be
sent to you, to be followed shortly by Consumers
Union's 1937 Buying Guide. For information con-
cerning this Guide see opposite page.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
(Continued from page 237)
LITTLE BROTHER AND HENRY GOT WELL, BUT NOT IN TIME TO
go to Emmie's funeral. She looked right pretty, laid out in
her little wooden coffin. There weren't many flowers for her
grave, but everybody thought the nice words of the preacher
were more comforting than posies. His final remarks, just
before the earth was shoveled in, were repeated often as the
most heartening.
"Yes, friends," the preacher said, "mysterious are the ways
of the Lord, blessed be His name. Emmie here was not in-
tended to live long in this world, she was too sweet, too pure.
The Lord just lent us the bright little angel for five short
years, and then He took her home to be with his other
cherubs. Right now her shining spirit is smiling down on us
from Heaven. For remember always what the Lord Jesus
Christ said. He said, putting His hands on their sweet little
heads, 'Suffer the little children to come unto me.' . . ."
It was during these words that Dr. Brown once shook his
head slowly, and then stared grim-eyed at the hills beyond.
People noticed this, and reckoned to themselves that the new
doctor, being a city man and all, just didn't have much real
feeling.
Notes on Housing
by LOULA D. LASKER
HOUSINC-FOR-THE-LOWER-INCOME-CROUPS IS TAKEN FOR GRANTED
as front page news today. But a few years ago it was a matter
of active interest mainly to social workers and others con-
cerned with the problem of those who could not afford an
economic rent. The depression changed this; politicians no
less than economists and the dormant construction industry
threw the spotlight on housing.
Legislation
ON FEBRUARY 24 THE WAGNER-STEAGALL BILLS WERE SIMUL-
taneously introduced in the Senate and the House. Last year
the Senate passed Senator Wagner's housing bill, but its com-
panion in the House never came out of committee. This year
President Roosevelt is believed to be ready to back up Senator
Wagner — even though he may not be behind the bill entirely
in its present form. Anyway Senator Wagner is quoted as
saying that although the problem of agreeing on a method of
financing remains, there is full agreement that "the houses
will be built." The essential difference between this Wagner
bill and its 1936 version is that, in addition to the original
construction loan, provision is made for an annual deficit sub-
sidy to a project instead of a large capital outlay at the outset.
The Wagner-Steagall bills have plenty of company in Con-
gress, six other housing bills having preceded them. The most
talked of is the Scott bill, which would provide 100 percent
subsidy — 85 percent from the federal government and 15 per-
cent from a municipal authority. The very existence of this
extreme measure may be helpful in winning support for the
Wagner bill.
To promote federal housing legislation the Housing Legis-
lation Information office has been opened in the Duryea Build-
ing, Connecticut Avenue at L Street, Washington, D. C.
In New York the annual flood of housing bills is before
the state legislature. One widely discussed bill would em-
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
238
power the Tenement House Department of New York City
to make repairs and alterations in multiple dwellings where
owners refuse to comply with the law, the cost thereof to con-
stitute prior lien over all charges except taxes and water rates.
Another bill would create "an old law tenement assessment
fund" to be used at the discretion of the Tenement House
Department for this purpose. The passage of these bills would
give official aid to perpetuate the 60,000 odd sub-standard old
law tenements; but with 2 million people still living in them,
and a housing shortage imminent, realists insist they be made
at least as safe and sanitary as the law demands. . . . On
March 1 the Reconstruction Finance Mortgage Company ten-
tatively agreed to consider loans up to $4000 at 4 percent
interest for ten years for financing alterations to multiple
dwellings to make them conform to legal requirements. . . .
Another bill would authorize a referendum vote on a proposed
state bond issue of $100,000,000, the proceeds to be used as a
mortgage fund to be loaned to public housing authorities to
help finance their low rental housing projects.
The Court of Appeals of Kentucky — the highest court of
the state — recently affirmed a previous decision on the Munici-
pal Housing Commission Act of 1934. Along with a similar
decision last year of the New York Court of Appeals, it con-
stitutes a significant precedent for court action in other states
where validity of housing authority legislation may be
questioned.
International Housing Conference
THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF HOUSING AND TOWN
Planning (London) and the International Housing Associa-
tion (Frankfort) will meet in joint conference in Paris, July 5-
13. The great exhibition, "Art and Technique dans la Vie
Moderne," to be held in Paris this year will offer an added at-
traction to delegates. Excursions in the neighborhood of Paris,
and two housing and town planning study tours to other parts
of the country will follow the Congress. . . . The itinerary of
the second annual European housing tour of the National
Public Housing Conference (112 East 19 Street, New York)
includes attendance at this conference.
Public Demand for Better Housing
ONE OUTSTANDING EVENT OF THE MONTH RELATING TO INCREAS-
ing public interest in housing was the formation in New
York City of the Citizens Housing Council, with Harold S.
Buttenheim, editor of the American City, chairman. This
organization will attempt to find a solution of the city's hous-
ing and slum problem through the cooperative effort of real
estate, construction and labor groups as well as civic, welfare
and tenant's organizations.
The Church Conference on Slum Clearance — also in New
York — sponsored by the Diocese of New York, the National
Council of the Episcopal Church, the Greater New York Fed-
eration of Churches, in cooperation with the National Council
of Jewish Rabbis and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York
which met in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, marks the
organized entrance of the churches into the move for decent
housing. One thousand people attended the opening meeting
and thousands came daily to see the real slum apartment set
up in the nave of the cathedral. Similar conferences are being
formed in other cities. ... In Washington under the sponsor-
ship of Rt. Rev. Msgr. John A. Ryan a national housing com-
mittee is being formed; policy and procedure not yet definite
for announcement.
Up to now the tenant has left it largely to others to fight
his battle; but the newly formed National Tenants Council,
Inc., with central offices in Washington and budding branches
in a number of principal cities offers concrete evidence of a
changed attitude. The most active tenant group so far is the
City- Wide Tenants Association of New York, representing 13
organizations, which claims a membership of upwards of
10,000.
(In answering advertisements
COMING!!! The
Consumers Union
.937 BUYING
GUIDE
A 192-page handbook containing ratings of hundreds of products
by brand name as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not
Acceptable."
Do you want to know which vacuum cleaner out of fifteen models
tested by unbiased experts will give you the best value for your money?
Which brands of motor oils can save you from $15 to $20 a year on your
oil bill? Wnlch shoes will give you the most wear, which liquors are
the "Best Buys," and which brands of other products tested In labora-
tories are acceptable for consumer use and which are not acceptable?
Then make sure that you get a copy of the 1937 edition of Consumers
Union's Yearly Buying Guide. This 192-page Guide la now being
printed and will be ready for distribution early in April.
It will contain ratings, &y brand name, of shoes, tires, radios, tooth-
pastes, soaps, stockings, shirts, refrigerators, automobiles, and most of
the other products you buy from day to day.
Prepared In a compact, convenient size which can easily be carried in
your pocket or your handbag while shopping, and Indexed so that ref-
erence can readily be made to the product or products which you are
purchasing, this Buying Guide can enable you to save substantial sums
on your purchases, help you to avoid Inferior or Injurious products and
give you the Information you need in order to make Intelligent choices.
Use the coupon below to order a copy of this Guide. In addition to
the Guide, membership In Consumers Union also entitles you to twelve
issues of the monthly Consumers Unton Reports. (Note: The Buying
Guide Is confidential and Is available only to members of Consumers
Union. Individual copies will not be sold to non-members.)
WHAT CONSUMERS UNION IS
Consumers Union's Buying Guide
Professor Colston E. Warne, of Amherst, Is president of Consumers
Union Arthur Kallet, co-author of 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, is director,
and D. H. Palmer, physicist. Is technical supervisor. Among the board
of directors and sponsors are many prominent educators, social workers,
journalists, scientists, and labor and liberal leaders.
Now close to 35,000. Consumers
Union's membership Is growing at
the rate of nearly a thousand each
week . The membership fee —
which puts a targe group of tech-
nicians to work for you testing
the products you buy — is only $3
a year ($1 a year for an abridged
edition covering only the less ex-
pensive products).
To become a member simply
fill out and mail the coupon below.
You will receive the April Issue
of the Reports (contents of which
are given on the opposite page)
to be followed shortly by the
Buying Guide. Or, if you wish,
you may begin with any of the
previous Issues listed at the right.
MAIL THIS COUPON
Principal Subjects In Past Issues
MAY — Toilet Soaps, Breakfast Cereals,
Milk.
JUNE — Automobiles, Gasolines, Seeds.
JULY — Refrigerators, Used Cars, Motor
Oils.
AUG. — Oil Burners and Stokers. Hosiery,
Blacklist of Drugs and Cosmetics,
Meat.
SEPT. — Shoes, Tires, Whiskies. Women's
Coats.
OCT. — Men's Shirts, Gins. Electric
Razors. Dentifrices, Antl-freeze
Solutions.
NOV. — Radios, Toasters, Wines, Chil-
dren's Shoes, Winter Oils.
DEC. — Vacuum Cleaners, Fountain
Pens, Electric Irons, Blankets, Nose
Drops.
JAN.-FEB. — Men's Suits, Cold Rem-
edies. Shaving Creams. Children's
Undergarments.
MAR. — 1937 Autos, Face Powders,
Sheets, Flour, Canned Foods.
APR. — Washing Machines. Radio Sets,
Gardening, Autos. Shirts, Cold
Creams.
To: Consumers Union of U. S., Inc., 55 Vandam St., New York, N. Y.
I hereby apply for membership In Consumers Union. I enclose:
D £3 for one year's membership, $2.50 of which is for a year's subscription
to the complete edition of Consumers Union Reports.
D $1 for one year's membership, 50c of which is for a year's subscription
to the abridged edition of Consumers Unton Reports. (Note: Reports
on higher-priced products are not In this edition.)
I agree to keep confidential all material sent to me which is so designated
Please begin my membership with the Issue.
I Signature. . . . ,
I Address
I City and State Occupation
SO-4
L.
See advertisement on opposite pate for contents of current issue.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
239
WHEN DOES IT BENEFIT
A FAMILY TO BORROW?
• Some social workers feel that
a family in debt only makes its
situation worse by borrowing. A
loan, they hold, can render the
borrower no permanent benefit.
This belief finds little support in
the long experience of Household
Finance. Thousands of families
have learned money management
— have disciplined themselves to
practice it — because they borrowed
at Household Finance when in a
money jam.
Why? Because Household rec-
ognizes that a loan by itself can
solve only the immediate financial
problem of the family in debt. Per-
manent escape from recurrentfamily
financial crises requires practical
budgeting — daily care in spending
the family income. So Household
urges borrowers to budget and
shows them how to do it. They are
shown how to stop money leaks
and control spending so that the
family lives within its means. Bor-
rowers also learn how to get more
for their dollars through better
buymanship, how to save when
shopping for daily necessities.
Last year thousands of familiec
learned money management a,
Household Finance. We believt
every social worker will be intev
ested in examining the practical
material that helped these families
put their money affairs on a sound
basis. Many of the booklets may
help your clients. They cost very
little — some are free. Why don't
you check the titles below that in-
terest you and mail the coupon now?
HOUSEHOLD FINANCE
CORPORATION and Subsidiaries
Headquarters: 919 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago
. . . one of the leading family finance organizations, with 222 offices in 145 cities
ORDER BLANK — EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE
Published by
BURR BLACKBURN HOUSEHOLD FINANCE BERNICE DODGE
Research Director CORPORATION Home Economist
"DOCTOR OF FAMILY FINANCES"
Research Dept., SG-4, 919 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Check the booklets you want. They will be sent promptly, postpaid.
-FREE BULLETINS-
D Money Management for House- I I Marrying on a Small Income, Finan-
bolds, the budget book. I — I cial plans for the great adventure.
D"Let the Women Do the Work," I — I Stretching the Food Dollar, ful
an amusing but convincing argu- I — I of
ment for making the wife business
manager of the home.
_>f ideas on how to save money on
food bills; presents a pattern for safe
food economy.
D
Credit for Consumers — Installment credit and small loan agencies
and how to use them; published by The Public Affairs Committee.
-BETTER BUYMANSHIP
The titles of the series to date are listed below.
for five cents, or three cents each.
The price of these booklets is two
A sample copy of the latest number in this series may be secured free by calling at
any Household Finance office.
D Poultry, Eggs and Fish D Kitchen Utensils
D Sheets, Blankets, Table D Furs
Linen and Towels D Wool Clothing
D Fruits and Vegetables, D Floor Coverings
Fresh and Canned D Dairy Products
D Shoes and Stockings D Cosmetics
D Silks and Rayons D Gasoline and Oil
D Meat
D ElectricVacuumCleaners n Gloves
D Children's Playthings and
Books
D Soap and other Cleansing
Agents
D Automobile Tires
H Dinnerware
D Household Refrigerators
D Home Heating
Enclosed find $ in stamps; please send booklets checked to:
NAME
ADDRESS
CITY
STATE
STATE WALLS AND ECONOMIC AREAS
(Continued from page 196)
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
240
which the employe will be called upon to pay. But here again
the inequality between states is likely to be only temporary.
Either the twenty-five states that have not so far taxed
employes will do so, or those that have done so will repeal
this provision of their law, in order not to give the appear-
ance of discriminating against their own working people.
If each state in the union were subject to similar hazards
of unemployment, the system of separate state funds based
on approximately the same rate of payroll tax would prob-
ably work out as satisfactorily as any scheme of payroll taxes.
Conversely, if the hazards of unemployment vary widely in
different states, then the funds in states where the heaviest
unemployment is found will be exhausted earliest.
Nothing is more clearly demonstrable than that the hazards
of unemployment vary widely between states. If any simi-
larity in unemployment were to be sought, it would almost
certainly be in economic sections having the same vital
industries. For example, it might be expected that the rate
of unemployment in the Pittsburgh coal and steel section
would be the same as that in the Birmingham coal and steel
section. But there is no similarity in respect to general unem-
ployment in Pennsylvania and general unemployment in
Alabama, because of the great difference in the industries
lying within the two states — Pennsylvania having a widely
diversified industry, particularly in the eastern part of the
state, and Alabama dependent on only a few raw material
industries. The interplay of the forces that cause seasonal,
cyclical and technological unemployment is exceedingly in>
tricate, and the three types are so combined and interwoven
in different states that the total amount of unemployment
varies widely among them. These differences are so great
that the present system of separate unemployment state funds
based on a uniform rate of payroll tax will almost certainly
break down in practice.
No state can claim that it has the right to any financial
benefits that might conceivably accrue to its unemployment
reserves because it happens to have industries within its
borders with lower seasonal and cyclical unemployment than
other states. Each state has need of all the industries that
exist in the United States, both those with high cyclical
unemployment and those with low; both those with much
seasonal unemployment and those with little, and they must
be prepared to pay the costs of such industries, no matter
whether they happen to be located within or without their
borders. This can be accomplished best by a single national
unemployment compensation fund.
As THE NATION ENTERS THE FINAL STAGE OF RECOVERY, THE
main outlines of the national task of reconstruction emerge
fairly clearly. The job is essentially one of utilizing our re-
sources— human as well as physical — to the maximum. Nat-
ural causes of recurring disaster must be dealt with. The
problem of floods will give way before the attack of science
and engineering. The solution of the drought problem is more
difficult, for it involves a clean-cut break with mind-sets
hardened by tradition as to the rights of the individual, and
years of political opportunism. In the Great Plains country,
man must learn to live harmoniously with Nature, which
means obeying her laws as manifested in meager and unde-
pendable rainfall. The withdrawal from cultivation of 50
million acres now under the plough (although some experts
say twice that is nearer the figure) means reduction in the
population now dependent on dry-land farming. The cot-
ton south presents an even more baffling human problem.
This year we are spreading the income resulting from a
STATE WALLS AND ECONOMIC AREAS
(Continued from page 240)
14 billion bale cotton crop over at least three times as many
families as ought to be supported by it, assuming any decent
American standard of living. And the promise of a prac-
tical mechanical cotton picker threatens the ability of the
cotton land to support its present population. Yet, for every
dry-land or cotton breadwinner displaced by wise land con-
servation policies or unpreventable (and desirable) mechan-
ization, a new job must be found, either in productive indus-
try or in the servicing thereof. The agricultural problem
cannot be solved without at the same time solving that of
urban industrial employment. Moreover, depressed indus-
trial areas dot the economic landscape of the United States,
and unemployed workers wonder if they are to spend the
rest of their lives on relief. They are the more permanent
scars of the disease of economic instability. How shall the
transfer of "surplus" workers from depressed areas and over-
populated agricultural sections be effected without increasing
the lack of balance?
Two main lines appear to be open for governmental
exploration and possible action. One is to encourage the
investment of new capital in agricultural and depressed
industrial areas in which the population is in excess of the
present and prospective employment opportunities. By that
I do not mean the shifting of industrial enterprises, or the
"decentralization" of existing plants. That would not mean
additional employment, but merely the balancing of new
industrial employment in previously non-industrial areas with
unemployment in older sections. The other possible line of
experiment is to stimulate increased industrial activity in the
existing centers of production, and attract the unemployed
from the depressed areas. The problems that will grow out
of increased congestion in centers already overcrowded from
the living standpoint can be handled by regional planning.
In the meantime, ample justification for continuing the fed-
eral emergency work program may be found in the determi-
nation to utilize it primarily for increasing the economic
stability of "depressed" vulnerable and low stability areas,
including those subject to recurring natural disasters, until
long range plans for shifting population from uneconomic
productive activities to economic ones can be devised. Aside
from ethical considerations, the country cannot afford to dis-
pense with the productive power of seven or eight million
unemployed workers, nor to accept the low level of productiv-
ity represented by large numbers of agricultural producers
giving their effort to uneconomic activity. If the nation's
standard of living is to be kept on a constantly rising grade,
it needs the brain and brawn of every possible producer.
In what has been said above, we have proposed no immedi-
ate solutions. Adding our voice to the swelling chorus
demanding that the federal government have the power to
deal with human problems, we merely emphasize this point:
For the task of social engineering to be effectively done, we
must look for the deep-seated causes of employment
instability in relationships that have nothing to do with
purely political state boundaries but are essentially national
in their nature.
Mr. Williams' second article will deal with the depressed
areas in the United States; and his third with the areas of ex-
panding economic activity and opportunity.
II
Some Spring "Relief
for Mrs. Mulaki
YOU tell her it's Spring. You point to the windows — the
floors — the linens — and say it's time for a good clean-up.
But Mrs. Mulaki doesn't spark. She's tired. She isn't
looking for more work — she wants more relief.
And that's when it pays to remember Fels-Naptha Soap.
For Fels-Naptha saves hard rubbing and scrubbing. Its
richer, golden soap and tots of naptha hurry out dirt— even
in cool tmtfr. Tell Mrs. Mulaki about it and you'll find her
more willing to clean up for spring and all through the year.
For a sample bar of Fels-Naptha, write Fels & Co.,
Philadelphia, Pa., mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CLEAN NAPTHA ODOR
PLANNING A TRIP?
Look over the interesting travel sug-
gestions on pages 233-237 of this issue.
WHY NOT LIVE THE
GOOD LIFE?
IN THIS HOUSE, ON THIS GROUND, YOU
CAN. Secluded atop a West ch ester
hill, within easy express commuting
• to Grand Central, it is an ideal coun-
bront view — rear wtng not
showing try home, summer and winter. The
owners, with an itch for remodeling another farmhouse, are moving
up the road a mile. They would like to sell this place to a family
that would enjoy the swimming pool, the badminton court, the trees,
the view, the ski-ing (and even golf on the adjacent course of a
galore. Four bed- rooms, two baths
and lavatory, up- Badminton court with a view s t a i r s . Good
storage attic.
Two-car garage ; workshop with forge ; between three and four
acres; large flower and vegetable gardens. Complete with copper
screens, storm windows and doors; oil-burner; unfailing artesian
water with automatic pump ; paths ; terraces ; incinerator and
outdoor grill, this little country
estate is easy and economical to
maintain — a bargain at present
price of $17,000. The owners
will finance responsible purchaser. \
For details of down-payment, lo-
cation and inspection, write VW,
Survey Graphic, 112 East 19th
Street, New York City. The pool just off rear terrace
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
241
UntorBttg nf (Efjtrarjn
of
ADmtttiatrattott
SUMMER QUARTER, 1937
First term, June 16 • July 21
Second term, July 22-August 27
Academic Year 1937-38
Begins October 1
Announcements on Request
THE SOCIAL SERVICE REVIEW
Edited by GRACE ABBOTT
A Professional Quarterly for Social Workers
SIMMONS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Social Research
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
A catalog will be sent on request
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
GOING PLACES?
We recommend for your consideration the
announcements of travel agencies to be found
in this issue of Survey Graphic.
Write them direct telling of your plans
and they will gladly offer suggestions and
information.
CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF
TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WORK
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Announces a two-year program of graduate work
leading to the degree of
M. S. in Social Work
in addition to the pre-professional undergraduate program
leading to the degree of
B. S. in Social Science
The graduate curriculum includes courses and field work
practice in Social Case Work, Group Work, Community
Organization, and Social Research.
Summer Session
June 14 — July 2
Short, intensive courses for case workers and supervisors
with previous training and experience, as well as for
college graduates entering upon a program of professional
study.
For information, address
MRS. MARY C. BURNETT
Head, Department of Social Work
Carnegie Institute of Technology
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
Graduate Professional Training and Senior College Pre-
Vocational Courses in preparation for Social Work in Public
Service and in Private Agencies.
Particular emphasis on the Training of Men for Work among
Delinquents and other types of Public Service.
Courses leading to the degrees of Bachelor and Master of
Science in Social Service and Doctor of Social Science.
Electives available in the University include over a hundred
and fifty credit hours on a graduate level which have vocational
value.
A dints
84 Exeter Street
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Boston
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to the
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from •
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
242
SOCIAL WORK AS A PROFESSION
offers opportunities for constructive lead-
ership in public and private effort for
adjusting individuals and groups, and for
modifying community organization toward
that end.
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL FOR
JEWISH SOCIAL WORK
offers a graduate curriculum leading to
the Master's and Doctor's degrees, for the
acquisition of the necessary knowledge
and skills.
For information about require-
ments for admission, scholar-
ships and fellowships, write to
DR. M. J. KARPF, Director
The
Graduate
School
For
Jewish
Social Work
71 West 47th Street, New York City
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
SUMMER QUARTER— TERM B
July 26 — August 31
The Summer Quarter is planned for professional
social workers who wish to study during the sum-
mer. In this quarter the School can enroll a larger
number of students for courses than in other
quarters of the year. Among the courses to be
offered in Term B are the following:
Community Health Problems Byard Williams, M.D.
Probation and Parole
Administration in Public
Welfare Agencies
Social Work with the Foreign
Born
Analysis of Social Case
Method
Current Concepts and Prob-
lems in Casework
William D. McKerrow
Charles Nison
Mary E. Hurlbutt
Fern Lowry
Grace Marcus
For special summer catalogue write the Registrar.
122 EAST 22ND STREET
New York, N. Y.
The
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The Regular School offers two years of graduate
professional training upon the completion of
which the degree, Master of Social Work, is
conferred by the University of Pennsylvania.
The curriculum includes courses in
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
The Advanced Curriculum offers training beyond
the two year course to graduates of accredited
schools of social work who have had successful
professional experience. This curriculum includes
advanced technical courses in
Supervision and reaching of social case work
Psychological treatment of children
Social work administration
Applications for the 1937-1938 session should be filed
by May 15. A bulletin will be sent upon request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Pl
The course leading to the Master's degree consists
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
social agencies in various cities. This course is
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session
and the first winter session, and receive the Mas-
ter's degree upon the completion of the require-
ments of two summer sessions and one winter
session of supervised case work. Limited to forty.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks is open to expe-
rienced social workers. A special course in case
work is offered by Miss Ruth Smalley. Limited to
thirty-five.
Plan D An advanced course of training in the supervision
and teaching of social case work, conducted by
Miss Bertha Capen Reynolds, Associate Director of
the School, and staff. Graduates of schools of social
work with two years' case work experience are
eligible for admission. The course consists of two
summer sessions at Smith College and, in con-
sultation with the School, a winter of supervision
and teaching during which the student may hold
a paid position in a social agency. Limited to
twenty-five.
Seminars of two weeks on the following topics are open to a
limited number of qualified persons :
1. Application of Mental Hygiene to Present-day
Problems in Case Work with Families. Miss
Grace Marcus and Dr. Evelyn Alpern. July
12-24.
2. Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case
Work. Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss
Beatrice H. Wajdyk. July 26-August 7.
3. The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn
Jackson and Miss Mary Whitehead. August
9-21.
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
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WORKER WANTED
Man with experience in Settlement work to be
in charge of the club activities. Jewish pre-
ferred. 7423 Survey.
SITUATIONS WANTED
American Negro Ph.D. (Jan., 1937) University
of Dijon, France: college teaching experience;
wants directorship of boys' work or princi-
palship of an agricultural school in the
Americas or Africa. 7408 Survey.
College woman, experienced librarian, needs job
desperately. Cataloging private collections,
literary research, anything. 7416 Survey.
MATRON— DIETITIAN— 12 years' experience
wishes position Jewish Institution. Excellent
references. 7413 Survey.
CASEWORKER AND EXECUTIVE. Man, de-
sires position in delinquency or protective
work. Nine years social work, including case-
work with men and boys in welfare and pro-
bation fields. Also experience in community
organization and as business executive. Gradu-
ate Columbia University and New York School
Social Work. Member A. A. S. W. 7418
Survey.
Worker with long successful experience in settle-
ment boys work available June or September.
Keen understanding of boys. Highest refer-
ences. 7414 Survey.
College woman, capable, active, human, six years'
experience as camp counsellor, dietitian,
executive, available for similar position. 7425
Survey.
DIRECTOR OF BOYS' INSTITUTION desires
change of position beginning September. Ex-
perience in group work, community centre
activities, camping and case work. College
graduate, social work training. Progressive
education viewpoint. 7422 Survey.
Young woman. School of Household Arts and
Science graduate. Four years' institutional
experience, desires position as Matron or
Executive Housekeeper in institution. 7424
Survey.
EXECUTIVE, thoroughly experienced in child-
care and recreational fields, desires connection
with progressive childrens* organization. De-
tailed information furnished on request.
Excellent references. 7426 Survey.
REAL ESTATE
FOR SALE: Choice home site; three or more
acres : Westchester County, three miles from
Peekskill ; magnificent view ; large road
frontage ; water and electricity ; adjacent
Bronx River Parkway. 7417 Survey.
For Rent or For Sale
VINEYARD SHORE PROPERTY, West
Park. New York, 2 hours New York,
available nominal rental (might sell all
or part), for social or educational pur-
poses. 36 Acres, Hudson river front,
2 large houses and stone cottage. All
improvements. Vineyard, woods, beaches.
Suitable for school, conferences, con-
valescents. Owner would also consider
proposal for transfer of property to some
permanent organization. 7421 Survey.
Your Own Agency
This is the counseling and placement agency
sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
tion of Social Workers and the National
Organization for Public Health Nursing,
National. Non-Profit making.
(Agency)
122 East 22nd Street, 7th floor. New York
GERTRUDE R. STEIN, INC.
Vocational Service Agency
11 East 44th Street NEW YORK
MUrray Hill 2-4784
A professional employment bureau specializing
in social service, institutional, dietetic, medical,
publicity, advertising and secretarial positions.
MULTIGRAPHING
MIMEOGRAPHING
ADDRESSING
FILLING-IN
FOLDING
COMPLETE MAILINGS
• • •
QUICK SERVICE LETTER COMPANY
I NCOR ['ORATED
53 PARK PLACE - NEW YORK.
• • •
SALES CAMPAIGNS
PLANNED AND WRITTEN
FURNISHED APARTMENT
To Rent : Pleasant four-room apartment, Jackson
Heights, May 1 - November 1, comfortably
furnished, reasonable rental. 7420 Survey.
to EMPLOYERS
Who Are Planning to Increase Their Staffs
We Supply:
Executives
Case Worken
Recreation Workers
Psychiatric Social Workers
Occupational Therapists
Dietitians
Housekeepers
Matrons
Housemothers
Teachers
Grad. Norses
Sec'y-Stenogs.
Stenographers
Bookkeepers
Typists
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HOLMES EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL
One East 42nd Street New York City
Agency Tel.: MU 2-7575 Gertrude D. Holmei, Director
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PRINTED BY
BLANCHAHD PRESS
NEW YORK
The Committee on Cultural Relations
with Latin America
announces
The Twelfth Seminar in Mexico
and
The Festival of Pan American Chamber Music
July 8 - 28
M
E
X
I
C
O
Where Yesterday Lives
Fiestas . . . markets . . . folk dances
Handcraft villages . . . Spanish colonial cities
The Pyramids of Teotihuacan
The Convent of Acolman
The Toltec City of Cholula
Taxco . . . Puebla . . . Xochimilco
In Today
Lectures and round tables in Mexico City and Cuernavaca
Economics Modern Art
Politics Social Problems
Education Labor Movements
THE COMMITTEE ON CULTURAL RELATIONS WITH LATIN AMERICA
Hubert Herring, Director
289 Fourth Avenue New York City
SURVEY
MAY 1937
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
mODUCTIVITY OT LABOR
STATISTICS, IMC.
Technological Change
A NATIONAL INVENTORY OF ITS CONSEQUENCES
Unions and the Rackets
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
Face Your Taxes
TWENTIETH CENTURY FINDINGS : STANLEY HIGH
Employers and the Spy Business
BEULAH AMIDON
The Two England* by S. K. Ratcliffe . . . Doctors Dissect Medical Care by Michael M. Davis
JO CENTS A COPY
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DIVIDE this drop into 50,000 parts. purity. And so, in the Research Labora-
Each part is a gamma— 1/28,329,000 torv. in Schenectadv rh™ rh«-t on^ „
Each part is a gamma — 1/28,329,000
of an ounce. Yet in such tiny units research
chemists find the secrets of long life and
efficient operation of electric machinery
—of refrigerators and electric clocks,
of lamps as small as a grain of wheat, and
great turbines that supply electric power
to a whole city.
A smear of oil, a chip of metal, a scarcely
visible film on a polished surface — these
are clues to improved designs. Working
with drops on a microscope slide, General
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tory, in Schenectady, they check and ex-
amine, contributing of their skill and
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Scientific research requires attention to a
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GENERAL 0 ELECTRIC
1
NOFOREIGN-WAR CRUSADE
Launched on April 6, 1937:
the 20th anniversary of America's entrance into
"the war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy"
ADMIRAL RICHARD E. BYRD, Honorary Chairman
Purpose
1. To make articulate and effective the widespread determination to keep the United States out- of war in
Europe and Asia.
2. To promote ways and means of keeping this country out of war. Emphasis will be given through various
channels to the following:
(a) Complete the adoption of an adequate program of neutrality legislation, and undergird it with
aroused and organized public opinion.
(b) Change military and naval policy of the United States from one of preparedness to fight any-
where on the globe in protection of American property and lives to a policy of preparedness to
defend the United States only. (Many Quakers and other participants go further and oppose
the entire war-method.)
(c) Extend reciprocal trade agreements and other means of easing economic tensions among nations.
In the November series this aspect will be given primary emphasis.
(d) Increase the cooperation by the United States with international agencies of justice, including
Pan-American agencies, the International Labor Organization, the non-coercive activities of
the League of Nations; and by membership in the World Court and by participation in world
economic conferences.
Processes
1. EDUCATION. Help create an alert and determined public opinion.
2. LEGISLATION. Bring nation-wide pressure on Washington in behalf of legislation to prevent war.
3. ORGANIZATION. Create and strengthen:
(a) Peace committees in numerous local institutions.
(b) Local branches of national peace societies.
(c) City peace councils, and encourage affiliation with the National Peace Conference.
Methods
1. Four-day campaign at suitable time between April 6th and May 9th. During these four days from five to
ten outstanding speakers should be available for important meetings of local organizations. The climax
of this four-day campaign should be a mass-meeting in the largest hall available. In some smaller com-
munities it may be preferable to plan for a one- day or a two-day campaign with fewer speakers.
2. Radio dinners in 2,000 communities on April 6th at which time eminent speakers will launch the crusade
over the air. Also numerous small gatherings in homes throughout the land.
3. Send speakers to numerous local institutions and to adjacent communities at various times between April
6th and May 9th; including luncheon clubs, commercial groups, veterans' associations, labor unions,
women's clubs, parent-teacher associations, schools, colleges, churches, synagogues, etc.
4. Suggest the observance of April llth as No-Foreign-War Sunday, with appropriate sermons and programs
in churches and synagogues.
5. Encourage every meeting wherever appropriate to pass a resolution urging specific legislation to prevent
war; send to Washington and release to the press. Encourage citizens to send telegrams and letters to
Washington.
6. Promote the national enrollment of peace workers.
7. Prepare for frequent use of the radio.
8. Cultivate the daily press.
9. Circulate peace literature on a mass scale.
10. Cover the community with anti-war window-cards and to the extent possible with posters on billboards.
THE EMERGENCY PEACE CAMPAIGN
20 South Twelfth Street, Philadelphia
HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK, Chairman
SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn,
N. Y. Executive office, 112 East 19 Street, New York. Price: this issue (May 1937; Vol. XXVI, No. 5) 30 cts. ; $3 a year; foreign
postage, 50 cts. extra ; Canadian 30 cts. Entered as second class matter at the post office at Brooklyn. N. Y. ; under the Act of March 3, 1879.
Acceptance for mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917; authorized December 21, 1921.
/• — ^^~^
\-i927
YEARS JlGO
fHIS OCfOBER
It is interesting to turn back the pages of the years and read the record of a business. For time
has a way of testing purposes and policies. Good years and lean reveal the character of men and
organizations. The fundamental policy of the Bell System is not of recent birth — it has been the
corner-stone of the institution for many years. On October 20, 7927, it was reaffirmed in thes; words by
Walter S. Gifford, President, American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
"The business of the American Tele-
phone and Telegraph Company and its
Associated Bell Telephone Companies
is to furnish telephone service to the
nation. This business from its very na-
ture is carried on without competition
in the usual sense.
"These facts have a most important
bearing on the policy that must be fol-
lowed by the management if it lives up
to its responsibilities.
''The fact that the ownership is so
widespread and diffused imposes an
unusual obligation on the management
to see to it that the savings of these
hundreds of thousands of people are
secure and remain so.
"The fact that the responsibility for
such a large part of the entire telephone
service of the country rests solely upon
this Company and its Associated Com-
panies also imposes on the management
an unusual obligation to the public to
see to it that the service shall at all
times be adequate, dependable and sat-
isfactory to the user.
"Obviously, the only sound policy
that will meet these obligations is to
continue to furnish the best possible
telephone service at the lowest cost con-
sistent with financial safety. This policy
is bound to succeed in the long run and
BELL
TELEPHONE
SYSTEM
246
there is no justification for acting other-
wise than for the long run.
"Earnings must be sufficient to assure
the best possible telephone service at all
times and to assure the continued finan-
cial integrity of the business. Earnings
that are less than adequate must result
in telephone service that is something
less than the best possible.
"Earnings in excess of these require-
ments must either be spent for the en-
largement and improvement of the
service furnished or the rates charged
for the service must be reduced. This
is fundamental in the policy of the
management.
"The margin of safety in earnings is
only a small percentage of the rate
charged for service, but that we may
carry out our ideals and aims it is essen-
tial that this margin be kept adequate.
Cutting it too close can only result in
the long run in deterioration of service
while the temporary financial benefit to
the telephone user would be negligible.
"With your sympathetic understand-
ing we shall continue to go forward,
providing a telephone service for the
nation more and more free from imper-
fections, errors or delays, and always at
a cost as low as is consistent with finan-
cial safety."
The Gist of It
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FUND'S STUDY
of taxation in the United States, now brought MAY 1937 CONTENTS VOL. xxvi No. 5
out in a handsome volume, was prepared ^ —— ^ ^ ^^^^— ^^^^^
under the auspices of the Committee on Tax-
ation whose names are listed in the leading Cover Design PICTORIAL STATISTICS, INC.
article of this issue of Survey Graphic. The
Tax Survey was directed by Carl Shoup, as- Among Ourselves
sisted by Roy Blough, Mabel Newcomer and T; *• •
a staff of seventeen specialists. The Tax Pro- Front'spiece • PAINTING BY DORIS LEE
gram was formulated by Thomas I. Parkin- pace Your Taxes -STANLEY HIGH 251
son, Francis Biddle, Robert Murray Haig,
Peter Molyneaux and Eustace Seligman. To The Two Englands S. K. RATCLIFFE 255
distil both facts and conclusions of the study .
into the brief scope of an article, (page 251) Unions and the Rackets VICTOR WEYBRIGHT 259
we turned to Stanley High, versatile author _ , . , _ _ .
and publicist, who recommends that all tax- Emptoye" and the Spy Business. BEULAH AMIDON 263
payers who have time to do more than read Tafari Makonnen . . .JULIAN s. BACH, TR. 267
on the run get hold of the volume, Facing
the Tax Problem, published by the Twentieth Doctors Dissect Medical Care MICHAEL M. DAVIS 270
Century Fund, Inc., New York. Price $3.
Technological Change .DAVID WEINTRAUB 273
OH TO BE IN ENGLAND NOW THAT APRIL'S , , „, ... „,
here, with the approaching coronation, is a Manpower, Skills, Change-Selected Photo Studies LEWIS w. HINE 275
desire which American fans of pageantry The Schools We K .EVERETT B. SACKETT 280
are gratifying, it steamer reservations are an
index. Quite apart from the pomp of royalty, Through Neighbors' Doorways
however, are the currents of people and We Can't Trust Even the Fruit . . . JOHN PALMER GAVIT 285
social trends, that few visitors really discover
in England. Today's paradoxical mixture of Life and Letters: As seen through the new biographies
boom and depression is interpreted in the Parade of Biography LEON WHIPPLE 287
article (page 255), by S. K. Ratcliffe, who
is as well known in America, where he makes Human Inventions 296
an annual lecture tour, as he is in England, r .
where he has for more than a generation Servants of the People
contributed to liberal periodicals, notably the At the Bureau of Standards. .HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM 297
Happy Ending MARION DUNCKEL COTA 301
LEST HIS CRUSADE AGAINST INDUSTRIAL Mrs. Parrish and the Justices . . FRIEDA s. MILLER 303
racketeering in New York be misunderstood,
Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey steered © .Survey Associates, Inc.
clear of the phrase labor racket when he ,
brought four officials of the restaurant and
cafeteria unions to trial and secured their Harvard graduate, now studying abroad, was Washington reporter, writes of Brickwedde
conviction. The racketeering which he and written after a personal interview. of the Bureau of Standards (page 297)
his assistant, William B. Herlands, uncov-
ered was directed by these labor union of- CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE ON RESEARCH HAPPY ENDING (PAGE 301) is A SEQUEL TO
ficials. Using the trial testimony as the base in Medical Economics, Michael M. Davis, Marion Dunckel Cota's personal narrative
of his research, Victor Weybright, managing tells what the doctors have to say about medi- (in the December issue) of what it was like
editor, tells how the racket functioned, and cal care in the report just brought out by to live on relief. Now she tells what it's
why the conditions Mr. Dewey revealed are a the American Foundation, American Medi- like for a family to be back in the swim,
challenge to labor leadership. (Page 259) cine: Expert Testimony out of Court (page with a job, pocket money, and blessed peace
270). and privacy.
PARALLELING MR. WEYBRIGHT'S ARTICLE is
an equally challenging interpretation of DAVID WEINTRAUB is AN ECONOMIST, DI- Now THAT THE SUPREME COURT HAS RE-
an equally sensational probe into the other reeling the study of technology, skills and versed its previous stand on minimum wage
side of industrial relations, by Beulah Ami- employment which, with preliminary find- legislation, Frieda S. Miller, director, Division
don, associate editor — the record of employ- ings, he describes on page 273. of Women in Industry and Minimum Wage,
ers who have hired detectives to smash union New York State Department of Labor, tells
organizations. (Page 263) Basing her article LAST SUMMER EVERETT B. SACKETT, WHO (page 303) of the state legislation now
upon the facts unearthed by the La Follette now delves into the things that keep schools being drafted as a result of the triumph of
committee on civil liberties, Miss Amidon's and teachers on the chalkline, (page 280) a Washington chambermaid,
narrative ranges from Pinkerton and Burns wrote for Survey Graphic a penetrating ar-
to some of the biggest and best known manu- tide on life in the Canal Zone, whence he FROM LEON WHIPPLE'S LEADING REVIEW
facturers in the United States. had just returned. Now, making various re- on page 287, to the last listing on page 295,
search studies for the Regents' Inquiry into the Life and Letters pages this month are
NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN ETHIOPIA the Cost and Character of Public Education concerned entirely with biographies. Collect-
was still proud and free, Emory Ross wrote in the State of New York, he draws upon ing such an eminent variety as James G.
for Survey Graphic a distinguished article teaching experience in the Midwest and McDonald on Grey and Balfour; Robert
on the country as he knew it first hand. Now New York, as well as in the Canal Zone. Morss Lovett on Kipling; Frederick C. Howe
Haile Selassie, emperor without an empire, on Brand Whitlock; Robert W. Bruere on
has found sanctuary in Great Britain, where BEGINNING A SERIES OF BRIEF SKETCHES OF Robert S. Brookings and Vida Scudder;
his story provides a poignant footnote to little known civil servants whose work, David Sarnoff on Marconi, and so on, was
the coronation. The word picture of him through old deal and new deal, goes on for the unique editorial feat of Ann Reed Bren-
(page 267) by Julian S. Bach, Jr., a young the common good, Hillier Krieghbaum, ner, associate editor.
247
Among Ourselves
Hail to the Chief
STAFF AND BOARD OF SURVEY ASSOCIATES
pause in the midst of our 25th year to salute
our first editor, one of our founders and a
creative and outstanding pioneer in the fields
of social work. For May 6 marks the 70th
birthday of Edward T. Devine, and 1937 is
forty years since he launched Charities, the
taproot of our publications, and brought to
it that combination of social insight, keen
observation and robust espousal that gave
it fire.
It was in 1896 that a young Iowa econo-
mist, with degrees from Cornell College, the
University of Pennsylvania and Halle, be-
came general secretary of the New York
Charity Organization Society, and from the
outset gave new dynamic thrust to its work.
It was he who signally threw the emphasis
of what was to become social work over on
to prevention — bringing scientific method to
bear on the causes that brought men and
women and children into the concern of phi-
lanthropy. He bore a crucial part in the early
tenement house movement in New York; in-
stigated the first medical-lay committee in
the field of prevention and control of tuber-
culosis. He was organizing secretary in
launching the national association in that
field; again in launching the National Child
Labor Committee; and in securing the U.S.
Commission on Industrial Relations. At San
Francisco, following the earthquake and fire,
he broke ground for the civilian work of the
American Red Cross; and his emergent activ-
ities ranged over Russia, France and Italy in
wartime. During the depression he brought
his rare gifts to bear on mass unemployment
as director for Nassau County, Long Island.
He was instrumental in initiating the New
York School of Social Work — the first in the
field. He held the first chair of social eco-
nomics at Columbia University and later
filled the deanship of the graduate school of
the American University at Washington. A
long shelf of books crystallize his principles,
practice and thinking, and today he is work-
ing on a history of social work.
But, in his retirement because of ill health,
it is as an editorial colleague and leader that
we most cherish his living spirit — his cour-
age, his rare capacities as an executive and
above all his quality, at once constructive
and insurgent, which gave to his editorial
pages the electric distinction of the name
they bore — Social Forces. P. K.
Doremus Jessup of Wilkes-Barre
EMERSON JENNINGS, ICONOCLASTIC PRINTER
whose strange trial and conviction of bombing
the automobile of Judge W. A. Valentine was
described by Victor Weybright in February
Survey Graphic was denied a new trial by
Judge Samuel E. Shull in the Luzerne county
courthouse at Wilkes-Barre early in April.
Judge Shull evidently accepts the bizarre caste
of characters and the melodramatic evidence
introduced by the state's special prosecutor;
in denying a new trial Judge Shull dismissed
the "after discovered evidence," — especially
the perjury that has been revealed and the
transcriptions of dictaphone conversations
which add weight to Jennings's claim that he
was "framed" — as insufficient and unimportant.
Jennings, you may recall, is a typical mid-
dle class Yankee reformer, a gentle character,
but peppery in language, who boldly attacked
the "courthouse crowd." In his anthracite
community where social tensions and cleav-
ages are emphasized, rather than concealed,
by a good deal of political repression, that
proved to be a risky crusade. The denial of a
new trial led the Philadelphia Record to re-
fer to the "esprit de corps" of the judiciary.
Arthur Garfield Hays, able trouble shooter
where civil liberties are concerned, whose bril-
liant summation at the Jennings trial was a
challenge to Pennsylvania justice as well as
to Wilkes-Barre justice, will, of course, move
to appeal to the higher courts. Fortunately,
Francis Biddle of Philadelphia is associated
with the defense. The resemblance of the fate
of Jennings to the experience of Doremus
Jessup in Sinclair Lewis's novel of impend-
ing fascism is a point which Arthur Sullivan,
Jennings's local attorney, cannot well make.
Meanwhile, out on bail, Jennings has lost
none of his plucky talent for pamphleteering.
The very fact that he is an ideal target for
silencing adds to the general suspicion,
popularly held in Wilkes-Barre, that the
background of the evidence has not been suffi-
ciently explored. If an appeal through the
courts is unsuccessful it is to be hoped that
Governor Earle, or the state legislature, will
initiate an investigation. Certainly there is
room for doubt, not of the technical fairness
of the trial, but of the integrity of consider-
able of the state's evidence introduced by Spe-
cial Prosecutor Thomas M. Lewis.
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
Publication Office:
762 EAST 21 STREET, BROOKLYN, N. Y.
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SURVEY GRAPHIC— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
THE SURVEY— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOCC, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors:
RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD, RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPF.R, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MARY R. ANDERSON, adver-
tising manager.
The American Civil Liberties Union is
active in the defense. A defense committee
has also been organized in Wilkes-Barre. As
Mr. Weybright recalled in his first hand in-
quiry into the case last winter, Jennings not
only resembles Doremus Jessup in It Can't
Happen Here; he was long ago a resident of
Helicon Hall when Sinclair Lewis, youthful
idealist, was tending the furnace in the colony
founded by Upton Sinclair. A well known
figure in the printing trade, the proprietor of
a job-printing business, and the inventor of
press machinery, Jennings says he never had
his hands on a stick of dynamite in his life.
Yet when Judge Valentine's automobile was
dynamited, during an insurgent miners' strike,
when dynamite was exploding up and down
the Wyoming Valley nearly every day, Jen-
nings was arrested for the crime months after
it occurred. Meanwhile, he had been the prime
mover to have Judge Valentine impeached.
He was a thorn in the side of the coal com-
panies and the water company. Many potent
forces in Luzerne County would be relieved
if Emerson Jennings, crochety bourgeois
spokesman for the "little man," were in the
penitentiary.
The Wagner Act
THE PRINCIPLES OF THE WAGNER LABOR
Relations Act are now firmly written on the
statute books by the decision of the U.S. Su-
preme Court in the labor cases. Already legis-
lative draughtsmen are at work, shaping pro-
posed amendments to strengthen, fortify,
clarify or extend this measure designed to pro-
tect the right of workers to organize and to
further industrial peace. The Wagner Act in
its present form grew out of the industrial
experience of depression and recovery. In
Survey Graphic for November 1934, John
Fitch described the experimental and some-
what confused functioning of the National
Labor Board (the Wagner Board), its succes-
sor, the first National Labor Relations Board,
set up under Section 7-a of the Recovery Act,
and various other boards, commissions, com-
mittees and authorites. "It is in no jesting
spirit," observed Mr. Fitch, "that I call atten-
tion to the multiplication of these agencies
for ironing out industrial controversy."
In two Survey Graphic articles (7-a and the
Future, February 1935; New Techniques in
Labor Settlements, April 1935) Lloyd K.
Garrison, first chairman of the National
Labor Relations Board under 7-a wrote out
of his "brief but intensive experience" urging
the enactment of legislation along the lines
of the Wagner Labor Disputes Bill. In July
1935, two months after the Supreme Court
threw out NIRA, the Wagner Act was
passed, creating the National Labor Rela-
tions Board. Its authority, constitutionality,
methods and future, were discussed by Lloyd
K. Garrison in the December 1935 Survey
Graphic. Mr. Garrison wrote: "If the con-
stitutional issues which the Act presents are
substantially resolved in favor of the govern-
ment, the board will probably be able to
function without a great deal of litigation.
There may be a good many appeals from its
orders, but, as is true of all well established
administrative tribunals, it is likely that the
great majority of the orders will be accepted
and complied with as a matter of course."
How the Act operates to protect the right
of workers to organize, the sort of opposition
it has encountered from many employers,
248
SURVEY GRAPHIC
were shown in the story of the Greyhound
Bus mechanics who were "fired" when they
tried to form a union. [Workers' Power to
Bargain, by Beulah Amidon. April 1936.]
Last fall, five of the labor board cases were
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They
involved the discharge of union employes by
the Associated Press, a truck trailer company
in Michigan, a Pennsylvania steel corporation,
a Virginia clothing manufacturer, a District
of Columbia bus line. Every seat in the Su-
preme Court room was filled, and a queue of
visitors stood in the rotunda during the week
in February when the Court heard the argu-
ments in the labor cases. [Listening in on the
Supreme Court, by Beulah Amidon. March
1937.] Six weeks later the historic decisions
were handed down.
In the seventeen months of its active work,
the National Labor Relations Board and its
twenty-one regional offices have handled 2072
cases involving 745,702 workers. Of these,
493 were pending on March 1. Out of the
1579 cases closed, 737 involving nearly 100,-
000 workers, were settled by agreement be-
tween employers and employes. The board
reports that 378 strike cases, involving 67,932
workers were handled; 249 were settled, and
35,805 workers were reinstated. In addition,
101 threatened strikes involving 30,067 work-
ers were averted through the board's action.
Quakers in Spain
WHERE WAR RAGES, AND MEN ARE KILL-
ing one another, there you will find those
realistic pacifists, the Quakers, quietly going
about the humane business of feeding women
and childien. Now organizing relief for
Spanish mothers and children, the Ameri-
can Friends Service Committee is associated
with two other historic "peace" churches,
the Brethren and the Mennonites. A few
months ago they sent Sylvester Jones, of
Chicago, to explore conditions in Spain. He
.was welcomed behind both Loyalist and
Rebel fronts, and especially in Barcelona and
Valencia which are crowded with refugees
from Madrid.
Engineers and the Social Sciences
THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECH-
nology announces the appointment of Edwin
S. Burdell, associate professor of sociology,
as dean of humanities. While on the faculty
of Ohio State, Dean Burdell was widely
known for his work as a member of the Ohio
Relief Commission, the State Commission on
Unemployment Insurance, as well as for his
interest and activity in the field of city plan-
ning, housing, criminology and penology.
When he came to teach at M.I.T., his alma
mater, in 1934, he soon made himself at
home in various community welfare and
regional planning organizations. In announc-
ing the appointment, President Karl T. Comp-
ton said: "The appointment of a dean of
humanities at Technology is another signifi-
cant step in the efforts of this institution to
meet the challenge of the changing social
order in America. In earlier days the urgent
need was for men trained in science. . . The
need for such men to develop and operate
the physical plant of the country is undi-
minished. . . . The country, however, is
becoming increasingly faced with human
problems, many of which are closely related
MOTHER AND SON
by Charlotte Kellogg
Yours were not two roads timed for mother and son.
That wind that drove you forward without rest
Swept her: where for men wronged, for men undone,
You reared a wide-roofed structure in the west,
You laid with passionate hands that stubborn stone,
She who had known the older century's way,
Wrought now with spirit quickened as your own
The broad beam of the house for a different day.
When, past that hope you lighted, that new flame
In men's empty eyes, death crumpled down your years,
Steel-like she straightened, and reaching beyond tears,
Seized the struck purpose, upheld it in your name —
These searching faiths are one, these fires converge,
In just and healing action nobly merge.
Last month Survey Graphic published the first Branson Cutting Memorial
Lecture by Charles A. Beard, and announced that the two subsequent lectures
by Harold }. Lasl(i would appear in an early issue. Dr. Last's lectures were
given from notes, however, which he informs us he will not be able to put into
manuscript form until his return to England in June. The first, which we
shall publish in August, will consider the future of democracy in Europe; the
second, the future of democracy in the Vnited States.
Mrs. Kellogg's poem was inspired by the founding of the Memorial Lec-
tures by the late Senator Cutting's mother.
to technological developments. The dean of
humanities has been appointed to consolidate
the work [in cultural and social studies] and
to assure the most fruitful attention to this
aspect of the institute's curriculum."
In an early issue we hope to present Dean
Burdell's own interpretation of the relation
between engineering and the social sciences.
An Advocate of Cremation
SAVINGS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS WHICH
may be diverted to endowments for universi-
ties or churches are forecast by Frances New-
ton in her prize winning book, Light, Like
the Sun, published by Dodd, Mead and Com-
pany. Mrs. Newton, who won the Reader's
Digest's thousand dollar competition, has her-
self set up a revolving fund for needy stu-
dents at a Canadian university, as a memorial
to her father, out of the funds saved by a
simple cremation ceremony instead of an ex-
pensive, elaborate funeral.
According to an article by Ruth Brownlow
in The Survey of August 5, 1932, the average
dependent family in a middle western com-
munity spends from $250 to $600 for a
funeral, and this in families which often
cannot pay their doctors' or hospital bills.
With cremation the total costs of a funeral
may be kept as low as from $40 to $75. It is
difficult to allow them to go above $150.
Light, Like the Sun deals simply and prac-
tically with the intimate problem of crema-
tion in terms of the author's own experience
at the time of her father's death.
Alcohol
To THE EDITOR: The following is prompt-
ed by the Balance-sheet of Repeal. [See
Survey-Graphic for January 1937, page 20.]
First: Democratic government exists be-
cause of social integrity which actually de-
pends upon personal devotion to Social Truth.
To express one's best self, in thought and in
action, is the resulting necessity; personality
the greatest of social assets. It betokens con-
fusion to affect "impersonal social contribu-
tion." Competent social interpretation must
recognize that personal opinion and the frau-
dulent verbiage of personal, material gain are
not to be confused.
Second: Sound personal opinion requires
ability to evaluate authority. Authority for
the assumption of social detriment implicit in
the alcohol problem rests with the medical
sciences. Obligation for timely and adequate
public enlightenment as to the social signifi-
cance of the findings of medical science has
been placed upon public health administra-
tion, as a basic social trust.
Private and semi-private organizations have
presumed to share this trust with the U.S.
Public Health Service and the health depart-
ments of the various states. Most prominent
of these are the Tuberculosis, and Social, and
Mental Hygiene Associations and other mem-
bers of the National Health Council ; the edu-
cation extension of the Metropolitan Life In-
surance Company, and the public health and
education sections of the American Medical
Association.
The facts of the medical sciences have
established alcoholic indulgence an important
factor in the incidence of tuberculosis, syphilis,
mental disease and incompetence — including
crime, accident, unemployment and much
damage to children. (See Rosenau, and Alco-
hol and Man) Indeed, "the student of pre-
ventive medicine regards the alcohol question
as a major public health problem" (Rosenau)
but thorough survey reveals that deliberate
intention to suppress the truth could scarcely
have resulted in a more thorough elimination,
from the programs of public education con-
ducted by all the above groups, of the facts
of the medical sciences regarding alcohol.
Attention needs to be focused on this peculiar
situation before any sound understanding of
the alcohol problem can be brought about.
MARGARET HILDEBRAND SAWYER
MAY 1937
249
THE FARM IN THE SPRIN
Courtesy, Walker Galleries, New Y
Painting by DORIS LI
MAY 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 5
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Face Your Taxes
by STANLEY HIGH
For the — and who isn't? — tax-conscious citizen, Mr. High summarizes the
findings and recommendations of the Twentieth Century Fund's two-year
study which has just been completed
TAXES, LIKE BASEBALL UMPIRES, POLITICIANS AND THE
weather, are necessary, always complained about and sel-
dom understood. They are one of those things of which
any is too much. There is no other question of govern-
ment on which the average citizen is more voluble or
less informed. All that the average citizen knows, for
sure, is that he has to pay. The hows, the whys and the
wherefores he seldom inquires into.
For that he can hardly be blamed. The facilities for his
inquiries have never been readily available. If he got
seriously curious about taxes he usually got lost. There
has been no such thing as a tax primer.
That is why the just released study prepared under
the direction of the Committee on Taxation of the Twen-
tieth Century Fund* is important and — continuing gov-
ernment expenditures being what they are — exceedingly
timely. Facing the Tax Problem, as the volume of find-
ings and recommendations is titled, might very well
have been called: "All that the Slightly-More-Than-Aver-
age-Citizen Needs to Know about Taxes and What to
Do about Them."
Contrary to most tax studies which are put out by
special interests with their own axes to grind, there is
neither bias nor political or economic partisanship in this
study. And instead of arguing for or against particular
taxes, after the fashion of the tax propagandists, this
study tells the whole tax story — pro and con.
At present, the tax collectors' annual intake in the
United States is $12,500,000,000. That total includes all
taxes: local, state and federal. It is our all-time tax high.
Even that sum, however, is not enough to meet the whole
cost of government. The difference is made up by bor-
rowing. If we were taxed for all that our governments
spend, instead of borrowing for part of it, some $15 to
$20 would be added to the $100 which, on an average,
every person is already paying out in taxes.
The nation's total tax collection is split three ways: the
federal government gets $5,500,000,000 of it— the lion's
share; state governments: $2,500,000,000; local govern-
FACING THE TAX PROBLEM. Twentieth Century Fund, Inc. New
York. 606 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
ments: $4,500,000,000. The system by which the federal
government raises its quota is somewhat uniform. At
least, the Constitution provides that Washington cannot
go in for geographical discriminations in levying taxes.
But there is very little tax uniformity anywhere else. The
states operate according to forty-eight different tax sys-
tems. Some states even tax differently in different locali-
ties. Then there are about 175,000 other tax units: coun-
ties, cities, school districts, and so forth, whose tax sys-
tems are modelled on lines laid down by the state legis-
latures but among which there is little uniformity. In
short, there is hardly anything in the United States
which is coordinated enough to be called a "tax sys-
tem." There is a multiplicity of tax systems just as there
is a multiplicity of taxes.
HERE, HOWEVER, ARE THE MAJOR TAXES AND THEIR CASH-
producing importance.
The most profitable of them all is the property tax.
Except for the sales tax the property tax is practically the
only tax available to the various local units in the several
states. It produces about one third of the total tax revenue
— local, state and federal.
Next in line is the income tax. Whereas the property
tax is chiefly used by local tax units, the income tax is
largely an instrument of the federal government. Includ-
ing the tax on corporations as well as that on individuals,
the federal government is getting, from this source, slight-
ly more than one third of its total tax revenue. Including
state income taxes, about one fifth of the nation's tax
revenue is produced by levies on income.
There are a number of other, less important taxes.
Federal payroll taxes have been levied in accordance with
the Social Security Act but, in 1937, will not yield more
than 6 percent of the federal tax revenue; highway taxes,
on gasoline and automobiles, produce about 9 percent of
the total federal, state and local tax sum; liquor taxes pro-
vide about $600 million for the federal government and
$200 million for the state governments; tobacco taxes,
$500 million for the federal government and $50 million
for the state governments. On January 1, 1937, twenty-
251
two states and two large cities — New York and New Or-
leans— had sales taxes in operation. They produce about
6 percent of the entire local and state tax revenues. All
the states, save Nevada, have death taxes, which are much
lower than the federal death tax. The federal govern-
ment and three states levy a gift tax designed to discour-
age tax avoidance by the transfer of property before
death. The states and localities collect about 2 percent
of their total taxes from the death taxes, and the federal
government about 5 percent. Taxes on imports, i.e., cus-
toms duties, are exclusively the privilege of the federal
government which gets, at present, about 7 percent of
its total tax revenue from that source. Shortly before the
War, customs duties provided nearly 50 percent of the
government's revenue.
That, in brief, is an outline of the way in which our
governments get their twelve and a half billion. Just
how good a way it is remains to be seen.
THERE ARE, OBVIOUSLY, TWO MAIN PURPOSES OF TAXATION.
The first is financial: to raise revenue. The second is
social: to regulate or control production, distribution or
consumption. On the revenue-producing side, the tax
problem is inextricably bound up with the question of
the country's taxable capacity. Where, in brief, is the red
light on taxes — beyond which it is dangerous to go? Poli-
ticians are familiar with one kind of red light, the point
beyond which it is politically inexpedient to go. Here,
however, it is not the political but the economic tax
"ceiling" that is under discussion.
It is clear that if the money collected for taxes is used
for productive purposes — to supply the country with
goods and services — the tax limit can be set at a higher
figure than if the money goes for non-productive uses.
"If the tax money is to be used to produce the necessities
of life the limit of taxable capacity is remote."
Two things seem to be clear about taxable limits. First,
The chairman of the Twentieth Century Fund'* Special
Committee on Taxation was Thomas I. Parkinson, presi-
dent of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, and its
other members were: Francis Biddle, formerly chairman of
the National Labor Relations Board; Professor Robert
M. Haig of Columbia University, one of the nation's
leading tax authorities; Peter Molyneaux, editor of the
Texas Weekly and agricultural specialist; and Eustace
Seligman, of the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, attorneys
for many large corporations. Professor Roswell Magill
of Columbia University was a member of the committee
until he accepted the position of Undersecretary of the
Treasury in charge of tax matters. Henry S. Dennison,
president of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, was
also a member but, likewise, could not take part in framing
the committee's recommendations.
Facing the Tax Problem runs to a six hundred page
volume and can hardly be called a primer. But the facts,
as well as the conclusions, are there, inside the covers of
one book. They were gathered and analyzed by a corps of
tax experts under the direction of Professor Carl Shoup
of Columbia University. The program for improving the
tax system was drawn up by the Taxation Committee.
the present ratio of approximately $60 billion of national
income to $12 billion of taxes is not as bad as it looks.
It is not that bad because national income does not in*
elude a great many valuable services — the work of house-
wives for example — which, if figured in, would make
the income figure a much larger one and the tax propor-
tion more reasonable. Again, it is not that bad because
some of the tax bill does not come out of the sixty billion
— but has already been paid out at the source by business
concerns from funds destined for investors or employes.
In the second place, it is clear that there is no eco-
nomic certainty about taxable limits. Too many facts —
of income, of the purposes and results of taxation — have
to be considered. It is the conclusion of this study that
"the amounts now raised by taxation and the amounts
that are likely to be demanded in the near future are not
beyond the economic limits of taxation."
BEYOND THE REVENUE-PRODUCING ASPECT THERE is ANOTHER
primary purpose of taxation: the use of taxes as a means
for social control. Those who decry any kind of social
control through government, naturally decry at least
some of the taxes levied for this purpose. But such levies
have always been an important part of our tax system,
more or less.
Taxation for social control falls into two general cate-
gories: taxes which encourage and taxes which restrain
certain economic activities or types of business.
In the first category, the most important tax in the
United States in the past has been the protective tariff.
Manufacturing has been the chief beneficiary of the
tariff. Agriculture, an exporting industry, has been hurt
rather than helped. Undoubtedly, the tariff which was
aimed to aid manufacturing has facilitated the growth
of monopolies and protected inefficient industries by elim-
inating foreign competition. Other less important taxes
levied to aid economic activity in certain fields have been:
the tax on oleomargarine designed to aid the dairy indus-
try; the taxes under the Agricultural Adjustment Act;
and certain types of tax exemptions invoked to free fa-
vored businesses from tax burdens.
In the second category — that of restraint — social con-
trol is exercised through taxes, both by state and na-
tional governments, to curb big business in the interests
of smaller business. The tax dice, in other words, are
loaded to favor the small units. For instance, the tax on
corporation incomes by the federal government is a
graduated tax. In other words, the tax gets proportion-
ately bigger as the corporation's income gets bigger. Sim-
ilarly, the chain store tax is designed to protect the small,
independent merchant against the competition of the big-
ger unit.
Social control, however, is not only exerted against
"bigness," but to put restraints upon certain types of busi-
ness. The federal government tax on certain types of
cotton future sales has made such sales impossible. Sump-
tuary taxes — those on liquor, tobacco and habit-forming
narcotics — are a restraint upon the consumption of com-
modities which, in varying degree, are held to be socially
harmful.
One further aspect of social control through taxation
has to do with the redistribution of wealth and income
in order to correct economic maladjustments. The redis-
tributing of wealth — since wealth is chiefly not money
but things — is not easy. The redistributing of income —
252
SURVEY GRAPHIC
since incomes are more easily got at — is comparatively
simple. Theoretically the government, if it chose, could
by taxation bring the income of the people into a state
of almost complete equality.
In addition to these major purposes of taxation — the
production of revenue and the exercise of social control —
the Twentieth Century Fund study lays down a series
of tests or standards by which the merits of each tax
should be judged. The first of these is justice. And the
first item in considering the justice of a tax is its ease of
adjustment to the capacity of the individual or the
economic unit to pay. Furthermore, the exact amount of
taxes paid is not an accurate picture of tax justice. The
tax burden of an individual can be measured only after
knowing what share of the taxes he pays is shifted to
others and what share of what others pay is shifted to
him. Thus, the test is taxes borne rather than taxes paid.
This problem of justice involves, also, the results of
changes in the rates of a tax. It is often impossible to
rectify past injustices by changes in the present tax struc-
ture. Likewise, new taxes or higher rates of taxes may
lead to injustice merely because they represent a change
in the system. If a business enterprise is built up in part,
at least, through tax favor or on the assumption that the
tax structure in certain particulars will remain stable, it
is clearly unjust to make sudden or drastic changes in
the system at those points.
Tax justice likewise calls for particular attention to
those who receive special benefits from government.
"Persons who directly use and benefit from certain gov-
ernment services should pay a benefit charge." Such
taxes, of course, are already widely in use — the best
known being the gasoline tax on all automobile users
for the financing of highway building and repair. In the
area of the federal government the most important tax of
this kind is the postal charge.
In addition to the test of justice, there is the further
test of "tax consciousness" which must be applied if a
tax is to be properly appraised. Tax consciousness — al-
though there cannot be statistics on the subject — is prob-
ably a force for good government. The more conscious
every person is made of the cost of government and of
the necessity which rests on the people to foot the bill,
the greater will be the political pressure for governmental
efficiency. Judged by this standard the best tax is the one
of which the taxpayer is most aware.
THERE is LIKEWISE THE NECESSITY FOR JUDGING A TAX SYS-
tem on the basis of its ease of administration. That in-
volves both cost of administration and cost of compli-
ance. On these matters there is very little available evi-
dence and such evidence as is available reveals very little
choice between different taxes on the basis either of cost
of collection or cost of compliance. In general the costs
of tax collections are not as high as, probably, they should
be, due to the fact that governments are often indifferent
in the matter of collecting taxes from small taxpayers.
It is obviously undesirable to have a body of citizens who
are relatively free from taxes, merely because the cost of
collecting taxes in such small amounts is high.
The final test of a tax is that of revenue stability: can
it be counted upon to produce a fairly even flow of
revenue under all circumstances? Certain taxes, notably
income taxes, death taxes, stock transfer taxes, are par-
ticularly susceptible to business fluctuations. Customs
S/LUOMS OF DOLLARS
2 3 4
Wm Federal
&7771 State (Including shares distributee/
to /oca// ties)
fe"^ Local
Gasoline Tax
Liquor Tax
Af/sce//a/7eous\
Taxes
/ncome Tax--
Corporation
'ami Persons/
Property Tax
From Facing the Tax Problem, Twentieth Century Fund. Inc.
Sources of tax revenue in the United States. Estimated to the
nearest tenth of a billion dollars for the year ending June 30, 1937
duties and the cigarette tax have proved to be less sensi-
tive to business cycles. It is clear, however, that there
are some things which should not be sacrificed for reve-
nue stability. The income tax, for example, is desirable
despite its economic sensitivity. It is probable that the
federal tax system should be geared to a fluctuating busi-
ness cycle rather than designed merely for in-season-and-
out revenue stability.
Now, it is not possible in the scope of this article to
apply these various tax tests to all the major taxes. It is
possible, however, to indicate how — on the basis of these
tests — the system as a whole seems to work. The data for
these conclusions were gathered from a case study made
of tax burdens in two states: Illinois and New York.
Certain conclusions seem to be clear. First, wage earn-
ers, in general, pay more taxes than farmers. The urban
dweller pays more than the rural resident with an equal
income largely because of the higher property taxes in
cities. For individuals of $5000 incomes, the merchant
pays a heavier tax than the salaried worker. Because of
the ease with which taxes can be shifted and passed on,
however, it is virtually impossible for anyone to escape
a substantial tax burden even though such a person pays
no direct taxes. Moreover, it is clear from this study
that our present tax system is regressive for the lower in-
come groups. That is, the lower the income, the greater
the percentage of it that is taken out in taxes, either
direct or indirect. In other words, on the basis of the
figures in these two states, our present tax system shows
an exceedingly bad adjustment to ability to pay for the
masses whose incomes are low. In the higher income
groups, however, the tax burden is progressive — that is,
the larger the income the greater the tax.
Like all the studies of the Twentieth Century Fund,
MAY 1937
253
Facing the Tax Problem goes beyond the facts to a con-
structive program. In addition to the investigators who
prepared the data for this study, the Special Committee
on Taxation, using these data and the standards laid
down in the report, formulated a specific program for
improving the tax system.
The most fundamental of the committee's recommen-
dations, it seems to me, have to do with the income tax.
It recommends lowering the exemptions, both federal
and state, in order to broaden the basis of the personal
income tax. It proposes that federal exemptions be low-
ered as follows: for a single person from $1000 to $500;
for a married couple, from $2500 to $1000; for each de-
pendent from $400 to $200. These levels are suggested for
both federal and state income taxes. That means, in
short, a much greater reliance than even at present on
the income tax for the revenues of government. The
change would increase the number of taxable returns
from the present total of about four million to from eight
to nine million, and would yield, in a poor year, an addi-
tional revenue estimated at $200 million and, in a good
year, $500 million.
THIS SOUNDS, OF COURSE, LIKE AN INCREASED BURDEN ON
those least able to pay. As a matter of fact, taken with
the committee's other suggestions, it means quite the
opposite. I cannot emphasize too strongly that the fund
program is designed to ease the unfair tax load which
now rests — though often in hidden form — on the shoul-
ders of the little man.
In the first place, the proposed rates in the low-
est brackets will be merely nominal. In the second place,
for those who will be included in the income tax who
have not had to pay such a tax before, it is suggested
that taxes which now bear more heavily on persons of
low income be abolished or reduced. This offset is to be
accomplished federally by lowering the social security
payroll taxes, the cigarette tax and other indirect internal
revenue taxes, some lowering of tariff duties and, in the
case of the states, abolishing sales and chain store taxes.
The further suggestion is made that there be no increase
made now of taxes in the middle and higher brackets
and that the rates on these brackets be slightly reduced —
if the additional funds secured from this tax are not re-
quired— in order to counterbalance the added burden of
the lower exemptions.
It is further proposed that, if additional tax revenues
are needed, they be secured through heavier death and
gift taxes and higher surtax rates in the middle income
tax brackets — i. e., on net incomes of from $5000 to
$50,000 — which would also automatically increase the
taxes on the higher incomes. In other words if the gov-
ernments of the United States need more revenue than
existing rates will produce, it will be those with incomes
over $5000 who will foot the bill.
This lowering of income tax exemptions is recom-
mended: first, because the income tax is the easiest to
adjust to capacity to pay; second, because this will help
to make a greater number of people conscious of their
tax responsibilities; third, because increased government
expenditures should lead to an increased sense of tax
responsibility.
One of the most striking of the committee's recom-
mendations is its proposal that the present undistributed
profits tax — which has caused such a storm of criticism in
business circles — be abolished. The committee, however,
does not stop there. In its place the committee proposes
that every individual who owns property be required to
report in his income tax return the increase or decrease
in the value of his holdings during the year. It is further
proposed that if his holdings have increased in value the
amount of that increase be taxed as if it were income.
If the value has declined he would be allowed to deduct
the loss from his income from other sources, and to carry
over into future years losses which cannot be absorbed in
the year in which they occurred.
The committee points out that one of the chief aims
of the undistributed profits tax was to place the stock-
holder on an equal basis with the partner or individual
owner of a business in respect tc his tax liability. The
member of an unincorporated partnership or the indivi-
dual owner of a business must pay taxes on his business
gains, but the man who shares ownership in a corpora-
tion through stock holdings has not been taxed if the
company retained its profits rather than paying them out
in dividends. The measures which the committee would
substitute for the undistributed profits tax would achieve
this aim of tax equality, it is claimed, without forcing
business concerns, under penalty of high taxes, to dis-
tribute all their earnings.
As to the present excess profits tax, the committee rec-
ommends its repeal as a hard tax to administer, of un-
certain revenue value and of doubtful justice. In its place,
it is proposed to have a "preparatory, records-producing
tax," with nominal rates. The present tax does not cover
partnerships or proprietorships and, because it is levelled
solely at the excess profits of corporations, is not inclusive
enough. Under the proposal for reporting incomes from
all kinds of business, it is suggested that the Treasury
Department, during the first five-year period, study and
find the basis for a new tax. After the groundwork has
been laid it is proposed to abolish the nominal rates and
impose, instead, high progressive rates beginning on
profits above a 5 or 10 percent return on capital.
In the field of social security, the committee recom-
mends reducing the payroll taxes and placing the system
on a "current cost" basis — thus eliminating the danger
from the huge reserve fund at present planned in the
old age benefit system. As it stands now, the cost of the
payroll tax will probably be shifted to the consumer in
increased prices, or to the employe in lower wages. It
is proposed that the decrease in the employer-employe
contributions to this fund be made up from general
taxes.
As already indicated, it is the conclusion of the com-
mittee that there should be a wider use of the death tax
and the gift tax — this to be accomplished by raising the
rates in the middle brackets and by lowering the present
exemptions, rather than by increasing the rates in the
higher brackets only. The economic effect of the high
rates in the higher brackets is uncertain.
NOT ALL THE MATERIAL GATHERED BY THIS STUDY — IN THE
data of the investigators and the recommendations of
the Committee on Taxation — will be of interest to every
citizen. But every citizen, tax-conscious or not, has some
stake, at some point or other, in these findings. The point
is, that here in one volume is the whole problem with the
supporting evidence and some indication of some things
that need to be done about it.
234
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Two Englands
BACKGROUND OF THE CORONATION
by S. K. RATCLIFFE
Beyond the thoroughfares of London, where throngs will hail the new
King, lie two Britains — one a land booming with recovery, the other a land
blighted by depression, and both shadowed by the war clouds of Europe
THE VICTORIAN ERA OPENED ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. IT
was the early morning of June 20, 1837 when (as the
American public has been delightfully reminded by Helen
Hayes) a young girl of eighteen ascended the throne upon
which she was to sit for nearly sixty-four years. The age
to which Victoria gave her name has been for our genera-
tion a too common target. Such is the law of alternation.
The eighteenth century despised the seventeenth as bar-
barous and theological; the nineteenth the eighteenth as
barbarous, prosaic, and unscientific; while the twentieth
began by condemning the nineteenth, and especially its
long Victorian stretch, as barbarous (again) and crudely
industrial, ugly, hypocritical, and above all complacent.
We, however, are in 1937 — a centennial year, and the
year which begins our Neo-Georgian epoch. Since we have
all been learning what the newest barbarism can be, it is
fair to assume that the middle term of the twentieth cen-
tury will take a juster view of the Victorian time. It was
an age of genius and discovery, an age during which the
leadership of the world came to be shared between Britain
and North America. It witnessed the establishment of the
machine in society, the first momentous triumphs of man
over time and space, the victory in thought of creative
evolution and, arising out of the advance of political de-
mocracy, the beginnings of genuine social science and an
active social conscience.
We English, as it happens, are easily led to think of
epochs in monarchical terms. The reign of Victoria was
indubitably an era, and although that of her son, Edward
VII, was no more than a nine-year interlude, the quarter-
century of the next king made another clear division of
time. When George V came to the throne in 1910 the
Victorian Liberal party was in its last stage of positive,
and possible, achievement. Labor was moving forward.
Ireland was near the final spasm of the parliamentary
struggle for home rule. The incident which we can all
now see to have been the preliminary skirmish of the great
War, Agadir, befell in the summer of the coronation.
A reign that comprised the first world war must obvi-
ously stand in history as an important and well-defined
period.
This chapter ended in January 1936, to be followed by
the shortest, queerest, and most disturbing sequel that
any modern great power has experienced. The reign of
Edward VIII was a few days short of ten months. At its
beginning the British Crown carried an unexampled pres-
tige. The King of England was the most popular man
alive. His father had done more than any other royal
personage to justify the institution of constitutional mon-
archy. He presided over the nation through its severest
ordeal. George V occupied the only important throne that
MAY 1937
had survived, and he was the one monarch to benefit in
full measure from the perfecting of world radio. His eld-
est son was the beneficiary of all this and, since he had
been for twenty-five years the most publicized of all youths
and young men, he entered upon his brief reign amid con-
ditions such as had never before been the portion of any
human creature. Nobody today would describe them as
indicative of good fortune.
THERE is A PERSISTENT BELIEF THAT TORY ENGLAND DETHRONED
Edward because of his democratic ways and his frequently
avowed sympathy with the destitute; or, as some would
put it, because he wanted to make kingship a real execu-
tive job. Edward as prince and king had, as we all know,
genuine sympathy with the workless and disinherited. The
housing reformers could always count upon him when
they needed a special word from high quarters to further
their cause. This, again, was the first king England had
known (at least since Charles II) who was entirely at
ease with all sorts and conditions of men and women.
It is undoubtedly true that a section of the not yet dis-
possessed ruling class resented his open contempt for cere-
mony and his strong language on certain occasions. Such
people violently condemned his last visit to Wales and
the semi-public expressions of horror at what he saw. The
London Times made itself the mouthpiece of this class
when it rebuked Lord Rothermere for allowing his morn-
ing paper to commend the King and to ask why it did not
occur to cabinet ministers to inform themselves by per-
sonal inquiry into the conditions with which their de-
partments had to deal. Such things as these belong to the
last stage of the brief reign, but it is nonetheless idle to
suggest that they had anything to do with its abrupt con-
clusion. No government could take action against a mon-
arch who felt with the mass of his people, or wanted to
see quicker action along lines of reform already started.
Edward's popular sympathies had nothing to do with his
going. And yet, undoubtedly, there is one ironical circum-
stance to be noted. With his departure, England made a
move towards a more thorough and vigorous effort to
grapple with those peculiarly distressing problems which,
as it happened, were the only social affairs that drove King
Edward to express himself from time to time spontane-
ously and in accents of personal conviction.
Well, Edward VIII disappeared and has already to a
remarkable extent faded from the public mind. About
his successor there is at present little to say. King George
VI is serious, conscientious, and wholly interested in the
British people and their welfare. His family fulfills the
wish and dream of the British nation. He succeeds to a
throne which stands now as the completed type of limited
255
monarchy. No fact of the British system is more certain
than this: the titular headship of the Empire has been
most strictly defined. In the most unmistakable fashion
government and people alike have made known their
convictions as to the constitutional sovereign and the
royal family. And it is impossible to be in England in
these days, so highly charged with peril, without realiz-
ing that the nation has, by its own curious and wholly
national route, gained a recovered sense of power and
security, in which the swift and united surmounting of
the monarchical crisis played a considerable part.
The new Georgian epoch, then, is making its start
amid conditions strikingly contrasted with those which
governed the closing years of the good old King's reign.
Let us see in outline what has been happening in England
— first of all politically.
THE FALL OF THE SECOND LABOR GOVERNMENT IN 1931
opened a chapter which ends this summer with the retire-
ment of Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. The
defection of the Labor leader six years ago and the wel-
come accorded to him by the tories as head of a national
administration was a unique event in British politics. It
dealt a mortal blow to the older Labor Party, and much
more than that. It made an end for the time being of the
regular party system, brought within sight the ruin of the
Liberal remnant, and initiated the method of govern-
ment by a single party in a manner that makes an inter-
esting partial parallel with certain other countries.
Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden belonged al-
ready to the past, but their departure revealed that as in-
THE SOCIAL PYRAMID IN GREAT BRITAIN
Each symbol represents 155,000 families
Top row: Families in which chief earner receives £10 per week
or more
Next two rows: Families in which chief earner receives £4 to £10
per week
Four rows at bottom: Families in which chief earner receives less
than £4 per week
dividuals they counted for much more in the Labor
movement than the bulk of its members had realized.
They were known to the whole country, and they left no
successors. The Labor Party in 1931 found itself without
accepted leadership and today, after six years of national
government, its case is not altered. The Labor vote in the
country is larger than it was in 1929, when Ramsay Mac-
Donald became head of a Labor Cabinet for the second
time, but there is no expectation that in the near future
the party can get another opportunity of forming an ad-
ministration. G. D. H. Cole has said emphatically that
this can not happen after the next general election, and
probably not after a second. Mr. Cole and many others
see the only hope for their side in a Popular Front, com-
prising all the Left parties and the left wing of the van-
ishing Liberals. The case for such a combination is two-
fold. First, it is urged that a working party system is an
imperative need: there must be an effective opposition in
Parliament. And secondly, that only by a strong union of
the progressive sections can the fascist tendencies of our
Conservatives be restrained. To these arguments a large
number of political Britons reply: By all means make
your Popular Front if you can, but the extreme Left is
intransigent and the Liberals are nearly all conservative;
and for ourselves, we think that the surest protection
against fascism in England is the maintenance of national
government.
SUCH GOVERNMENT, AT ALL EVENTS, IS ENGLAND'S PRESENT
destiny. It involves the premiership of Neville Cham-
berlain, who will make some important changes in the
Cabinet. Mr. Chamberlain is a strong, not to say stiff,
Conservative. He was the architect of our present tariff
system, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer has been the
firm ally of the Bank of England and the great indus-
trialists. From him as Prime Minister we may expect first,
in home affairs a stronger hand than Mr. Baldwin's and
a more positive social policy — especially, perhaps, in pub-
lic health and national fitness. But what as regards Europe
and peace? My tentative answer to that would be: Look
for a more definite movement towards an understanding
with Berlin. Mr. Chamberlain will not take the view that
peace can be obtained by intensifying the hostility to
Hitler. But he cannot be upon the right road unless he
builds upon the truth that the peace of Europe is indivisi-
ble, and that British policy must be based upon the
assumption that no evil can be so great as another gen-
eral war.
Turn now to the social picture of England in this year
of the new start.
After the financial crisis of 1931 England pulled herself
together under the national government. The inevitable
economies were made, wage and salary earners submitted
to drastic cuts, those liable for income tax made haste to
pay, the country went off gold. These measures preluded
an undeniable trade recovery from which England has
benefited equally with the United States and far more
than any other European country. The revival of British
industry and foreign trade is an impressive phenomenon,
and it has not been accomplished without large adjust-
ments in policy and a great extension of government
regulation and subsidy. The notion, until recently widely
held in America, that England was able to achieve a great
recovery without the aid of any kind of New Deal is a
serious misreading of the facts.
256
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The greatest evidences of improvement are to be seen in
the metropolitan region and over the South generally.
Here there has been an extraordinary expansion of indus-
try, especially in the newer trades; a growth of new occu-
pations, bringing into being a varied new community of
technical and other workers who, in character and outlook,
are markedly different from the traditional English work-
ing class. Along with this development there has gone on
a rapid urban growth, the most significant feature of
which is the building almost everywhere of housing es-
tates and garden suburbs. The general rehousing of the
people for which America has so long been calling made
a genuine beginning in England more than a dozen years
ago. New housing acts, municipal enterprise, and activity
by public utility bodies all contributed to the movement,
which has been stimulated by a decisive awakening of the
popular demand. Town-planners and housing reformers
such as Sir Raymond Unwin, designer of the pioneer
garden city and suburb, would tell you that for twenty
years after their beginning they seemed to be beating
upon a stone wall, but that in recent years the activity in
slum clearance and new building has taken on the charac-
ter of a national crusade. The immense expenditure and
taxation involved in the rearmament program will cer-
tainly administer a check, but nothing except war could
now bring it to a stop. The English people have con-
demned the slums, and ten years more of public and co-
operative effort should bring us within sight of the goal.
Apart from London, the civic enterprise of great cities
such as Manchester and Leeds stands out as an example
to be followed. The Victorian age witnessed nothing com-
parable with this. Rehousing is a sound policy at all times,
and particularly during depressions. In England today it
stands out against a background of general recovery
which, as American visitors are the first to note, reveals an
extraordinary complex of social change. Urban life has
been to a large extent transformed in a single generation,
and it is not possible to deny that the changes amount to
a continuous Americanization.
AT THE SAME TIME WE ARE WITNESSING A REMAKING OF THE
rural order on a scale which it would not be easy to
exaggerate. Income and inheritance taxes, together with
the rapid adoption of new ways of living between country
and town, make an end of the traditional village and great
house which together stood for five hundred years as the
almost unchanging unit of English country life. The
large estates are broken up, the great house is made over
into a holiday hotel or public institution, while a new
system of highways removes features of the landscape
which, down to the close of the Victorian era, seemed to
be as unalterable as when Thomas Gray wrote the Elegy
in a Country Churchyard. And roughly speaking, outside
certain devastated regions, there appears to be work for
almost everybody, while from the flow of new company
prospectuses in the daily papers the city man is tempted
to infer that happy days indeed have come again.
The picture makes an encouraging contrast to that of
1921 or 1931, two years of varying crisis. But we do not —
or at least should not — lull ourselves with hopes that the
present unequal prosperity of England can be enduring.
It contains plain evidences of an unreal boom; it is re-
lated in an unknown degree to the government's stupen-
dous rearmament plans, and it hangs, of course, upon in-
calculable possibilities on the continent.
MAY 1937
In 1931 the total of the registered unemployed went
beyond 2,700,000. At the time of writing it is about 1,-
500,000. Although the U.S.A. is the land of statistics be-
yond all others, the federal government, I believe, does
not at any time undertake to furnish an accurate estimate
of the workless in the country. If, however, we take the
7,000,000 figure which was frequently cited last winter,
and put it beside the total of population — nearly three
times that of Britain — the American reader can work out
the comparative sum. The percentage in Britain would in
any case be considerably smaller. We have a population of
between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 which is normally sub-
ject to fluctuating unemployment. About one third of
these are unemployed at any given date. Under the rules
for unemployment benefit the man out of work must
register daily, and every day of unemployment is counted
in the returns. Roughly one half of the total is made up
of men who have been unemployed for less than three
months, while the specially distressed areas account for
perhaps 450,000 men who must be reckoned as perma-
nently unemployed. Bearing in mind the recognized fea-
tures of the capitalistic system, it could be argued that
the South of England, including Greater London, is
carrying no more than the unavoidable minimum of un-
employed, and it could certainly be shown that general
conditions over these parts of the country are today better
than they have been at any time within the past fifteen
years.
Is the existence of 1,500,000 unemployed a fact so terrible
that Britain needs to be in despair over it? Manifestly not.
The bulk of the evil is concentrated. The special areas
account for one third of the total, and their continued
miseries make the darkest blot on the map and on the
reputation of present-day England. And yet there are
FUTURE POPULATION OF GREAT BRITAIN
Estimated changes in age composition
1931
TOTAL 44,100,000
Under 15 years
15-65 years
30.650,000
65 years and over
till
1941
TOTAL 44,140,000
Under 15 years
1 5-65 years
31.930,000
65 years and over
lift
1951
TOTAL 41,170,000
Under 15 years
1 5-65 years
3l.no.ooo
65 years and over
till
I
1961
TOTAL 3»,3to,ooo
Under 1 5 years
1 5-65 years
11,100,000
65 years and over
ttttt
li
Each symbol represents 1,000,000 persons
Charts from The Home Market, a handbook of statistics, by
Major G. Harrison and F. C. Mitchell
257
many among us who cannot admit that a practicable
remedy is beyond the reach of an all-powerful govern-
ment. Durham and South Wales, with their small extent
and orderly inhabitants, make an urgent challenge which
no government ought to evade.
SIR MALCOLM STEWART, THE ABLE COMMISSIONER FOR THE
Special Areas, relinquished his post in the fall of 1936
under a sense of hopelessness and disillusion. His powers
were restricted, the funds at his disposal were altogether
inadequate, and he failed to obtain the support of Parlia-
ment or the Cabinet for his larger schemes, particularly
for specific public works projects (such as a bridge over
the Severn, to end the crippling isolation of South Wales)
for which the arguments would appear to be unanswer-
able. The special areas have decayed, of course, by reason
of the decline or death of their basic industries — mining,
iron and steel, textiles, shipbuilding. They contain whole
communities in which it is possible to find 50 percent or
more of the employables permanently out of work, men
in the prime of life who have not worked at anything for
three, four or five years. The commissioner's last report is
a document of exceeding interest but of virtually no hope.
Persuasion was tried among manufacturing companies to
induce them to build new factories in these zones. The
result, as Sir Malcolm Stewart explains, was negligible.
Economic reasons must decide: how could the firms do
what was asked? They will not choose the North of Eng-
land or the notorious Welsh valleys when fresh sites are
available. There is no need for them to be near the coal
fields. They have no liking for the northern climate or
for the northern workers with their rigid traditions. They
do not see why their plants should be set among the ruins
of older industries, when the brightness and variety of a
newly industrialized South, within easy reach of the vast
metropolitan market, is welcoming and insistently adver-
tising. There is no reply to such contentions as these, but
to some extent the government may get round them by
means of subsidies and other emergency measures.
PLANS OF RECONSTRUCTION CAN BE ONLY OF VERY PARTIAL AVAIL;
measures of relief do not touch the roots of the problem.
Why not, then, a national scheme of migration ? The com-
missioner discusses this aspect of the problem in an ex-
ceptionally interesting chapter of his report. The special
areas contain today a population of about 2,800,000, which
is barely 200,000 less than at the beginning of the post-War
depression, despite the fact that within the past fifteen
years more than 600,000 have moved out. The explana-
tion is found, of course, in the natural means of increase.
In these districts the birthrate remains relatively high.
Emigration, which in the nineteenth century would have
drained the surplus into the United States and the British
dominions, offers no solution today. The great depression
came just as the once wide-open lands were learning how
to shut and bar their doors. They will not be reopened in
our time to admit industrial workers from the Old World.
In the meantime the population of the areas is being
steadily though slowly reduced by internal migration.
Young people are continuously moving out, and as in
Ireland over so long a period, young women have not
been Jess enterprising than the lads. The rising genera-
tion is restless and is encouraged to be so. The common
view has been that industrial England depended upon a
static working population. If the comparison is with the
United States that view, needless to say, is correct: some
mining and manufacturing regions are still homogeneous
and immobile. But this has not been by any means true
of all industrial Britain. The manufacturing centers of
Midlands half a century ago attracted artisans from all
sides. The coal fields of southern Scotland have a varie-
gated population, including Poles. South Wales itself is
anything but pure Cymric. In the boom times workers
of the other three British nationalities poured in. The
later migration, however, is more serious and general.
It has been partly planned, and planned or not, hence-
forward it will inevitably be speeded up.
WHILE THE CONDITION OF THE DESOLATE AREAS REMAINS A
major concern the British people as a whole are increas-
ingly conscious of other pressing matters very near home.
Sir Malcolm Stewart has some fascinating pages dealing
with one of these — the astounding expansion of the im-
perial capital. Greater London was never a city. It has
become a province of infinite variety and incalculable
wealth, which ought without further delay to be recon-
stituted and brought under a unified administration. The
social gain would in every respect be immense, but no
regional government, however admirable, could reverse
the mischief that has been done. London is far too large
and is still increasing at undiminished speed. Its spread
has ruined a circle of landscape as agreeable as any sur-
rounding a great center; its insatiable demand is draining
the counties of their human resources. Moreover, as many
writers lately have taken occasion to demonstrate, Greater
London offers to the aerial invader an opportunity for the
swift paralyzing of Britain's central power. The metropoli-
tan province could not be defended, and no authority has
put this disturbing truth to the nation more pointedly
than the retiring Prime Minister. How large today, one
asks, is that percentage of the British people which has
resolved to confront the logic of implacable fact — the
minority which knows that peace is the one necessity
for England, knows that Britain's policy must be concen-
trated upon the single aim of holding the peace of Europe,
since war would literally bring the end ? "And we all know
it," said Mr. Baldwin to the City of London's most im-
posing audience last November.
HERE, AS I NEED NOT ADD, is THE SPECTER THAT LOOMS OVER
our land as, against a continent lying in suffering and
dread, we celebrate the crowning of a King and Queen
who a few short months ago had no knowledge of the
destiny awaiting themselves. Theirs now is the kingdom.
It is indescribably remote from the position of ease and
security that the great old Queen passed on to her son
thirty-six years ago, and hardly less remote than the
throne to which her grandson fell heir in 1910. There is
a simple truth in the statement that the whole English-
speaking world in 1937 greets the royal pair with pro-
found hope and sympathy, since nothing in this day can
be more certain than that the health of the commonwealth
over which they preside is bound up with the welfare of
civilized mankind.
This is the first of two articles by Mr. Ratclifte. The second will deal with the British Empire.
258
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Unions and the Rackets
by VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
The first of two articles on the seamy side of industrial relations [see
Employers and the Spy Business, page 263]. This delves into Prosecutor
Dewey's convictions in the restaurant cases in New York where, it was
brought out, tribute was exacted from employers and employes alike
WHEN SPECIAL PROSECUTOR THOMAS E. DEWEY BEGAN HIS
campaign against racketeering in New York City it was
inevitable that eventually he would tackle what, speaking
loosely, may be called a labor racket. In the restaurant and
cafeteria business, with which he was not unfamiliar, his
staff uncovered what proved to be a vicious hangover
from the old bootleg days of Dutch Schultz.
As the repeal of prohibition in 1933 brought about
diminishing returns from illegal beer and liquor, a
Schultz lieutenant, one Jules Martin, who has since been
killed in a gang war, turned to the profitable business
of selling restaurant owners immunity from "labor trou-
ble." That was obviously a commodity that could not be
sold without the connivance of union officials. The trail
of investigation, directed by Mr. Dewey's chief assistant,
William B. Herlands, led directly to a group whose con-
nivance Martin apparently had no difficulty in secur-
ing. Indeed, the union officials had become partners
with the gangsters. Together they extorted tribute
from employers and from helpless waiters, cooks, barmen
and busboys of the two unions having jurisdiction over
restaurant and cafeteria workers. To many crusaders it
would have been a tremendous temptation to sidestep
even the appearance of making a special target out o£
a labor union; but, being prosecutors with no foggy in-
hibitions, Mr. Dewey and Mr. Herlands saw it through.
From indictment to conviction of the union officials and
their gangdom associates, however, they stressed a point
which the public has sometimes missed in the headline
accounts of the trial: They were not attacking a union,
or unionism; they were attacking men who had betrayed,
disgraced and misled their unions in the course of run-
ning a $2 million racket.
The trial, held before a blue ribbon jury and Justice
Philip J. McCook of the New York Supreme Court, was
a sensational one. Through January, February, and
March, its daily headlines were big enough to compete
with floods, murders and sit-down strikes. There was
such a vast and confusing array of evidence that its sig-
nificance has become distorted in the minds of many
friends as well as foes of labor organization.
This first prosecution of a case against a complete in-
dustrial racket in the United States harked back to the
time, several years ago, when Jack Dempsey, posing for
news cameramen, signed a contract with the Metro-
politan Restaurant and Cafeteria Association. The former
heavyweight champion was joining that misbegotten trade
organization on behalf of his classy chophouse. Willingly
or unwillingly, and without fanfare, the owner of many
another Manhattan eating place joined up. It was, to put
it bluntly, a "protection" society. From cafeteria chains
MAY 1937
catering to workingmen to Edward Levine's tavern in
Central Park, the bronze shield of the Metropolitan Asso-
ciation emblazoned on the portal meant that the com-
mercial boniface had paid an initiation fee of $250 and
dues of at least $5 a month, to combat deliberately ex-
orbitant labor demands, to prevent strikes and picketing,
and also to avoid stench bombs, mice in the soup, and
other forms of terror hinted at by the collectors for the
racket and on occasion actually demonstrated. At first the
restaurants paid this tribute, plus additional shakedown
money, to ward off rising labor costs — but, once the
racket had got a hold on them, they were forced to pay
it to prevent a terroristic perversion of legitimate union
activities. The racket worked both ends from the middle.
USUALLY THE FIRST STAGE OF THE RACKET WAS AN
apparently bona fide visit from one of the four union
officials who were later indicted and convicted. He would
inform the employer that the place was organized, or
would be organized, and would demand a wholly unrea-
sonable agreement as to hours and wages. This routine
parley was, in the early days of the racket, deceptively
earnest and innocent. The visit from the union repre-
sentative was from the start, however, promptly followed
by a call from a representative of the Metropolitan who
either cajoled or threatened the restaurateur into joining
up, paying up — or else the union would have its way.
Fortunately for the Dewey investigation, the best-known
collector for the racket, Louis Beitcher, turned state's
evidence. His description of the way the racket worked
was corroborated by restaurant owners, by honest mem-
bers of the union, and by the accountants for the Dewey
investigators who traced the payments of tribute to the
racketeers.
Most restaurateurs who made payments knew they
were dealing with extortioners identified with union
officials. Jack Dempsey, whose name lent prestige and
publicity to the Metropolitan, got off with light payments,
and no shakedown payment in addition to membership
fees. But many of the large chains were bled time and
time again. The Willow and Stewart cafeteria chains, for
example, paid a total of $46,500 including initiation fees,
dues for each unit of their chains and shakedown money
paid directly to the Metropolitan's representative. Folds
Fischer, a large cafeteria chain, paid $12,975. The case of
the Sherman cafeterias and Tiptoe Inns is typical. In
1934, the Sherman chain of twenty-one units were tied
up for several months by a strike in which Locals 302
and 16 participated. On October 27, 1934, Aaron Chinitz,
representative of the Sherman chain and the Tiptoe Inns,
made out a check of that date payable to the order of
259
Wide World
Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey
the Metropolitan Association for $10,200. On that very
same day the strike was called off.
By that time most of the restaurateurs who were vic-
tims of the racket realized they were dealing with a form
of extortion in which they were not always buying a
bargain of low labor costs when they staved off union
demand, by dealing with the Metropolitan. Some of them,
like the Metropole, never were organized, but neverthe-
less were threatened with labor trouble as a means of
exacting shakedowns.
The employers appear in an uncommendable position.
They testified they were afraid not to play along with the
racketeers. Some said that, threatened with ruination of
their business, there was no choice. Some said that, being
retailers, they could not take the chances on stench bombs
or picket lines that would frighten the public away.
Some of them attributed the whole scheme to labor;
others, who were never even honored by a call from a
union delegate, reluctantly paid off the gangster-inspired
employers' association when the "heat was put on them."
Often it would have been cheaper to make an upward
wage adjustment in an industry in which labor condi-
tions are far from ideal, and in which reasonable labor
demands would have won the support of an impartial
mediator.
But, no matter what the motives of the employers —
whether they preferred to deal with gangsters rather than
take a chance on reprisals, or whether they were content
to pay dearly to keep labor costs down — the Dewey in-
vestigators went on the assumption that all the employers
actually were genuine victims. They were granted im-
munity when they testified. Mr. Herlands, as Mr. Dewey 's
260
chief prosecutor of the case, also granted a
welcome hearing to the earnest and some-
what insurgently radical rank-and-file mem-
bers of the two dominant unions of the
International Hotel and Restaurant Work-
ers Alliance, affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor.
Last fall the Dewey investigators swooped
down upon the headquarters of Local 16
(composed of restaurant workers) and
Local 302 (composed of cafeteria workers).
At that time they were led by men closely
identified with the Central Trades Council
and the State Federation of Labor, as well
as with Tammany Hall and the Schultz
racketeers. The rank-and-file members were
confronted with a dilemma. To protest
against the investigations of Mr. Dewey,
a relentless investigator and prosecutor,
would smear their unions instead of the
indicted leaders only. That would certainly
play into the hands of the employers, who,
naturally enough, might welcome the wip-
ing out of racket and union in one stroke.
On the other hand, if the members co-
operated with Mr. Dewey they would be
bound to alienate what might be described
as the old line political machine type of
labor .leader who vehemently calls Dewey
a union-buster. The rank-and-filers co-
operated.
It is to the credit of the majority of mem-
bers of Local 16 and Local 302 that they
did so. Back in 1933, when Local 302 levied an assess-
ment of $5 apiece against each member in order to raise
a $2500 fund which the Schultz mob demanded, the
amount was charged on the union books to "organization
expense." At that time several knowing members, aware
that the money went directly into the hands of the
racketeers, were intrepid enough to bring charges against
Max Pincus, president of the union, Paul N. Coulcher,
boss of Local 16, and organizers John J. Williams, Irving
Epstein and Aladar Retek. In October 1933, these union
officials were actually arrested on the complaint of union
members, and eventually brought before the Court of
Special Sessions. In February of 1934 this influential clique
was acquitted without entering a defense at the end of
the state's case.
EMBOLDENED BY THIS DISPLAY OF THEIR OWN POWER,
thereafter the union officials promptly expelled from
their union any member who questioned their motives,
throwing out of the hall any one who referred to their
racket connections. A few materialists among the rank-
and-file bided their time, and kept quiet, on the theory
that the racketeers at least were enabling the union to
penetrate the strongest shops of the restaurant trade in
New York City. But not all the members were thus
willing to temporize. A zealous insurgent group continued
to criticize the crooked leadership of the two unions.
They were branded radical and communistic by Coulcher
and Pincus, and expelled when their activities were dis-
covered. These radicals later cooperated with the Dewey
investigators.
Their cooperation, helpful as it was, was buttressed by
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the kind of evidence that Mr. Dewey demonstrated he
knew so well how to handle when, as assistant federal
district attorney, he sent Waxie Gordon, notorious beer
runner, obliquely to prison on an income tax charge. The
history of all rackets is written in dollars, in figures
written in bank books, and on forgotten scraps of paper.
But, unlike the prosecution of an income tax case, a
racket case involves more than one culprit at a time. For
that Mr. Dewey was prepared, with a New York law
passed at his special request. Under it, a group may be
tried at once, resulting not only in economy but in a
more comprehensive presentation of evidence than the
trial of a series of individuals would permit.
This blanketing of union officials with underworld
characters provided the defense with a plea of persecu-
tion, which resulted in their enlisting two eminent lib-
eral attorneys to represent them. One of them, John Fi-
nerty, well known as a defender of civil rights and as
attorney for Tom Mooney before the California Supreme
Court referee in 1935, represented Aladar Retek, organizer
of Local 16. The other, Louis Waldman, prominent
Socialist, represented Charles B. Baum, president of Local
16. Baum was stricken ill during the hearing and still
awaits trial. Retek was convicted. Finerty and Waldman,
it was apparent, were disturbed when the sordid evidence
began to unfold involving the union clique; nevertheless,
both of them protested against the Dewey investigation's
methods; Mr. Finerty took exceptions to Judge McCook's
charge to the jury. Their criticism has been echoed by
resolutions of several New York locals of other unions,
and by many members of the Central Trades Council,
which is headed by Joseph A. Ryan, who before the
trial upheld Paul N. Coulcher, erstwhile boss of Local
16, who was convicted. In marked contrast, praise, not
criticism of Mr. Dewey and his staff
is now heard among the present
leaders of the purged locals, 16 and
302.
Both of the unions are now go-
ing through a process of reorgan-
ization. There is an ironic circum-
stance in their rehabilitation. Their
leadership now comes primarily
from the erstwhile members of two
independent leftish unions, locals
110 and 119, whose members were
taken into 302 and 16 in line with
the obvious strategy that, being
pink or red, they would be bound
to raise a characteristic radical wail
that Dewey was a "persecutor of
labor" and a "tool of the capital-
ists." Instead, chafing at the un-
democratic, incompetent and gang-
influenced leadership of 302 and
16, these newcomers turned the
tables, encouraged outright union
cooperation with the investigation.
Stimulated by an accolade from
Mr. Dewey for their present hon-
esty both locals are now growing.
Their spokesmen now say that
without the Dewey housecleaning
they could have wiped out rack-
eteering within the unions, if given
Paul N. Coulcher: 15-20 years
time to gather their strength and force a showdown in
union elections. This unctuous claim may be discounted;
Mr. Dewey accomplished what they had not yet set out
to do alone at the time of the indictments.
SPURRED BY THE REVELATIONS, THEY ARE NOW ATTEMPTING
to educate their membership, conducting a drive on a low
initiation fee basis, proving that the unions and the work-
ers within them have not been tainted by the illegal deals
between the convicted ex-leaders and restaurant owners.
As they point out, the extortion did not originate in the
union — indeed, the extent to which the convicted union
leaders benefited financially was not definitely proved.
Nevertheless, the testimony conclusively implicated the
union officials. To quote Judge McCook:
If anything can be worse than deliberately and sordidly
preying on substantial employers through the underworld,
it is by the same means betraying the members of two great
unions who serve those employers. One of the most shocking
pieces of testimony in this case related to the dissipation and
diversion by the four union leaders of the funds of these two
unions, built out of the small contributions made by their
honest, decent and hardworking fellow members.
As the sentencing judge further reminded the union
leaders, New York is in the forefront of states which
have adopted a liberal and sympathetic attitude toward
organized labor, granting to unions many and varied
privileges and immunities which "entail, I need scarcely
say to any person with a shred of honor, corresponding
responsibilities of a moral nature. The paid officials of a
union are the guardians and trustees for the public and
their fellow members of these responsibilities."
Just before Judge McCook pronounced sentence, Mr.
Herlands handed the court a sealed envelope bearing
Coulcher's signature, which was
found to contain $3500 in cash,
which the convicted union leader
had deposited with a restaurant
owner for safe keeping during the
trial.
Addressing Coulcher as "the
most guilty and most treacherous
of all the union officials," Justice
McCook in sentencing him re-
marked : "I cannot help but express
curiosity as to what the laboring
men and women who struggled
more than a century to gain sym-
pathetic laws in New York State
would think if they witnessed this
scene."
The sentences, with some of
Judge McCook's remarks, were as
follows :
Paul N. Coulcher, founder, boss
and secretary-treasurer of Local 16,
convicted of attempted extortion and
23 counts of extortion: 15-20 years.
Aladar Retek, organizer for Local
16, convicted on same counts as
Coulcher: ll/2 to 15 years. "Coul-
cher's assistant, a shrewd and astute
individual, avaricious in a material-
istic manner."
John J. Williams, business agent
MAY 1937
261
of Local 302, convicted on same counts as Coulcher: ll/2 to
15 years. Judge McCook censured him for his "unmanly
and outrageous outburst" when convicted.
Irving Epstein, former business agent of Local 302 and,
at the time of the trial, head of Local 60, an offshoot of the
counterman's union with jurisdiction over delicatessen clerks,
convicted on same counts as Coulcher: 10 to 15 years. "Your
breach of trust to the members of your union makes you
equally as guilty as Coulcher."
The three guilty kingpins of the Metropolitan Asso-
ciation were:
Abraham Cohen, lawyer for the association: 10 to 15
years. "A person devoid of moral sense."
Philip Grossel, treasurer of the Metropolitan: 10 to 15
years. "A front man cannot claim immunity by claiming he
was not the head of the organization."
Harry Vogelstein, lawyer, 5 to 10 years. "Uncontradicted
evidence showed your connection with Dutch Schultz and
other gangsters."
The president of Local 16, Charles B. Baum, who was
Louis Waldman's client, and against whom the evidence
was slightest — for Coulcher was the real boss of the union
— was brought to trial by a rank-and-file committee of
Local 16 and ordered expelled. The late president of
Local 302, Max Pincus, committed suicide soon after he
was indicted. Killed in gang wars, or fugitive from jus-
tice, are several other members of the original ring of
Metropolitan Association racketeecs -and union officials.
CONVICTION OF LABOR UNION OFFICIALS FOR ASSISTING
racketeers to shake down employers (even though it
was frequently to their advantage to be shaken down, for
every racket has to be sold as a service) and to shake
down workers (even though the workers sometimes
profited by the facilitated organization of a large restau-
rant unit) raises many questions.
Mr. Dewey and Mr. Herlands were careful to avoid
the phrase, labor racket. They referred throughout the
trial to industrial racketeering; but the truth is that the
essential of the racket was the element of union official
participation. How except through prosecution can such a
racket be eliminated? Labor union history goes to show
that a union which holds regular meetings, which dem-
ocratically elects capable officers and which sets low initia-
tion fees to avoid freezing a labor monopoly in power,
can take care of such problems. The loose federation set
up by the AF of L has proved a weak reed when it
comes to disciplining unsatisfactory local officials. In the
case of the restaurant locals, the president of the Inter-
national Hotel and Restaurant Workers Alliance, Ed-
ward Flore, did not raise a hand, utter a word or attend
the trial.
Coinciding with a wave of sit-down strikes, the revela-
tions of the Dewey trial have given momentum to a de-
mand that labor unions should be incorporated, so that
their officers will be responsible for publication of mem-
bership, finances and activities. Persuasive as this sounds,
the chances are that it would drive questionable union
activity underground. That provocation and intimidation
can flourish in spite of incorporation is shown in Miss
Amidon's article [page 263], reporting the hundreds of
thousands of dollars spent for undercover men and strike-
breakers by industrial corporations.
Well run unions, like well run business, usually give
their participants a clear and full picture of their activi-
262
ties. But it is obvious that to require all labor unions,
regardless of their maturity, to make public every detail
of their strength and strategy would tend to smash them.
Little more than a week after the Dewey convictions, a
committee of 400 restaurant owners in New York City
announced the formation of Affiliated Restaurateurs; and
it is rumored that they are seeking a f 25,000-a-year czar of
the industry to settle their labor disputes for them. Ap-
parently they do not take Mr. Dewey 's word for the pres-
ent honesty of the purged unions, for the Affiliated Res-
taurateurs' expressed purpose is to combat racketeering.
It remains to be seen whether this organization will de-
velop into a cover for anti-union activity.
Certainly the Dewey trial has made it clear that every
employer who talks loosely about labor rackets now has a
demonstration that if he has evidence to offer he had
better present it to his district attorney. In New York's
restaurant business there cannot be a similar racket unless
employers and unscrupulous union officials again dis-
cover an affinity for gangsters.
The Dewey investigation has kept clear of business and
union activity which is not racketeering. Mr. Dewey was
not concerned with the legitimate, no matter how in-
surgent, struggle for advantage between employer and
worker; he and his staff were concerned only with
predatory criminals.
When Mr. Dewey challenged not only crooked, but
irresponsible and incompetent labor leadership, he
strengthened rather than weakened the real union of the
restaurant workers. Moreover, he showed that rackets in
labor unions, like rackets in business, vice, politics or
gambling, can exist only when there is a surreptitious
demand for the kind of privilege that racket promoters
have to sell. That must be worked out if we are ever to
achieve harmony and security in stable industrial rela-
tions.
Kirby in the N. Y. World Telegram
Drive them out!
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Employers and the Spy Business
by BEULAH AMIDON
Based on the La Follette hearings, this article brings out testimony as
to how, by whom, for how much outside agencies are hired to furnish
espionage or guards or munitions; to keep out unions, or to break strikes
HE is USUALLY CALLED "CHOWDER HEAD" COHEN. HE is
also known to the police as Sam Cohen, Samuel Louis
Cohen, Sam Goldberg, Charles Harris. His police record
includes fourteen arrests, five convictions, and prison
terms for conspiracy, receiving stolen goods and burglary.
As an employe of detective agencies specializing in "labor
troubles," he has worked for many firms in the last twenty
years including Borden, Remington Rand, Purity Bread.
This ex-convict typifies one set of characters in the story
that is being unfolded in sworn testimony at hearings
before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Edu-
cation and Labor, under a resolution "to investigate vio-
lations of the right of free speech and assembly and inter-
ference with the right of labor to organize and bargain
collectively." Cohen is a professional strike-breaker.
Robert A. Pinkerton, graduate of St. Paul's and
Harvard, president of Pinkerton's National Detective
Agency, represents another group of characters. A mem-
ber of the firm of Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine and
Wood, the agency's legal advisors, was at Mr. Pinkerton's
elbow as he testified. The witness put off answers to many
questions. But office memoranda bearing his initials, the
replies of Mr. Pinkerton and of his associates showed that
this affable, well educated young man now is, as he
stated, "actively in charge of the business."
"Industrial service" is the term employed by many
detective agencies to cover the main branches of their ac-
tivities for industry, which may include investigation,
strike breaking or the furnishing of guards. The workers
have a shorter word for such "investigation." Their term
is "spying," and the investigators they call "spies" or "rats."
United Mine Workers Journal
Driving the rats out of industry!
Industrial service, the record reveals, enjoyed "recovery"
before the rest of the country, as employment began to
pick up and the unions to make a concerted organization
drive. The net income of the Pinkerton agency (after
taxes, before dividends) leaped from $76,760 in 1933 to
$268,703 in 1934 and $243,351 in 1935. Mr. Pinkerton owns
70 percent of the stock, and in 1935 his dividends
amounted to $129,500. "Chowder Head" did not do so
well, though he testified that on the Remington Rand "job"
handled by the Bergoff agency he was paid $9 a day, "$2
for eats," and "the company paid the hotel bill." But
"Chowder Head" specializes in strike breaking, and
"strike guarding." Pinkerton's specializes in "investiga-
tion." It used to pay its investigators wages of $2 to $3.50
a day. A worker "hooked" to report on his fellows received
$25 to $30 a month. Since the Social Security Act went
into effect, Pinkerton's "buys information" at piece rates,"
so it need not report its operatives as employes.
THERE ARE NO AVAILABLE FIGURES SHOWING IN DETAIL THE
extent of industrial espionage. Between January 1, 1934
and July 1, 1936 two of the chief agencies, Pinkerton and
Railway Audit and Inspection, did a gross business
totalling $6,511,891. In 1935, Mr. Pinkerton testified, his
firm did a gross business of approximately $2,300,000; for
the first seven months of 1936, the figure was $795,098.32.
Pinkerton has approximately 1000 regular employes, in
addition to thousands of "contacts." The firm's chief indus-
trial client was until very recently the General Motors
Corporation. But the committee's Exhibit 317, a partial
list of industrial firms served by the Pinkerton Agency,
includes Bethlehem Steel, Pennsylvania Rail-
road, Radio Corporation of America, Curtis
Publishing Co., Baldwin Locomotive Works,
B. F. Goodrich Co., Endicott-Johnson, Frank-
fort Distilleries, Kroger Grocery, Libby-Owens
Glass, San Francisco Industrial Association,
Gulf States Utilities, Oklahoma Power and
Water, Congoleum-Nairn Co. Chrysler is the
chief client of another agency, Corporations
Auxiliary Companies, which also serves General
Motors, Timken Roller Bearing Co., Campbell
Soup, Quaker Oats, Postum Co., Electric Auto
Lite, Fairbanks Morse, Royal Typewriter, Kel-
vinator, Underwood Elliot Fisher, William
Wrigley Co., American Can, New York Edison.
There are at least 200 agencies in this country
which carry on industrial espionage, but there
are no available figures to show the total volume
of their business. Minimum estimates quoted by
an official of the National Labor Relations
Board place the number of their employes at
40,000.
MAY 1937
263
Four witnesses before the La Follette Committee unfolding a story of labor espionage. Left to right: Dan D Ross and I H SmitT
heads of Corporat-ons Aux,hary Companies; Richard Frankensteen, union organizer; Herman Weckler ° Chrysle'r executive
Limited in funds, the La Follette Committee nar-
rowed its investigation to five of the largest detective
agencies, at least two of which (Railway Audit and In-
spection and National Corporation Service) also engage
in strike breaking. Three firms, Federal Laboratories,
Lake Erie Chemical Co., and Manville Manufacturing
Co. which supply tear and sickening gas, guns and am-
munition to industrial employers and to detective agen-
cies, have also been investigated. The committee has
subpoenaed not only officials and employes of the agencies,
but of industrial corporations who employ them and
workers who are at the receiving end of the services
rendered. In legislative inquiries of this sort, witnesses are
subpoenaed and interrogated by the committee. The pro-
cedure does not afford opportunity for cross-questioning;
but a hearing is a more flexible instrument than a trial
for its prime purpose of disclosure.
IN SPITE OF THE OBSTRUCTIONIST TACTICS OF THE AGENCIES
and of many of their important clients, the committee
has produced a vast body of information about industrial
espionage and strike breaking. In attempting to picture
these practices, this article will not go outside testimony
heard by the La Follette Committee, and the National
Labor^Relations Board, and the documents, letters, and
other "exhibits" which are now matters of public record.
This record, incomplete as it is, has literally been "pieced
together" at many points. Files from the New York,
Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Atlanta offices of
the Railway Audit and Inspection Co., subpoenaed by the
subcommittee, instead of being produced were destroyed.
Investigators for the committee rescued torn scraps from
the trash barrels of the office buildings, and pasted them
264
together to reveal details of the spy business which the
agency apparently wanted to hide.
With great plants, costly machinery and materials, in-
dustrialists and agency officials point to the need to protect
company property, prevent widespread pilferage, root out
falsified checks, and so forth. The concern of the Senate
committee has been with something very different from
old line detective work. It has probed into how far
this has been converted in industry into an ugly answer
to the demand of great groups of workers to bargain col-
lectively. Section 7a of the NIRA gave fresh sanction to
their right to do so. The Supreme Court decision uphold-
ing the Wagner Labor Relations Act establishes that right
more firmly in national industries. But an anti-union em-
ployer may prefer to forestall unionization rather than
fight it after the union has members, leadership and funds.
The hearings revealed many of them turning to detective
agencies who through undercover men dig up what their
workers talk about, on and off the job, with whom they
correspond, what they read, any gestures toward organi-
zation. Mr. Pinkerton was queried as to why he is will-
ing "to pay men to spy and peach upon their fellow
workers."
MR. PINKERTON: . I feel a man running a business
must keep himself posted on how that business is being run.
He wants to know if there are shortages, thefts, he wants to
know any conditions that upset or disturb the smooth running
of his business.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: I am not talking about thefts.
I am talking about this type of industrial espionage that
you do frankly, Mr. Pinkerton, I do not see how you
can draw the line on divorce matters [which the agency
refuses to handle] and then be perfectly willing to have
your company go out and pay what is practically bribe
SURVEY GRAPHIC
money to men to spy upon their fellow workers, and
to report what they are doing with regard to organization of
their workers' union.
MR. PINKERTON: Well, if you were running a business
would you not want to know these facts?
THE DETECTIVE AGENCIES HAVE OPERATIVES OF THEIR OWN
whom they use to make direct investigations, to "shadow"
union officials, to go into factories as workmen, join the
union, and, as J. H. Smith put it, "get all the information
he possibly can concerning, all dissatisfaction, discord,
nepotism, anything at all that would tend to create an
unpleasant feeling, and we give that information to our
clients." Such an agent is usually assigned a regular job
at the bench or on the assembly line, placed on the fac-
tory payroll, and paid a fixed sum by the agency in addi-
tion to his wages.
The activities of operatives "planted" by detective agen-
cies in the factories of their clients, have been described
by .employers, workers, and agency representatives before
the subcommittee. Thus a Pinkerton agent was given a job
in the Fruehauf Trailer plant, joined the union, was
elected treasurer, and made to the company reports on all
business transacted at union meetings. There was testi-
mony that the union leaders were promptly fired.
Lyle Letteer, another Pinkerton operative, working in
the Atlanta Chevrolet plant, "wormed into" the union,
was elected to office, and finally had charge of the books :
"I went to the labor office, and as I was going to close
up for the night I would take all the records, including
the ledger and everything, whatever he [manager of the
Pinkerton Atlanta office] called for that day, take it to the
office, and we would make copies that night. The rec-
ords were returned to the union office next morning. The
copies were forwarded to Detroit."
Operatives no less than labor witnesses stated that such
a man working inside the union not only supplies infor-
mation to the employer; he may seek— often with success
—to stir up dissension within the organization, to dis-
credit the leaders, or to foment badly timed strikes.
Given inside information, an employer may "break"
the union by discharging the "ring-leaders," as the hear-
ings disclosed was attempted by the Fruehauf Trailer Com-
pany, Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, and others.
Head" Cohen has worked for twenty years as a strike breaker.
Kuhl, right, is an expert in "hooking" workers as informants
MAY 1937
Acme
General Motors was a leading client of the Pinkerton Detective
Agency, headed by young Robert Pinkerton, right
Or the members of a labor organization may find them-
selves let go at the seasonal lay-off, after years of satisfac-
tory service. A Chrysler official testified that in 1935 he
had requested Corporations Auxiliary to furnish "a man
that was qualified, a draftsman, to get me the information
as to what the Society of Designing Engineers really stood
for." Operative H-287 was sent to work in the engineering
division. He joined the chapter, made regular reports to
the company, and twenty Chrysler employes who were
active in this union were dropped in the next lay-off.
A Pinkerton operative, the subcommittee learned, was
detailed to "shadow" Edward F. McGrady, Assistant
Secretary of Labor, acting as
federal conciliator in a strike of
Chevrolet workers at a Toledo plant
in 1935. R. L. Burnside, head of
Pinkerton's Toledo office, testified
that his "instructions from Detroit"
were "to see who he was contacting,
where he went." Probably not since
Teapot Dome has a congressional
hearing been given so many inches of
front page space as the story of this
attempt by a detective, paid by Gen-
eral Motors, to track a government
official who was carrying out the
duties of his position.
ALMOST EQUALLY SENSATIONAL WAS
the story which centered around one
of the witnesses — Richard Franken-
steen, employed in the Dodge plant,
a Chrysler subsidiary. Frankensteen,
International News
265
whose father is also a Chrysler employe, put him-
self through the University of Dayton, working in
the plant during vacations and for two years while he
went to law school at night. He became the chief organ-
izer for the United Automobile Workers of America in
the Detroit area, and played an important part in the
General Motors strike in January. Early in his union
activities, Frankensteen became friendly with another
Dodge employe, John Andrews. Andrews was a fiery
talker always urging violence, agitating for a strike. Again
and again the clearer headed Frankensteen had to restrain
his friend, warning him that precipitate action might
wreck the growing union. The families became well
acquainted, and in 1935 during the regular summer layoff
took a vacation cottage together at Lake Orion. With the
Frankensteens' consent, Andrews invited his wealthy
uncle, a retired theatrical producer named Bath, to join
them. Mr. Bath "threw parties" for the two families,
bought Mr. and Mrs. Frankensteen the first champagne
they ever tasted, gave their children elaborate toys.
In February, in the hearing room of the La Follette
committee, Frankensteen flushed, then turned pale when
he heard Daniel G. Ross, sales manager for Corporations
Auxiliary describe that 1935 summer vacation, referring
to Andrews and his "uncle" as Agents L-392 and F-B.
"Johnny" Andrews and "Mr. Bath" had been undercover
men assigned to spy on this leader of the young union.
The Chrysler Corporation had footed a bill for $1152
for the services and expenses of the two operatives.
Following the detective agency official, a former Pinker-
ton operative, Frankensteen himself was sworn as a wit-
ness and told the whole story. At the conclusion of his
testimony, he turned to the former head of labor rela-
tions for Chrysler, sitting at the witness table, and said:
I at one time was in on a trial before Judge Moinet, a fed-
eral judge in Detroit, and he had on trial a narcotic sales-
man, and he pointed out that this man was not a dope-taker,
and he said to this man, "I am going to give you the high-
est penalty that the law allows me to give, because I think you
are much worse than the man who takes dope, than the
average addict, because he is a weak man."
I think men [like you] . . . are in the same category as
that dope salesman. They take these innocent people and get
them on jobs where the workers despise them, and they
have a right to, they put them in that type of work and then
throw them out to the winds, they do not care anything
about them, they still go on and impose on decent people.
. . . [They] walk around as decent citizens, and I say they
are not.
But the detective agencies do not depend entirely on
their own operatives for information. In addition to these
professionals the agencies "hook" or "rope" workers in
the plants of their clients, paying them a daily or monthly
wage to spy on their fellows. "Red" Kuhl who for twenty
years has been a strike breaker and "hooker" told the
Senate committee how "hooking" is done:
Well, first you look your prospect over, and if he is married
that is preferable. If he is financially hard up, that is number
two. If his wife wants more money or hasn't got a car, that
all counts. And you go offer him this extra money. Naturally
you don't tell him what you want him for. You have got some
story that you are representing some bankers or some bond-
holders or an insurance company and they want to know
what goes on in there.
The "hooker" sometimes gets a list of possible pros-
pects from the personnel manager or the factory super-
intendent. Sometimes he has to feel around for himself.
A skillful "hooker" may try to secure the president or
treasurer of the union, who can furnish a reliable list of
union members, and who will also carry out policies, di-
rected by the detective agency or its client tending to dis-
rupt the organization. The "hooked" man is usually paid
a dollar a day or $25 a month; occasionally he may receive
as much as $75 a month. In the first seven months of 1936,
the Pinkerton Agency paid approximately $240,000 to
workers thus hired to report on their associates.
The reports are usually "edited" and sometimes "built
up" in the agency office before being passed on to the
client. There was testimony that when a spy's reports "be-
come routine" he is urged by his chiefs to "liven them
up," to "tell the client what he wants to hear."
Some "hooked" men manage to wriggle loose as soon
as they understand clearly what they are being paid to do;
some are ashamed and unhappy, but continue to make
reports "because, I needed the money"; some are as hard
boiled as the "hooked" man, who wrote in a report patched
together from fragments in a Railway Audit and Inspec-
tion Co. waste basket:
"I may as well state that Ferguson . . . and Kepler [both
union men] are personal friends of mine. I have known
Ferguson for twenty years and Kepler for ten years, and
now I am selling them out, as they tell me most any-
thing."
A textile organizer testified that workers-turned-spies
are also useful in helping build up company unions
"as a union-busting tactic." An agency official confirmed
this statement when he testified:
"We put men in the Newton Steel Co and formed a
company union there. We also formed a company union
in the Taylor Winfield Co. at Warren, Ohio to offset
any possibility of joining the outside union."
These and other company unions were started after re-
ports of organizing activity were received from the
agency's "contacts."
A CIRCULAR LETTER PUT OUT BY THE BuTLER SYSTEM OF
Industrial Survey suggests to employers, "Where it is
desired that company unions be formed we first sell the
idea to the workers and thereafter promote its development
into completion. Hundreds of such organizations have
been formed by us to date."
The chief purpose of labor espionage, according to heads
of detective agencies, is to forestall "trouble." "Our work
is strike prevention," Mr. Ross of Corporations Auxiliary
explained to the Senate committee. "We fail when one
of our clients has a strike." Corporations Auxiliary, its
officials testified, does only "preventive" work. It supplies
no strike breakers in the instances where espionage and
summary discharge fail to disrupt a union and a strike
occurs. But many other agencies furnish strike breakers.
Strike breakers are usually recruited and hired as
guards "to protect personnel and property." But some, it
was testified, have provoked violence, so that the police
will arrest the union "ringleaders." Violence also turns
public opinion against the strikers, and, at the same time,
creates a demand for more "guards." Strikebreakers are
not to be confused with "scabs," brought in by employers
to break a strike by taking the jobs of the regular workers.
Some agencies keep lists of (Continued on page 305)
266
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Tafari Makonnen
by JULIAN S. BACH, JR.
Portrait of an emperor without an empire who,
till he "can return to his own country in God's
good time", finds sanctuary in Great Britain
A SMALL PENSIVE MAN OF FORTY-FIVE, WITH DEEP SAD EYES,
strolls through the garden of his new seven-acre estate
called Fairfield, overlooking the city of Bath, England. He
wears his world-famous black cloak and trilby hat. The
name — incognito — is Mr. Tafari Makonnen. But he is
much better known as His Majesty Haile Selassie I, King
of Kings, Lion of Judah, Christian Emperor of Ethiopia.
Haile Selassie is now in exile. At Bath the man who has
been called the "Black Napoleon" has found what may
well become his Elba. Surrounded by the Empress, four
children, and three grandchildren, Haile Selassie keeps
hoping against hope, fighting against insuperable odds for
a lost cause — an emperor without an empire. Only the
imperial crown remains — locked in a London safe.
He has bought Fairfield; that brief word symbolizes
the doom which is fast encircling this tragic figure. He
expects to be there long — longer than he wishes.
Yet withal this singularly pathetic man has kept his
faith. "From the beginning," the Emperor told me when
I visited him recently, "I have put my trust in the faith
of the European nations, and I still believe that they will
fulfill their pledge to uphold my cause, especially since it
is not only Ethiopia's independence which is involved,
but the accepted principles of international relations as
well. My people and myself," he concluded with feeling,
"have a clear conscience. We have done all that we could
by negotiation, and protected ourselves by force as best
we could when diplomacy failed."
Life is quiet at Bath. To the fourteen-room Georgian
house, secluded behind a high wall and a grove of trees,
come few visitors. "Because of the very serious financial
question only one or two of my loyal subjects have been
able to visit me." The English kitchen staff, the English
gardener, and the well-educated Ethiopian secretaries and
valets go silently about their duties.
Haile Selassie's life in exile is austere. He rises at
seven, eats an English breakfast, and takes a short walk
with his elderly cousin, Ras Kassa, the greatest of Ethio-
pian warriors. He works until lunch, rests for two hours,
•and plays with the children. It is perhaps his greatest re-
laxation. After an English tea he works again till dinner
at eight, and continues to read or write until midnight. He
is occupied with a 90,000-word story of his life, which is
written in Amharic and translated into English, since the
Emperor cannot speak English — although he is fluent in
French and (ironically) Italian. Sometimes the Emperor
and Empress ride in the evening in their gray towncar,
driven by their Ethiopian chauffeur. Occasionally they
visit English friends in Bath or London, but they them-
selves never entertain.
Courtesy The Art Digest
Haile Selassie
Portrait bust by Jacob Epstein, 1936
In England he never goes to restaurants or theaters. The
rest of the imperial family are movie fans but the Emperor
himself never attends, although he used to enjoy the films
that were shown privately in the palace at Addis Ababa.
English films were his favorite; he disliked American
films with their "snappy" dialogue and light-hearted ro-
mance. In general he "detests the easy in art." That is why
Beethoven is his favorite music.
Haile Selassie likes the radio, however, and while like
Gandhi he never smokes, he does enjoy a little white wine
with his meals.
Lulu, the Empress's terrier, who was smuggled out of
Abyssinia hidden under a seat in the Emperor's railroad
compartment, still scampers about. But the three pet lions
— "ancient symbols of imperial power" — are dead in their
cages in Addis Ababa, machine-gunned by the retreating
Ethiopians so that Mussolini could not parade them be-
fore his legions in Rome.
The Emperor spends a great deal of time reading. His
favorite subject is diplomatic history — and diplomacy
failed him in the hour of need; his favorite historical fig-
ures are "all the great nationalists," Napoleon, Garibaldi,
Cavour, and Lincoln — and Ethiopia's national indepen-
dence has been lost during Haile Selassie's reign.
"I am also interested," the Emperor told me, "in eccle-
siastical and medical history." As a child he was educated
in a French Roman Catholic mission. "Pasteur," said the
Negus, "is one of my favorite characters, and I am inter-
MAY 1937
267
estcd in Theodore Roosevelt, who had the welfare of
Africa at heart."
In 1924 Cambridge University gave him an honorary
LL.D. degree. "But I have received other honors," the
Emperor confided, "which I particularly value because of
the humanitarian sentiments of the societies which gave
them to me."
In England his religious life has been necessarily altered.
Formerly in Addis Ababa he rose at five to worship in the
palace chapel. At Fairfield he sleeps till seven, since there
is no Coptic church where he could worship and the
religion forbids praying in the home. "I am, therefore,"
the Emperor said, "thinking of building a separate Coptic
chapel on the grounds, so that my family and my followers
will receive the benefit of their own religious services."
The Negus has been able to keep the usual Coptic
fasts. On Wednesdays and Fridays he eats only fish, fruits,
and vegetables. "For you see," he explained smilingly,
"our fasts are not like the European ones where you give
up only one or two things." At Easter he fasts for sixty
days, subsisting on vegetables which must then be cooked
in oil, on fruit, and on bread. At Christmas he fasts an-
other forty days, though he may then eat fish.
During the Italo-Ethiopian War the Emperor's health
was weakened and he was slightly gassed. And so at Bath,
famous for its ancient Roman springs, he has taken the
cure — drinking the waters and undergoing mud packs,
deep immersions, and whirlpool baths. Now that he has
recovered, Dr. Mailkou Bayen, his private physician, is in
America seeking funds; but the Emperor said sadly, "He
has not met with much success."
HAILE SELASSIE HAS ALWAYS DEMANDED GREAT DEFERENCE.
Sometimes it was difficult to get. When the sixty-odd war
correspondents first arrived in Ethiopia, he would give
audiences only if they called in full dress, then dinner
coats, and finally he was forced by circumstances to re-
ceive them in ordinary clothes. Some of the American
correspondents called him "the 8 ball" in the billiard cable
code which they used to evade the censors.
As a refugee he is friendly but regal. As many court reg-
ulations as possible are retained at Bath. Only the Em-
peror and Empress, however, continue to wear Ethiopian
clothes. Haile Selassie still appears in his blue-black cloak,
and a white shamma, embroidered by the Empress, en-
circles his torso. (But underneath he wears a regular gray-
striped suit). The Empress has compromised with a plain
brown cloak like the Emperor's and plain English hats.
Recently they held "court" at a bazaar they gave in a
restaurant in Bath. Two hundred sympathizers paid 50
cents each to bow and curtsy before the Emperor and
Empress as they sat on a dais covered with the gold and
scarlet colors of Ethiopia. The national anthem of Ethio-
pia was played and the Empress wiped tears from her
eyes. The bazaar grossed $1000.
In the matter of private interviews at Fairfield, cordial-
ity and pride are mixed. One bows and shakes the Em-
peror's hand — but only if he extends his first. Interviews
are sometimes held in the private study, which contains
his paper-littered desk and the small French writing desk
of the Empress, his favorite armchair drawn up by the
fireplace, a small bookcase, and maps of Ethiopia, penciled
here and there probably for military purposes.
Usually the Emperor receives visitors in the pleasant for-
mal drawing-room. The red damask Empire furniture
and the fine Persian rugs are his own. With great dignity
he sits on a low settee.
But the atmosphere of the room is depressing. The bay-
windows face low-lying hills, which remind the exiles "of
the hills around Harrar" in Northern Ethiopia. The room
holds too many souvenirs of past glory, such as the large
silver loving-cup, "Presented by George V to King Tafari
Makonnen, October 1928."
One cannot help remembering Haile Selassie's first visit
to England in 1912, when, as Crown Prince, he attended
the International Exhibition in the company of the Kings
and Queens of Denmark, Roumania, and (ironically
again) Italy. Two British destroyers escorted him across
the Channel. (In 1936 he sought refuge on a British war-
ship.) In 1924 when Haile Selassie again visited England
a special steamer carried him across the Channel, and the
Duke of York (the present George VI) met him at the
station. He lunched with George V, the Prime Minister
and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
PAST GLORY. TODAY THE BRITISH PUBLIC LIKE HIM, AND AN-
thony Eden, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke
of Gloucester visited him when he first arrived, but George
VI has not yet received him, and Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin keeps his lips sealed tight, undoubtedly wishing
that the Emperor was just plain John Doe of Ethiopia.
The British government created an embarrassing situa-
tion by inviting representatives of the Emperor Haile
Selassie to attend the forthcoming coronation of George
VI. Since the King of Italy has also taken the title of
Emperor of Abyssinia and would consent to be represented
at the coronation only in that guise, the British action is
considered by the Italian press as a direct "slap in the face."
The Italians may refuse to attend. If representatives of
both "Emperors of Abyssinia" should appear, the situa-
tion would be ticklish. It has brought forth one magnifi-
cent piece of ironic wit. Low, the celebrated cartoonist,
has one of his aristocratic characters say: "By Gad, Sir,
it's a darned outrage that the government should invite
the man who tried to annex Italy." (As a matter of fact,
the Ethiopian delegate at the last coronation in 1911,
created a slight stir. He wore a lion's mane swathed about
his headdress which tickled his neighbors' faces whenever
he turned his head to watch the ceremony.)
Weekly the Emperor goes up to London. There is
plenty of work for him to do — especially financial. His
fabulous wealth is pure myth. He is in difficult financial
straights. The "100 metal cases," the "100 trunks," and, in
all, "the 10 tons of baggage," which he is said to have
taken out of the country on his flight, were not filled with
"gold, precious jewels, and Mexican silver dollars," but
mainly with silverware, furniture, and fine rugs.
Forty-five hundred pieces of this silverware have been
sold at public auction "to keep the Emperor alive." Gross-
ing $12,640, the sale will help tide over the imperial fam-
ily and their closest followers until he can sell his most
valuable holding, his 8650 shares of the Djibouti-Addis
Ababa railroad. Their market value is between $750,000 and
$1,000,000. Four months ago the French government flatly
refused to buy them, knowing that Mussolini, whom the
French and English are momentarily trying to woo away
from Hitler, would consider such a transaction hostile.
Indeed the Italians hope to get them free. Once again
268
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Haile Selassie is a pawn on the international chessboard.
Eventually the shares may be sold behind the scenes to a
neutral party, on the political understanding that he will
pay the Emperor but resell the shares to Mussolini.
The Emperor, in his turn, is suing a Belgian senator,
who is a coffee merchant in Liege, for $70,000 alleged due
him from the sale of coffee grown on the Emperor's pri-
vate plantation in Ethiopia.
For two years the Emperor has been trying to sell his
thirteen-room chalet at Vevey, in Switzerland. "It would
help us a lot, if we could sell it," the Emperor told me,
"but nobody is willing to buy it or even rent it."
As MIGHT BE EXPECTED THE EMPEROR HAS BEEN THE BUTT OF
numerous attempts to exploit his tragedy. When he first
arrived in England a "fly-by-night" British film company
offered him a role in a film, and the Texas Centennial
Exposition offered him $100,000 for a two weeks' personal
appearance, with another $50,000 added if he would stay
a month.
Today no one is trying to commercialize him. But his
daily mail contains some oddities. Englishmen, Euro-
peans, and "plenty of Americans" send him their pet
prophecies — usually that "the Lion of Judah will be vic-
torious in the end"— and numerologists send him varying
reports about his "lucky number."
Haile Selassie is obviously not the kind of man who
would be interested in such twaddle. In an Oriental way
he is blind to the little things in life. His excellent mind
likes generalities and abstractions. He has not been im-
pressed with the everyday things in English life — the
trains, the taxis, the customs. Instead, as he said, he is
"pleased to discover that their hospitality and their ability
to provide law and order, for which they are so famous,
do in reality exist."
Even in defeat he has not lost this broad, philosophical
way of his. His faith is anchored in the Ethiopian Bible,
the Kebra Negast (Glory to the Kings of Ethiopia) , which
tells him that justice "shall rise like the Morning Star."
The Emperor informed me that he is still in contact
with his foreign advisers. They are an unusual group of
men; for, unlike certain outside advisers among backward
peoples, they have never exploited their position and have
remained trustworthy. Chief among them was the late
Everett B. Colsom, who died recently in Washington. He
literally died for the Emperor. His heart, weakened by the
Ethiopian altitude, was overtaxed when after a short rest
he appeared at Geneva to help the Emperor. Colsom was
chosen a few years ago by the State Department when
Haile Selassie requested a financial adviser. His salary was
$15,000 a year. He was worth it. To keep free of foreign
influence and intrigue he never circulated among the in-
ternational crowd in Addis Ababa during the war. Gen-
eral Virgine, a Swede, was the Emperor's military adviser
— although he also had Belgians and Turks helping him.
The general received $10,000 a year. The legal adviser was
M. Auberson, a Swiss, who got $7500 for his excellent
services. Newspaper men considered his diplomatic notes
superlatively phrased.
The Emperor's doom was dramatized in June 1936,
when Anthony Eden approached the gilt-edged "throne"
on which Haile Selassie was sitting in his temporary Lon-
don mansion and told him that sanctions against Italy
would be dropped. The Emperor pleaded and his head
drooped slightly as he listened to the words that would end
Ethiopia's independence.
Thus beaten by the Great Powers, though not by life,
the imperial family of Africa's last native monarchy are
trying to adapt themselves to their new conditions.
Eighteen-year old Princess Tshai is studying to be a
nurse at the Children's Hospital in London. Later she may
take a medical degree. Shy, reticent, she is the favorite with
the British public. As Nurse Tshai she goes quietly about
her tasks, dressed in the usual pink and white uniform.
Her day starts at seven and she works fifty-six hours a
week. She plays tennis, wears her European clothes well,
admires Shakespeare and "cool English poetry," and
speaks five languages, having been educated in France and
England.
The eight-year old Duke of Harrar is at King's College,
in Taunton. He goes home each weekend, but observes
the same strict rules as the other pupils. Crown Prince
Asfaou Wosan is now in Jerusalem with his family.
The Empress, in spite of her desire to "slip into a new
life," has taken her exile with less equanimity. Her time
is spent in meditation and reading. Gardening is her only
diversion. Tears come easily when Ethiopia's fate is men-
tioned, and one speaker was asked to shorten her appeal
lest the Empress, who was in the auditorium listening,
lose her self-control.
THE EMPEROR HAS MANY ENGLISH SYMPATHIZERS, SOME OF
whom, like Sylvia Pankhurst, are well-known. At Christ-
mas he received an illuminated address signed by one
thousand people, and he was also given an Ethiopian
Bible, discovered in a second-hand bookstore.
The $10 million war chest which he tried to raise has
been a dismal failure. "My appeal to the world for my
distressed country," the Emperor said, "has failed to bring
a response sufficient even for my personal needs." The
Red Cross has raised some $100,000 for the relief of desti-
tute Abyssinian refugees who are flooding the African
frontiers.
A mysterious Scotswoman, named Mrs. Muir, has been
attempting through both the English and Italian Foreign
Offices to get Mussolini to give back to the Negus a small
part of Ethiopia for his own personal use. Needless to say,
she has gotten nowhere.
The Swiss Government, patron of the League of Na-
tions, has refused to allow Haile Selassie to live in Swit-
zerland, although he is a property-holder there, and al-
though the Swiss have given generous asylum in the re-
cent past to Mussolini, Trotsky, Lenin, King Constantine
of Greece, Charles II, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary,
Dr. Breuning, the ex-Chancellor of Germany, Otto Habs-
burg, the Pretender to the Austrian throne, and Abdul
Medjid, the ex-Caliph of Turkey.
Sixty-eight years ago Prince Alamayn of Abyssinia, who
had been educated in England and befriended by Queen
Victoria, was buried at Windsor Castle. Haile Selassie
visited the tomb in 1924. But he has not returned this time.
One wonders why. Perhaps because of dread that his final
resting place will also be outside his native land?
If so he will be laid to rest as His Majesty Haile Selassie
I, Negus Negusti, Lion of Judah, Christian Emperor of
Ethiopia. For no Ethiopian monarch has ever surrendered
and Haile Selassie himself has never abdicated. He "hopes
to return to his country in God's good time."
MAY 1937
269
Doctors Dissect Medical Care
by MICHAEL M. DAVIS
The two big volumes of the American Foundation "may act as poultices upon
the carbuncles of contention." Here they are appraised by the chairman of
the new Committee on Research in Medical Economics
HERE is WHAT ONE PHYSICIAN SAYS: "i BELIEVE THAT THE
only way that satisfactory medical care can be given to
the population at large is by a completely socialized state
service, paid for out of taxation and open to the use of
any person, rich or poor. . . ."
And another: "The plan best suited to meet the re-
quirements for medical service in this country is one
supported by governmental tax funds in part, organized
by an extension of existing public health organizations,
available to all the people, as are our public schools, and
like them not excluding private practice for those who
wish it and can afford to pay for it, a plan worked out
and controlled by the medical profession, maintained on
high professional standards and with a broad view of
service. . . .
"I believe the average doctor would find a more satis-
fying life in a properly run public medical service than he
now does in competitive private practice. Competition
and medicine do not belong together."
THESE QUOTATIONS ARE NOT FROM PHYSICIANS IN RUSSIA OR
from social reformers in the United States. They are in-
cluded in the report on the Organization of Medical Care
just issued by the American Foundation; the first is from
a letter by "a New York City internist, member Ameri-
can Society for Clinical Investigation"; the second from
a "former president of the Association of American Phy-
sicians," a distinguished scientific group. At least ten
pages are filled with similar views. They are balanced by
every other shade of opinion from over 2100 physicians,
through the horde of middle-grounders to numerous
groups "unalterably opposed" to governmental or "social"
medicine. Here at last the lay reader has an opportunity
not only to observe that "doctors disagree," but to study
what first rank doctors are thinking seriously and some-
times practically about the present and future problems
of medical care.
"This body of opinion," write the editors, "stands out
sharply against the facile view that medical care in the
United States is the 'best in the world,' that the 'very
poor and the very rich get the best imaginable medical
care,' and that only the low income group suffers."
A "leading dermatologist" declares: "Medical science
has so far outstripped the mechanism for the application
of existing new knowledge that a large part of the reor-
ganization problem lies in the direction of making what
is known available, rather than of increasing existing
knowledge, at least for the moment."
A Philadelphia gynecologist says: "That the wage-
earner and his family receive inadequate preventive and
curative medical care is, in my opinion, indisputable. . . ."
A medical school professor, University of Kentucky,
270
writes: "More than one fourth of the counties of the state
and one seventh of the people are without an even decent
medical service. . . . The state has now (considering
only total numbers) enough doctors, but they are not the
right kind or in the right place."
The American Foundation, says Curtis Bok, chairman
of its governing committee, has recently transferred its
activity from the international to the domestic field and
is hoping to apply in the latter "a technique whereby not
we but the competent or especially interested groups
really do the researching." Personal correspondence has
elicited 5000 letters, often extensive documents, from the
2100 physicians. Most of the 1500-page, two-volume re-
port of the foundation is filled with the quotations.
"HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE LED YOU TO BELIEVE THAT A RADICAL
reorganization of medical care in this country is indicated?
If so, in what direction? If you do not believe that radical
reorganization is indicated, what, if any, changes or revisions
in the present system would you like to see made? What
evolutionary possibilities would you stress?"
Such was the essential question asked in the initial
letter to these physicians. The doctors were mainly those
who had been in practice twenty years or more, selected
largely from the membership of scientific societies, thus
including numerous men and women of distinction and
not a few with high positions in universities and medical
schools. General practitioners, a considerable body of re-
cently graduated physicians, officials of the American
Medical Association and of state medical societies, public
health officers and industrial physicians were included.
Every state is represented among the contributors, and
rural areas, towns and small cities, as well as New York
and Chicago. The assemblage of opinions is presented at
length under such topics as: "Is adequate medical care
now generally available?" "General principles and con-
siderations that should underlie the organization of medi-
cal care"; medical education; specialization; the present
and future place of hospitals; public health and preven-
tive medicine; health insurance; state medicine; care of
the indigent; group practice and "experimentation."' Dr.
Truman G. Schnabel, member of the governing commit-
tee of the foundation, remarks in the introduction, "The
letters are in the main the mature and profound and
poignantly sincere thought" of their authors.
In the text, names are not attached to the quotations,
but there is some designation of medical specialty and
connection. An appendix however contains an alpha-
betical list of all the correspondents.
To the general public it is news that a substantial body
of scientific medical men are keenly conscious of serious
deficiencies in professional services and of important
SURVEY GRAPHIC
unmet public needs; and that they favor changes, some-
times moderate, often radical, so that the medical pro-
fession which they love shall measure up to its past tra-
ditions and its future obligations.
WHAT ARE THE VIEWS OF THE TYPICAL PHYSICIAN OF THIS
distinctive group? He is consecrated to medical service,
cherishes its idealistic tradition and no less its individu-
alism, but he sees social change coming that will bring
alterations in medical practice. He is frank in stating
defects in medical service as he sees them. Better trained
doctors seem to him almost the complete solution of
present problems if there were enough of them properly
distributed throughout the country. This is because he
demands the highest quality of care. New plans of medi-
cal care must involve no compromise with quality, he is
likely to say, although in the next paragraph he may de-
plore the fact that private practice of today is full of com-
promises. He judges adequacy of care from the stand-
point of a producer of medical service, thinking of the
quality of the doctor's work rather than of its availability
to the people; and of paying for medical care as a sec-
ondary problem.
"The cost of physicians' services," says one, "is spread
over about one half of the population and amounts to
some $16 or $17 per capita per year, an item of cost that
can be carried by a large percentage of the people and
without assistance from the government." This would
be true if sickness costs fell evenly. Unfortunately, they
do not. The "average cost" is a hot poker. Sickness costs
fall so unevenly that about one twelfth of our families
have to bear about 40 per cent of all physicians' bills year-
ly, and this unevenness is found at all income levels.
Few physicians quoted in the report seem to have
grasped the fundamental fact of the uneven incidence of
sickness costs among families. Generally they do not per-
ceive that sickness costs thus differ essentially from food,
shelter, and all the other main items of family expendi-
ture. Hence not a few declare that a "living wage" —
amount unspecified — would solve the economic problem
of medical care. For analogous reasons, insurance is gen-
erally conceived only in its personal and commercial, but
not in its social forms. Many seem to have accepted the
misstatements about European sickness insurance which
have been widely published in official medical journals,
although they do not by any means swallow American
Medical Association policies.
The question which these physicians were asked in the
original letter from the American Foundation called for
a statement of opinion regarding needed or desired
changes, and was not directed to eliciting knowledge of
the facts of the present situation. Masses of valuable facts
are indeed presented; in particular — to name only two
illustrations — the revealing individual experiences of phy-
sicians with problems which are too often discussed only
in the abstract; and the section on "contract practice,"
a vivid and substantial account of the working of this
form of voluntary health insurance. On the other hand
there is little evidence of familiarity with the community
studies of the availability, utilization and costs of medical
care, as the people who receive the service and pay the
bills have reported them.
THE TYPICAL PHYSICIAN OF THIS GROUP, MOREOVER, IS I.M-
bued with the spirit of charitable service toward the
MAY 1937
patient. He extends this attitude to society as a whole,
thinking that the people who are "indigent" or very low
paid present most, if not all, of the economic problem of
medical care. With some exceptions, this point of view
pervades the correspondence.
The typical physician is interested in "evolutionary ex-
perimentation" but, has little concrete idea about methods
of procedure. (Physicians who in, their own specialty will
apply rigorous criteria of accuracy often evince an en-
tirely uncritical attitude towards current plans and experi-
ments.) He distrusts government and organization gen-
erally. "Politics" are as much of a bugaboo to him as
labor unions to the American Liberty League. He is
likely to welcome government financing of some medi-
cal care for the poor while insisting that the system re-
main "entirely in the control" of the medical profession.
Through it all he is profoundly convinced that medicine
must fulfill its obligation of furnishing the best of mod-
ern scientific knowledge to all the people for the care
and prevention of disease.
What should be done to effectuate this obligation?
Amidst the great variety of opinions and proposals which
the later sections include, the major trend of the con-
structive suggestions is displayed in the final chapter
entitled, Limited State Medicine and Private Practice.
Emphasize "Limited"; underscore "and." Thus, the "in-
digent," or rather the "medically indigent" are visualized
as the essential social problem of medicine. The practical
extension of modern knowledge of prevention to the
whole population and the improvement of medical edu-
cation are brought forward as the heart of medicine's
professional problem. On these foundations, a series of
quotations and careful editorial summaries develop a
program which would:
1. Enlarge state medicine by extending public health work
to more people and to more diseases.
2. Expand care for the indigent and low income groups
with tax support; primarily from state and local sources
and with state and local administration, but with federal aid
and some federal standards.
3. Assume public responsibility for furnishing and main-
taining physicians and hospitals for the poorer rural areas.
4. Supply diagnostic facilities in hospitals, clinics and lab-
oratories, with tax support so far as necessary for the benefit
of the whole population and of the medical profession.
5. Utilize tax funds, primarily state and local but with
possible federal participation, to maintain hospitals of ap-
proved standards, either voluntary or governmental; thus
supplementing what can be accomplished through voluntary
hospital insurance (group hospitalization) which is recognized
to be extending throughout the country and which to a cer-
tain degree is favored.
6. Use government funds, especially federal, to support
medical education and medical research more largely than in
the past; and
7. Establish a federal health department with a physician
in charge having full cabinet rank and "free from politics."
Here are slogans for action. The aim of the American
Foundation was "to illumine and not to prove." Hence
the foundation presents no program, but this report will
help physicians and others to do so. Certainly it means
a great deal to have a body of 134 medical men whose
position in their profession cannot be challenged, appear
before the public endorsing the report as "a fair summary
of the views of their colleagues" who replied to the foun-
dation's inquiry.
271
The rank and file of the 150 odd thousand physicians
in the United States will be no more likely to read these
volumes than will most laymen. The bulk of physicians
will get their information about it through reviews and
articles in their professional journals. What will these
journals do? Will the distinguished minority which be-
comes vocal in the American Foundation's correspond-
ence be given opportunity to express itself in the national
and state medical journals? Will they so express them-
selves? Will these physicians and some thousands of oth-
ers who must think much as they do, be given freer op-
portunity for working out practical experiments without
being exposed to sniping, censure, or expulsion from
medical societies, as have several well known physicians
in recent years?
THE LIMITATIONS OF THIS SEVEN-POINT PROGRAM WILL BE
apparent to many lay readers, as they are to many among
the medical correspondents. Concentrating upon that part
of the population who have little or no incomes, it passes
over the families with incomes of from $1200 to $3000 a
year, the numerical majority. None of these families can
tell, a year ahead, whether it will be in the lucky three
fifths who will have little or no sickness bills or in the
unlucky tenth to whom sickness will bring scamped care,
or financial difficulty or disaster. The problem of this
central body of our citizenship cannot be solved by any
extension of the principle of charity. Such a program fails
to recognize that the problem of paying sickness bills is
a problem primarily of the consumer. The typical doctor
tends to think as a producer of medical service; and
idealistically, and in entire good faith, to identify the pro-
ducer's attitude with the consumer's interest.
The program has the great merit of starting with the
sound, central demand for enlarging prevention under
public auspices. With the constantly widening powers
of medicine to prevent and control disease through or-
ganized action, a public program of this kind would, as
Surgeon-General Parran has told us, take us a long way.
The physicians' program recognizes the focal position of
the hospital in the future of medical service. Its clinics,
its laboratories, its community connections can be made
better and far more useful by state-wide organization and
public support, such as many of these physicians suggest.
The wide extension of laboratory and consultation ser-
vices should, a New England doctor writes, "reduce med-
ical costs to the most oppressed and at the same time in-
crease medical knowledge." Such facilities ought to be
available to all physicians as measures of professional
self-education as well as for service to their patients.
In view of the common misgivings about government,
it is- remarkable to find so extensive a convergence of opin-
ion upon extending the use of tax funds to pay volun-
tary general hospitals for the care of public charges. Using
local tax funds for this purpose is much more widespread
through the country than is generally known to the medi-
cal correspondents. They refer chiefly to the use of state
taxes for this purpose which is confined to a few states and
which, except in Pennsylvania, is relatively inconsiderable.
Federal funds to supplement other resources are consid-
erably discussed, especially in relation to rural areas.
A federal department of health has been under dis-
cussion for more than twenty years, along with federal
departments of education, welfare and other functions,
which have been promoted from particular points of
view. The recent report on the reorganization of the fed-
eral government did not concur with this proposal. The
magnificent work of the United States Public Health
Service presents a pattern of high professional stand-
ards under governmental auspices which the physi-
cians almost universally praise. Would it be as free from
the political pressures which these physicians fear, if it
were organized as they propose? And is the health of
the nation wholly a medical matter? Does it not involve
nutrition, housing, education, and other aspects of eco-
nomic and social welfare with which it should, in future,
be more rather than less closely associated? The practical
answer to these questions will be drawn from the field
of public administration rather than from the opinions of
any specialized group.
This report of the American Foundation is both a
study of opinion and a body of experience and sugges-
tions from significant sources. Expert Testimony Out of
Court, a subheading entitles it. Dr. Schnabel's introduc-
tion remarks:
In sending our inquiry to doctors in the first instance there
was no assumption that doctors and doctors alone could solve
the problem. Social scientists, economists, government admin-
istrators are in a position to estimate the needs of the popu-
lation; they have certainly a contribution to make, and, with
this report as a basis, we contemplate extending this inquiry
to include it.
The collation of opinion has been a method of pro-
cedure often more popular than important. Yet in this
particular field it is important. The foundation's summa-
tion of medical opinion comes opportunely after a period
of intense medical controversy. These two big volumes
may act as poultices upon the carbuncles of contention.
Furthermore, as a remarkably objective compilation of
observations and experiences as well as of ideas, this
professional self-analysis should help greatly to uplift
future discussions of "medical care" from the declama-
tory to the engineering level.
To CHANGE THE SIMILE, OPINIONS FURNISH OUTLOOKS AND
beacons, but the navigator also needs instruments and
charts and statistical tables to pilot the ship to harbor.
New harvests of facts must be added to those already
gathered by public health bodies, medical societies, foun-
dations, universities, hospitals, clinics, welfare, industrial
and other agencies. Progress in finding what to do, and
in judging what we do while we are doing it, requires
quantitative investigation. The question, "What changes
do you favor?" will be followed by "What facts are
required to guide and appraise change?" and "How shall
we get these facts and apply these criteria?" A former
president of the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine writes:
"There are two parties involved, the public and the medi-
cal profession. . . . Neither party can approach the sub-
ject without considering the other."
In this dualism lies difficulty, but also stimulus. The
quotation suggests the primary value of the foundation's
report. It will aid the public to comprehend the medical
profession better, and help physicians to understand one
another better. Many crucial questions can only be
framed and many of the answers can only be attained by
united effort. By thus aiding each "party" to fathom both
its own and the other's problem, their common problem
should be brought nearer to solution.
272
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Technological Change
A NATIONAL INVENTORY OF ITS CONSEQUENCES
by DAVID WEINTRAUB
ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF AGO CHARLIE CHAPLIN EMERGED
to film Modern Times, his animated critique of tech-
nological change. The hero of his piece, himself, a wrench
in either hand, screwed nuts on bolts at a furious pace
as they passed on an assembly line. At the time it seemed
the ultimate in industrial mechanization, but already a
portable electric nut-runner has been introduced on as-
sembly lines. The device drives a nut tight in about three
seconds, considerably bettering the time in which Charlie
Chaplin or anyone else can do the job by hand and inci-
dently changing some of the job's physical and psycho-
logical elements. Similar technological changes are fre-
quent in industry and their cumulative effects involve the
whole question of the economic security of those who
depend upon their work for a livelihood. Yet, despite
widespread interest in the question surprisingly little in-
formation is available concerning the effect on workers
of changes in industrial techniques.
Except in very rare cases, the effects of strictly tech-
nical changes on employment in a single industry or
even in a single plant cannot be isolated or dissociated
from other factors in industrial progress. Changes in in-
dustrial techniques are complicated and their effects on
skills and jobs diverse. For instance, one highly important
development of recent years is the adaptation of lifting
and conveying devices to a wide variety of work. Here
the effect is principally the displacement of unskilled men
whose chief assets had been husky arms, backs and
shoulders. Much less direct labor is now required for
many of these operations, and the new. skills are those of
manipulating, oiling and maintaining the machinery. The
cigar-making industry on the other hand affords a con-
temporary example of the inroads of machines upon hand
skills. The automatic long-filler cigar machine has affected
chiefly men who after years of training, and aided only
by a few tools, rolled out cigars by hand. Each machine
installed has on the average displaced ten of these skilled
individuals, chiefly men, and given four or five new jobs
to unskilled women as machine tenders.
The coal loading machine represents another form of
technological change. This machine, while it has not
abolished any of the operations required in coal mining,
has radically altered the organization of the work. Instead
of highly skilled miners each working independently in
his own "room" and performing during the day a wide
variety of tasks, a gang of ten to twelve men "tend" a
loading machine. Their work is coordinated by a fore-
man and each man is engaged in a single operation —
timbering, drilling or tracklaying — like the subdivided,
repetitive tasks in a factory. These loading crews produce
more coal during the day than the same number of miners
working by hand, and while the loader introduces some
new machine tending skills the miner's old diversified skill
is no longer needed. If he hopes to keep a job he must
adapt himself to the "coal hog."
Many innovations, like the portable electric nut-runner,
speed up work rather than change the skills required.
Other electrical implements are being used for similar
operations along the automobile assembly line — screw
driving, drilling, tapping, grinding, sanding and polishing.
No particular skill is needed to handle the tools; they may
be turned over to the men who formerly did the work
with a hand wrench or screw driver. But these new
devices, while they do not affect the skill with which the
task is performed, do influence the total number of men
who earn their living on the assembly line.
MACHINES OF OTHER TYPES CAUSE A DISPLACEMENT OF ONE
group of skills but call into play different skills. With the
advent of steel automobile bodies, skilled woodworkers
were replaced by skilled metal finishers, panelers, molders
and hand welders. Again, unskilled or semi-skilled func-
tions performed on single-purpose machines are often in-
tegrated by the introduction of multiple-purpose machines
which require a trained operator. For example, a new
automatic welding machine performs six different opera-
tions in the manufacture of radiator tubes for trans-
formers; it takes strip steel from a roll, presses six length-
wise grooves into the stock, folds it over, crimps the two
edges, welds them together, and then cuts off the welded
tubes into required lengths.
A still further technological development is illustrated
by the substitution of remote control of automatic opera-
tions for direct control of machines supervised by opera-
tors. In some hydro-electric plants there is not a single
worker. Operations and control are all carried on by elec-
trical devices which automatically "report" by telephone
to a central station. A man in the station transmits
"orders" back to the plant, to be automatically obeyed.
This month's cover design by Pictorial Statistics, reproduced be-
low, shows American industry with smoke stacks flying the
banners of production. But, in 1935, three out of 1920's ten
men were not needed to produce the same amount of goods — a
result of our sweeping advances in technology and efficiency
MAY 1937
273
In the total picture of technological change, the increase
in the number of trained technicians, in engineering,
chemistry, and other special fields, is an important factor.
The introduction of more efficient machines may result
directly in the displacement of workers and create a de-
mand for workers with another type of skill or ability.
But there are also other, less obvious, ways in which tech-
nological change affects employment. For example, im-
proved methods may enable one plant to lower its prices,
and so divert business from competitors. Or, the result of
a widespread technological change in an industry may
be a lower price and a wider market which so stimulates
employment in the same or other industries that the num-
ber of workers displaced is offset by the absorption of as
many or even more workers, though not necessarily the
same ones. Again, without reducing the total number of
employes, technological improvements sometimes change
occupational requirements, bringing about a labor turn-
over which results in at least temporary unemployment
for those displaced.
The extent to which individuals are affected by the dis-
placement and absorption effects of technological improve-
ments cannot be measured adequately with the data now
available. There are indications, however, that we are
heading toward greater instability of employment. This
trend is traceable in part to technical industrial progress,
which has been accompanied by a relative increase in the
production of capital equipment and durable consumers'
goods as compared with the production of other goods.
The initial purchase of durable goods can often be post-
poned, their replacement delayed. During depression
periods, therefore, their production drops further and at
a more rapid rate than the production of non-durable
goods. Since, as a long term trend, an increasing portion
of our economic effort is devoted to the production of
capital equipment and other durable goods, involving a
growing proportion of worker-consumers, it seems clear
that one of the important effects of our progress in indus-
trial technology is greater instability in production and
hence in employment.
Aside, however, from these general questions of the
swings in the production of the nation's goods and ser-
vices and the distribution of the nation's income, there are
obvious problems involving the adjustment of individual
workers to evolving industrial processes. However mod-
erate or cataclysmic industrial fluctuations may be, in-
dustrial techniques will continue to change and these
changes will modify the skills required in production
processes and the geographic location of job opportunities.
Individual workers will be forced out of their jobs as
occupational requirements change; they will have to search
for employment or they will need to acquire a new skill
and, unless somehow compensated by society, they will,
with their time and wages lost in the adjustment process,
pay part of the price of the social and economic progress
made possible by changing industrial techniques.
American industrial engineering has concentrated upon
the creation of machines and processes whereby goods
and services may be produced with constantly diminished
human effort. Without the technical development of the
past we could not have attained the higher plane of ma-
terial well-being which we have come to accept as normal.
But while engineering has been geared to the continual
improvement of mechanical efficiency, other costs and
values have frequently been overlooked. New machines
are rigorously tested so that mechanical efficiencies are
fairly well known before their introduction into an indus-
try, but changes in the human requirements are almost
completely disregarded. Frequently the effects on the in-
dividual workers are realized only after workers possessing
skills accumulated during the best years of life find them-
selves forgotten on the industrial scrap heap. Provision
for the obsolescence of machinery due to technological
change is usually made in the cost accounting systems of
industry and is an important consideration in the intro-
duction of new machinery, but it is the exceptional man-
agement which provides for its displaced labor force. Yet,
technological change junks the skills of workers as surely
as it renders worthless machinery which has not been
worn out.
Our efficiency is in part responsible for today's relief rolls. If
unemployment in 1937 is to be cut to its 1929 level, then the
production of goods and services must be stepped up 20
percent above the output of the last boom year. This is set
forth in a recent report on one aspect of the Works Progress
Administration study of Reemployment Opportunities and
Recent Changes in Industrial Techniques. The report points
out that while the "nation's output increased 46 percent from
1920 to 1929, there was a simultaneous increase of only 16
percent in the nation's labor force." Man hours required to
turn out one manufactured unit were cut more than one third
between 1920 and 1934. The report indicates that the trend
is toward greater technical efficiency, calling for an increasing
expansion in production and marketing if unemployment in
this country is to be brought down to 1929 figures and held
there.
The WPA study of recent changes in industrial techniques
and their effects on employment and unemployment was
organized in December 1935. The task was to assemble and
analyze existing information bearing on the problem, and to
supplement this data by field inquiries. Surveys have been
made of a number of industries — manufacturing, mining,
agriculture and railroad transportation. To help complete
the picture, employment histories of more than 20,000 workers
have been collected, showing the effect of technical change on
individual wage earners.
The project has had the cooperation not only of industry
and labor, but of governmental and private agencies, includ-
ing the Departments of Labor, Commerce and Interior, the
Railroad Retirement Board, Social Security Board, Bureau of
Internal Revenue, Federal Trade Commission, National
Bureau of Economic Research, the Employment Stabilization
Research Institute of the University of Minnesota, and the
Industrial Research Department of the University of
Pennsylvania.
In the succeeding pages Mr. Hine presents pictures selected
to illustrate one phase of the project, the impact of industrial
evolution on the skills of a group of factory workers.
274
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Making rubber dolls. Muscles are still needed in many Industries
MANPOWER, SKILLS
CHANGE
Selected Photo Studies
by LEWIS W. HINE
Chief Photographer
National Research Project
Works Progress Administration
Two ways of tying a knot. The nimble fingers, right, are -^
trained to make quick repair when a break occurs in the yarn mill The
gadget, left, operated by a thumb trigger, ties the knot in much less time
ich dev,ces increase the productivity of labor and create technological unemployment
This craftsman, who is preparing
designs for high quality furni-
ture, has worked with wood for
forty years. Right: His skilled
hands are putting the finishing
touches on a mahogany chair leg
Below: The machine which in
about five hours turns out
eighteen copies of the chair leg
on which the carver spent fifteen
hours. It requires only one man
to set it up and guide it. This
"multiple carver" is relatively
skilled, needing perhaps a year
of training for the job
*MF
s
Only a small fraction of America's bottle!
now are made by the hand-blowing process
shown on this page. Until blowing
machines were introduced successfully into
the industry about 1900, the technique of
glass-blowing remained much the same as
it had been when the Egyptians pictured
it on the walls of their tombs several
thousand years ago. A mold and a tube,
together with lung power and considerable
skill, were the principal requisites
Lower right: The "carrying-in boy" picks
up the new-blown, hot bottles and takes
them, three at a time, over to the cooling
oven or lehr, lower left, where the bottles
are allowed to cool off gradually
On this page are shown the mechanical devices which replace the
lungs, legs and arms pictured opposite. The machine below forms the
bottles and shoves them on to a moving belt. The belt carries them to
the "snapper-up," left, which lifts them into a mechanically operated
lehr. Bottom: Rows of bottles as they are discharged from cooling
ovens and conveyed to the packing room
•'• V L
The Schools We Keep
by EVERETT B. SACKETT
Drawings by Helen B. Phelps
Who runs our public schools? This article measures some of the influences
that affect pupils, teachers and textbooks in the big red schoolhouse of today
RAISING CORN WAS A SIMPLE MATTER FOR THE AMERICAN
Indian. A little cleared land, a few properly shaped
sticks, a little grain left from the previous crop, and the
beneficent action of nature were the only factors involved.
The rearing of the Indian children was as simple. Today
the raising of corn on an Iowa farm with its machinery,
fertilizers, carefully bred seed, and mortgages is vastly
complicated. The involvements of current life which com-
plicate the raising of corn likewise have complicated the
rearing of children.
As the raising of corn is today delegated to a specialized
institution, the modern farm, so is a major part of the
rearing of children delegated to a specialized institution,
the school, run by more or less well-trained technicians.
You and I may be only remotely interested in the prob-
lems involved in raising the raw material for our corn
meal mush. Indeed, we may not consider the provision
of corn meal mush an indispensable function of society.
But if we have a normal citizen's interest in the process
of producing future citizens, we are directly interested
in the schools. If we have a child of school age or younger,
we have an additional personal interest in the schools.
Interest in the schools being so widespread, the tech-
nicians who operate the schools are left far less to their
own devices than are the technicians on the Iowa farm.
Not only parents but civic groups take a hand in the
schools. Naturally any group with a "message" to
deliver to the people is eager to have it drilled into the
minds of the young. Special interest groups can enter
the classroom by several avenues. The state legislature
may be persuaded to pass laws affecting what may be
taught, textbook writers and publishers may be ap-
proached, local school boards may be urged to make spe-
cial regulations affecting instruction, teachers suspected of
unconventional thinking may be persecuted for civic or
social activities unconnected
with the classroom.
The use of legislative action
to control the curriculum of
the school is well illustrated
in the history of the ele-
mentary school curriculum of
New York State. During the
first century of New York's
existence as a state, the legis-
lature left to the school au-
thorities the detail as to what
was to be taught and how.
The first legal requirement
for the teaching of any spe-
cific subject was a law passed
in 1875 requiring instruction
in freehand drawing in the
280
larger schools. But the W.C.T.U. in 1884 introduced the
modern era of curriculum construction by pressure
groups. The original law, calling in general terms for the
teaching of physiology and hygiene with special reference
to the effect of alcohol, narcotics and stimulants on the
human body, was accepted without opposition by the
teaching profession. But lobbying continued and in 1894
a more stringent law was passed, which aroused wide op-
position. The law was modified in 1896, but it was
amended again in 1909 to provide once more the detailed
regulation of the law of 1894. Instead of railing against
the law, the present teacher probably is only dimly aware
of its existence and certainly in making the yearly pro-
gram does not set aside the three lessons a week for ten
weeks that it demands.
FOLLOWING THE ORIGINAL LAW REQUIRING THE TEACHING OF
temperance, the next law affecting instruction was that
of 1888 requiring observance of Arbor Day, part of a pro-
gram to introduce this subject into all schools.
State Superintendent Skinner was actively associated
with the G.A.R. groups which in 1895 secured passage of
a law requiring the display of the flag in all schools. As
the Spanish-American War fever rose, a movement for
the law's extension bore fruit in the patriotic exercises
law passed in 1898, one provision of which permitted the
conduct of military drill, outside school hours but at
schoolhouses, for children of the fifth grade and above.
Militia officers conducted these drills in many districts,
encouraged by local G.A.R. posts.
No new subjects were added by the legislature until a
physical training law was passed in 1916. The following
year, when the world was intensifying its efforts to make
mass murder more effective, the legislature of New York
set a ripple against the tidal wave by making the teaching
of humane treatment of ani-
mals mandatory in the ele-
mentary schools. In 1918 came
the legislation to command
nationalistic instruction in pa-
triotism, as if the insanity of
the World War were not
sufficient proof that the sub-
ject was already overtaught.
Following this burst of
legislation, there was a short
lull until 1923, when the rep-
resentatives of the people, in
solemn session assembled,
decreed that every child in
every school in the state must
have fifteen minutes instruc-
tion in fire prevention every
SURVEY GRAPHIC
week of the school session. Perhaps some one of the
twelve thousand schools in the state is obeying the letter
of this law.
Last on the list is a law passed in 1924 requiring courses
of study in the history and meaning of the Constitution
for all pupils in or above grade eight.
The impossible task of enforcing all of the laws de-
tailing bits of curriculum rests finally with the State
Department of Education. To go through the form of
enforcing the laws, questions covering their provisions are
included in the annual report of each school district.
This list of questions starts off:
1. How many times was the school inspected by the dis-
trict superintendent during the
year?
2. Has the school a United
States flag as required by article
27 of the Education law of
1910?
3. Has instruction been given
in the correct use and display
of the flag?
4. Do the privies and water-
closets comply with the provi-
sions of the "health and de-
cency" act?
Has your district installed ap-
proved sanitary toilets as re-
quired by Regents' regulations?
5. Has instruction been given
in physiology and hygiene as
required by article 26 of the
Education law of 1910?
6. Has instruction been given
in the humane treatment of animals and birds as required
by article 26-b of the Education law?
This description of the curriculum laws of New York
State has dealt with requirements that certain subjects
shall be taught. Laws prohibiting instruction in certain
subjects also are to be found on various statute books.
The teaching of evolution is prohibited in three southern
states. Eleven states prohibit reading of the Bible in
public schools, while twelve require it. North Dakota
requires that the Ten Commandments be posted on the
walls of every schoolroom in the state.
It remained for the last Congress to pass the law most
restrictive of instruction in the social sciences. Tucked
away in small type as a rider to an appropriation bill was
an amendment forbidding any money appropriated for
the use of the schools of Washington, D. C., being used
for the teaching of communism. On a ruling by the
comptroller general, no teacher or janitor in the district
schools could obtain a pay check without first swearing
that he had not taught communism during the period
covered by the check. This meant that textbook chapters
dealing with Russia must not be assigned or discussed in
class. The provision was amended early this year, so that
a teacher in the district may now present the facts and
philosophy of communism to her pupils, but she must
swear on each pay day that she has not "advocated" that
doctrine.
Not direct legislation on the curriculum, yet apparently
assumed by its backers to affect what is taught in the
schools are the laws requiring teachers to swear allegiance
to the Constitution.
The idea of a teachers' oath is not new; Nevada pio-
neered in the field back in 1866. Bolshevism not having
reared its head, the object of the Nevada law must have
been to discourage incipient secession movements.
The Spanish-American War can scarcely be rated as a
war, for not a single oath law did it foment. But the
World War and the following political and economic
upheavals have precipitated batches of oath laws.
Rhode Island led off in 1917 with a regulation that
still is looked upon as a model by the descendants of the
firebrands who in 1775 and the years following completely
demolished in the American colonies the rightful law
of Britain. Ohio, in 1919, was the next state in line. Four
more fell in during 1921, one each in 1925, 1928, and
1929, four in 1931, one in
1934 and seven in 1935. The
teachers' oath laws seem not
to be a partisan issue, the Re-
publican states being evenly
divided — Vermont with a
law, Maine without. It is per-
haps significant that only four
oath laws have passed when
business was above normal,
as against seventeen when it
was below.
Teachers' oaths are more
in the nature of an itch than
of a disease attacking the
well-being of the schools.
Although extremely irritat-
ing, they threaten no sub-
stantial damage to classroom
teaching. It is the fear that
the oaths will lead to something else that has roused
educational leaders and liberals to opposition. The history
of fascism gives point to this fear. The social unintel-
ligence of the backers of the oath laws is illustrated in a
recent article by an officer of the Sons of the American
Revolution holding that it is by law, not through the
cultivation of public opinion, that loyalty to American
principles of government can best be maintained.
THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE OATH LAWS URGED BY ALLEGED
radicals (including such notorious leftists as Presidents
Conant of Harvard, Marsh of Boston, Beatley of Sim-
mons, Bowman of Johns Hopkins, and Neilson of Smith)
are well summarized by the following quotation from a
New York daily: "The oath bill constitutes a 'needless
affront' to those who believe in American democracy and
is futile in the case of those who don't. Laws can be
framed to reach acts and utterances; they seldom, if ever,
control a state of mind." The foregoing is not from The
Daily Worker but from its contemporary, The Wall
Street Journal.
Laws passed by legislatures are impressive, but because
local government is still the active seat of control in school
affairs, the regulations of boards of education and their
superintendents are more effective in the classroom than
are the fiats of state legislatures. These local regulations
embrace almost every degree of liberality and restriction.
The extremes are illustrated by two recent rulings.
In Ann Arbor, Mich., the usual trickle of complaints
about "radical" teachers determined the board and the
superintendent to take action designed to settle the matter
MAY 1937
281
before it reached the point of personal charges and
counter-charges. In a statement of policy starting with the
sentence, "Any democracy, if it is to remain a democracy,
must expect and anticipate change — politically, socially,
and economically," the board provided that all pupils
should have the opportunity to collect, record, organize
and interpret factual material. The regulation warns
teachers against using their positions to propagandize,
but upholds the right of teachers to express their opinions
on controversial subjects, provided this opinion is not
expressed while the class is still in the developmental
stage of its study of the question.
Chicago obligingly furnishes an example of a contrary
policy. Last December an order containing the following
paragraph went from the office of the superintendent of
schools to the district superintendents:
Word has come to
the superintendent's
office that an essay
contest on the city
manager plan is under
way. Will you see to
it promptly that all
the principals in your
district understand
that participation by
the schools in this
contest has not been
authorized and does
not have the approval
of the central office,
and that school time is
not to be given to this
contest ?
Unfortunately, Chicago is much closer to common prac-
tice than Ann Arbor.
American teachers rely heavily on the textbook. Hence,
textbooks have had a full share of attention from those
interested in controlling school instruction, with history
texts the principal target of self-appointed censors. Many
of the best ones have been barred in some school systems,
and no textbook author or publisher is unaware of the
importance of giving at least as much weight to the
prejudices of the patrioteers as to truth, if the book
is to make money. Meddling with textbooks probably
has been far more effective in controlling instruction
than has legislation. On the other hand, though the
shortcomings of the textbook may be annoying to the
intelligent teacher, they do not prevent his wandering
beyond its limits in class discussions or in assigned
readings.
The assorted out-of-school controls which the com-
munity imposes on school teachers vary from com-
munity to community. In many cities there is no
official objection to teachers' belonging to the Amer-
ican Federation of Teachers, an American Federation
of Labor affiliate. But thirteen teachers in Wisconsin
Rapids, Wis., and three in Asheville, N. C., were fired
for doing so. In Toledo three teach-
ers were threatened with dismissal if t,
they retained membership in the fed- _ S t-' J
eration. Last fall in Walker County,
Ala., 7000 children of unionized mine
workers staged a school strike when
school officials discharged for "incom-
petence and outside activity" three
teachers who had been organizing a chapter of the fed-
eration.
In a small city of the state that nearly elected Upton
Sinclair governor, was a young highschool teacher who
was an active church worker — a qualification more potent
than a Ph.D. for one in such a position. He also was a
successful leader of the Boy Scout troop sponsored by
t h e American
Legion. But his
activities as sec-
retary of the
local unit of the
Socialist Party
blasted him out lf\ \ f
of his job and,
apparently, out
of his profes-
sion in that sec-
tion of the
country.
Teachers may
not be severely critical of the community in which they
work, as was demonstrated in 1934 when James M. Shields
lost his job as a principal in the schools of Winston-
Salem, N. C., after twelve years of successful service. Mr.
Shields was author of a book, Just Plain Larnin', which
described the influence on the community of the makers
of Camels.
TEACHERS MAY NOT BE TOO IMPATIENT ABOUT GETTING
their salaries. This was illustrated on a grand scale by the
resentment of certain classes of Chicago citizens at the
vigorous efforts to get action finally employed by the long
unpaid city teachers during the 1932-3 acute attack of
Chicago's chronic near-bankruptcy.
Not affecting his freedom of teaching except as it
squeezes the juice out of his personality, develops in him
an exaggerated caution, and threatens his job, but far
more annoying to the average teacher than limitation of
his classroom activity, is the regulation of his out-of-
school life.
The Follies girl and the first-grade teacher are sisters
under the skin. But the teacher who wants to stay
in the profession is forced to keep this kinship well
concealed. Much more in some sections of the country
than in others, more in small places than in large
cities, the teacher who would avoid the threat of
losing his job must avoid even the suspicion of violat-
ing the strictest conventions of the community.
Conduct is not left to the discretion of the teacher
in many systems. Possibly a quarter of the teacher con-
tracts of the country as a whole (judging by a recent
sampling) forbid teachers to dance in public places.
Although not so often found formally embodied in
contracts, definite requirements are frequent demands
for participation in church work or otherwise assum-
ing responsibilities not directly concerned with the
work of the schools. Sometimes these details are even
put in writing. In a southern state a
teacher signed a contract which bound
» her to refrain from falling in love, and
to sleep eight hours each night.
Certain details of his work prescribed
by legislation, his leisure time political
and social activities subject to critical
282
SURVEY GRAPHIC
scrutiny, is the teacher free? Volumes of evidence may be
presented without giving sure grounds for answering this
simple question. It is not more evidence that is needed
to settle this question, but a satisfactory definition of
"free."
The American Civil Liberties Union publishes a
pamphlet, The Gag on Teaching. The D.A.R. passes a
resolution that: "There is definite evidence that in the
teaching profession are many who seek to inculcate in the
minds of youth doctrines that are subversive of the
American ideal."
Such a well-informed liberal as Charles A. Beard does
not consider the American teacher tongue-trussed. He
wrote in The Social Frontier:
The right of a teacher, like that of the citizen in general,
is not absolute. A right is something limited by law and
custom and is effective only so far as law and custom will
protect it.
Almost anything can be said on any subject on any occa-
sion if appropriate language is chosen. What many teachers
who discourse on their rights really mean is to say things in
their own way, to express their
egotism, without reference to
the proprieties.
Compared with the eco-
nomic - political catechism
drilled into his brother in
fascist or communist coun-
tries, the American pupil re-
ceives instruction bordering
on education. The liberality
of his instruction depends
greatly upon the community
in which he receives it, the
courage and wisdom of his
individual instructors, and
the , ability of those in-
structors to avoid the dis-
favor of local busybodies.
What instruction will be received by the American
pupil tomorrow? Will the liberals succeed in removing
the "gag on teaching," or will the reactionaries liquidate
the "subversive" elements? Will the social science class-
rooms hear more names of labor leaders or more names
of Revolutionary War generals? Will the study of the
Constitution center around the first amendment or the
due-process clause of the fourteenth?
The course taken by the schools will be the resultant of
many forces. Prominent, potentially dominant among
these forces will be the teachers themselves. Who are
these teachers?
The typical teacher is a young, unmarried woman with
little teaching experience. Compared with students in lib-
eral arts colleges (some of whom become teachers), stu-
dents in teacher training colleges are older, from larger
families, poorer, from homes of lower educational status,
and from more rural areas. As a rule the teacher has
been born, reared and educated not far from where she
teaches. The mores of the community are her mores, not
those of an alien group.
If all teachers were average teachers, probably the
schools would drift along with the community, disturbed
only by cross currents set up by the conflict of community
groups. But all teachers are not average. There are those
who are more intelligent or less, more selfish or less,
more zealous or less, more diplomatic or less, more
courageous or less. The spineless dullards get along about
as well as the average teacher. Those with excesses of one
or more of such traits as those enumerated above are the
ones who chafe at the bit. It is they who re-interpret for
the pupils old facts. It is they whose classrooms welcome
discussion of social and economic problems. It is they who
make the teaching body potentially influential.
WERE THE TEACHERS TO ORGANIZE INTO AN AGGRESSIVE
national body they would be a powerful group. Their
numerical strength would be approximately that of the
American Legion. That seems to be sufficient to exercise
a very definite influence on elected officials.
At the beginning of the present school year The Social
Frontier, educational journal edited by George S. Counts,
champion of educational freedom, summed up the situa-
tion thus:
It is true that teachers' organizations are more effective
today than ever before, but the great body of teachers is
uninformed and indifferent. Only about one in five is a
member of the National Edu-
cation Association, 200,000 in
all, while the effective mem-
bership of the American Fed-
eration of Teachers is probably
not more than 20,000.
The National Education
Association has generally been
conservative in program, its
most aggressive action being
in the field of increasing
financial support of education
and hence higher salaries for
teachers. Its record in support
of tenure has not been bril-
liant. Administrators, prin-
cipally superintendents, have
dominated the organization.
The organization's meetings and publications have em-
phasized technical school matters, although in recent years
both have given some prominence to social and economic
questions. Few speakers before the association have been
as definitely liberal as one of the organization's past presi-
dents, Jesse H. .Newlon, who speaking before the annual
convention at Denver in 1935 declared:
. . . Teachers must choose definitely where their allegiance
lies. They must decide whether their influence is to be used
for the perpetuation of the economic and social status quo or
as a genuinely constructive force for building a more en-
lightened and humane society.
Although this convention passed a resolution for the
appointment of a committee on academic freedom, the
membership in general felt that Professor Newlon's
address was rather strong medicine.
The American Federation of Teachers has been def-
initely more aggressive than has the N.E.A. Its success in
championing educational freedom has been limited by the
smallness of its membership. The "discipline" to which
many of its members have been subjected helps explain
why the organization has not grown more rapidly. Per-
haps the organization has gained an undeserved reputa-
tion for liberalism merely through its affiliation with or-
ganizcd labor, A tie-up that places it somewhere left of the
MAY 1937
283
Soviets in the minds of many of the more conservative
teachers. Some chapters are unquestionably champions of
liberty, but the one with which the writer has had experi-
ence found its principal problem in persuading the teacher
members that they would get back the full value of their
dues in higher wages through the organization's efforts.
Opinion among liberal teachers is divided on the ques-
tion of the desirability of aligning with labor through the
American Federation of Teachers. There are those who
argue that educators should shun definite ties with any
one class. The opposition advances the practical argument
that only through affiliation with labor can teachers gain
sufficient power to enforce their demands. That this ar-
gument has force is indicated by the success of the
American Federation of Teachers in turning defeat into
victory in the Wisconsin Rapids and Toledo incidents
previously mentioned. In Wisconsin Rapids, the teachers'
union forced a recall election which gave the friends of
the union a four to three majority on the school board,
which then restored the thirteen discharged teachers. In
Toledo the union elected a school board and the threat-
ened teachers were retained.
The Progressive Education Association, formed spe-
cifically for the study and advancement of a particular
kind of education, has been alive in the field of educa-
tional freedom. Its Commission on Educational Freedom,
though small, has been active. The John Dewey Society
for the Study of Education and Culture has this winter
issued its first yearbook, The Teacher and Society. The
prominent liberals making up the executive committee
of this new organization give promise that its object of
studying the school's relation to modern society will be
vigorously pursued. To unify the efforts of the various
educational groups working for greater freedom in the
classroom, there was formed last year a National Ad-
visory Council on Educational Freedom.
In addition to the teachers enrolled in the national
organizations, there are half a million enrolled in local
organizations. Control of education being localized as it
is, these local associations could, and in some instances
do, exercise considerable influence over school affairs and
community attitudes.
44*
I i C I ',
J
284
Other evidence of the current interest of teachers in
the question of educational freedom is the success of
the magazine, Social Frontier, launched in the fall of
1934, under the editorship of George S. Counts of Teach-
ers College, Columbia University. The backers of the
venture hoped that by the end of the school year it would
have a circulation of 2000. It trebled that figure, and has
continued to grow.
Teacher organizations of the future promise to be
stronger than those of the past and more interested in
social questions. If their strength increases as it promises
to do, teachers' salaries should be higher and their tenure
more secure. Fair pay and fair conditions of tenure for
teachers should be reflected in the classroom by making
the teacher a more confident individual, less harassed by
the fear that a chance remark or a liberal attitude may
bring punishment.
That a teacher organization, no matter how strong and
well led, may have a controlling voice in building a new
social order through the schools seems on the face of it,
entirely unlikely. Assuming that the mass of teachers
could be enlisted in such a cause, there are other elements
of society to be considered. Should the teachers form an
aggressive alliance with labor, a numerous middle class
doubtless would be alienated — to say nothing of the
propertied group. Would the support of labor be suffi-
cient to maintain the public schools in anything like their
present form if lines were clearly drawn in such a conflict?
The answer depends on how the line is drawn in the
future between the "middle class" and "labor." If it is
drawn, as it has been in the past, on collar color, an
alliance of labor and teachers might favor revolution
rather than evolution. If the future class distinction is on
the basis of income, a teacher-labor alliance would be but
evidence of social evolution.
What teacher organizations can do, what teacher organ-
ization must do if the schools are to make from the chil-
dren of today citizens capable of solving democratically
the problems of tomorrow, is to work with other liberal
groups to open the classrooms of every community to the
unimpassioned study of controversial issues — social, eco-
nomic, political.
Not to pressure groups, either of the right or the left,
can the schools look for freedom. Pressure and freedom
are incompatible. A sane community democratically re-
molding social institutions is the only possible site of a
free school. A free school today is the essential forerun-
ner of such a community tomorrow.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
We Can't Trust Even the Fruit
by JOHN PALMER GAVTT
CONSIDER NOW THE GENTLE APRICOT, FRIENDLY PALATABLE
fruit of Prunus Armenica — halfway, so to speak, between
the peach and the plum. Originating probably in North
China and parts westerly thereof, it has spread all over
the Temperate Zone; it is said to have been brought to
Europe in 1540 by Richard Harris, fruiterer to King
Henry VIII of England, and grows there spread-eagled
against brick walls on the sunny side. It gets its specific
botanical name obviously from Armenia; but it is grown
profitably in British Columbia, Australia, France, Italy;
in this country 96 percent of its production is in Califor-
nia and Oregon, where it reminds the Japanese and Chi-
nese laborers of home. It is shipped as fresh fruit, dried,
canned, jammed and jellied. More than twenty varieties
are known. Surely a harmless and beloved household pet.
Yet there is more to the story; aside from the apricot's
uses as a food, and aside from the fact that the bitter
kernels, which like those of its cousin the almond con-
tain prussic acid, have long been a profitable article of
commerce. From them are distilled eau de noyau, huile
de Marmotte and more than one kind of potable potent
liqueur. The charred stones yield a black pigment simi-
lar to India ink.
There is another thing. . . . But first, speaking of
household pets — there is also the parsnip. I am ac-
quainted with persons of supposedly normal appetites
who actually profess to like parsnips, creamed, fried, in
fritters and under other forms of camouflage. However,
de gustibus non disputandum — no argument. But I know
a farmer who in Prohibition days devoted many acres to
parsnips, against which there was no law. Out of them
he contrived a gin-like hooch of sorts, much in demand
in those parts as alternative to the soul-warping apple-
jack and hard cider, on which one could stay drunk
for a week at a cost of 50 cents.
Still further parenthesizing: The chaplain of a Na-
tional Guard regiment in which long ago I played at
soldiering, undertook to stop gambling in camp. So pop-
ular was he, and so persuasive in his preaching, that the
poker-sharps and crapshooters actually surrendered to
him all — well, nearly all — of their cards and dice and
thereupon assumed a notable disgusting air of virtue.
Twas an astonishing and famous victory, talk of the
whole brigade; for that regiment contained a notoriously
formidable detachment of large-caliber gamblers. A few
days after this explosion of reform, the chaplain came
upon a crowd of soldiers in one of the company streets,
lined three or four deep about a blanket spread upon
the ground. In the middle of the blanket was an amazing
display of quarter-dollars, and at the corners and along
the sides were — lumps of sugar.
"What's going on here?" inquired the chaplain, elbow-
ing through the crowd. "Why all this money, and
sugar? Not gambling again, I hope."
"Well, sir, I don't know as you'd call it exactly gam-
MAY 1937
bling," said a red-faced sergeant, his face a deepening red.
"As you might say, we ain't got nothing left to gamble
with, sir; we having gave to you, sir, all our gambling
tools. We're just betting a little, quietly, sir."
"Betting! What's that but gambling? What are you
betting about?"
"Well, sir, we're just taking little two-bit chances on
which lump of sugar a fly will light on first."
In deep discouragement the chaplain returned to his
quarters, gathered up the cards and dice, and returned
them to their owners.
In fancy contemplating those fields of parsnips, the
apricot orchards between China and Oregon, that blanket
with its silver stakes and lumps of sugar, I reflect that
Man seems to be the only creature that studies how to
transmute the pleasant useful gifts of Nature, including
himself and his godlike intelligence, into agencies for
his own demoralization and destruction. For, mark you,
he has of late discovered a way to make a powerful ex-
plosive, usable in war — and no doubt in industrial blast-
ing— out of the kernels of the gentle apricot. So, just as
the parsnip became a symbol of the futility of Prohibi-
tion, and lumps of sugar symbol of that of surface re-
form against the lust for gambling seemingly resident
in the human heart, the harmless necessary apricot be-
comes another of the innumerable symbols of the futility
of words, whether in statutes or in treaties, to suppress
civil and international warfare, and traffic in the instru-
ments thereof, while the hearts of men, regardless of
their words, believe in warfare and are willing to line
their individual pockets with profits accruing from that
traffic.
ALMOST ANYTHING, HOWEVER INNOCENT IN ITSELF, CAN BE-
come an instrument of war. Of all things in these days,
Oil. No modern war could be carried on a day without
it. Mussolini's rape of Abyssinia would have died aborn-
ing but for the oil supplied to the Italian ravishers — by
the very countries not only vociferating protest but osten-
sibly inflicting "sanctions" to prevent and penalize that
outrage. Leaving aside money and credit . . . cotton,
chemicals, food supplies, machinery, steel, wool, agricul-
tural implements, coal, aluminum, rare earths — there is
no end to the list. Even junk, scrap iron; in the Panama
Canal two years ago I saw a procession of Japanese ships
passing through loaded to the scuppers with it; noto-
riously it was on the way to become armament. Upon
a certain famous occasion one Goliath, armed to the
teeth, fell to a rounded pebble in the sling of a stripling.
In the hands of Jael, wife of Heber, a mere nail sufficed
for Sisera. One might almost say that actual weapons and
ammunition form a secondary part in war material.
Behind all these — ideas, states of mind. The ultimate
and uncapturable, indestructible contraband of war. You
can seize and sink, or tow into your own port, a cargo
of apricot kernels; you can forbid the cultivation of
parsnips; you can sequester a whole regiment's playing-
cards and dice; still will remain the zest for gambling;
the thirst for hooch; the motivating causes of war in the
minds of men. The whole machinery of propaganda —
285
rHEY ALL THINK THEY RE
NAPOLEON. SIR-'
From Glasgow Record
"It must be infectious"
sanctimonious professions about our own motives and
malevolent lies about those of "the enemy" — is for the
purpose of inflaming ideas. The ordinary suspicion of
and contempt for "foreigners" — emotions primitive in
man and beast — are not sufficient; they have to be inten-
sified into active fear and hate. And those who do it
must have motives of their own. Usually those motives
are rooted in greed for pelf or power, or both; fertilized
by unthinking devotion to old tribal traditions and en-
thused by slogans, fetishes and cheer-leaders. We are all
subject to it. It is the fuel and supplies the technique for
sectarianism of every kind.
PERFECTLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF IDEAS AND PROPAGANDA CONSID-
ered as explosive munitions of war is the case of one
H. H. Mulliner, sometime managing director of an Eng-
lish artillery concern, namely, the Coventry Ordnance
Works, in whom patriotism and a disappointed desire
for British government ordnance contracts seem to have
been more or less synonymous. Space is not available
here to tell the story even briefly; but it hardly strains the
truth to say that the said Mulliner probably did more
than any other human being to incite the great naval
armaments race between Great Britain and Germany
which contributed enormously to the bringing on of the
World War. Not only did he boast of it himself; a royal
commission of investigation confirmed his boast. Failing
to frighten the British government with exaggerated and
even false reports of secret naval construction and prepa-
rations for immense munitions manufacture on the part
of Germany, this Mulliner instituted personally an in-
tensive press campaign which did the business by what
is known as "the Mulliner Panic," scaring John Bull out
of his wits, producing a state of mind in both England
and Germany — in fact setting the whole world by the
ears — which came to explosion in August 1914, and
ruined the world to this day.
The story is luminously told by Philip Noel-Baker, pro-
fessor of international relations in the University of Lon-
don, now a member of the British Parliament, in what
strikes me as undoubtedly the most important, as it is
also the most intensely interesting book* of any author-
ship extant in its field. A second volume is promised;
but this is complete in itself, and I go so far as to say
* THE PRIVATE MANUFACTURE OF ARMAMENTS, by Philip Noel-
Baker; with a Prefatory Note by Viscount Cecil. Oxford University
Press. 574 pp. Price $3.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
that for any understanding of international affairs, espe-
cially as to factors tending to war, it is indispensable.
Here writes no delving bookish recluse — Philip Baker
has been in the thick of things; he was a British member
of the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919; parliamentary
private secretary to the British Foreign Minister 1929-
31; personal assistant to the president of the Disarma-
ment Conference 1932-33. And although British-born he
was a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
Take my word for it — a "reg'lar feller." In his packed,
closely-documented volume, the fruit of ten years' intense
research and compilation of data, a highly-intelligent,
reasonable, fair-minded man makes plain the part that
the private manufacture and peddling of arms and muni-
tions play, not merely in spreading lethal equipment all
over the world as nations buy it; but in pursuance of
ordinary business enterprise, in the salesman-vernacular
making the nations and governments "armament-con-
scious." Seeing to it that Navy Leagues and ultra-pa-
triotic societies are established and amply subsidized;
smothering peace movements under what Bethmann-
Hollweg called "robust agitation." Sneering at League
of Nations and World Court, sabotaging disarmament
conferences (bad for business). Swapping supposedly
"secret" chemical formulae and designs; supplying naval
and army officers to instruct potential enemies; selling
back and forth irresistible shells and impenetrable armor-
plate. Meanwhile bribing officials, salving itching palms,
greasing the ways — of course; as in other lines of "legiti-
mate business"; all in the day's work.
At the same time appears the inexorable difficulty.
War is the only incentive and excuse for existence of this
great vested interest. Whether under private or govern-
ment ownership, what use can be made in long periods
of universal peace of this prodigiously expensive ma-
chinery, this highly trained and eager personnel? Why
pile up and then quit making vast supplies of notably
perishable material? Not to mention profits, the mere
existence of this immense investment of capital and spe-
cial skills depends greatly upon the continuance at all
times and upon a large scale of a state of warlike tension.
As for liquor and tobacco, there is an appetite which
must not be allowed to wane. And the business of the
sales force is to drum up trade. There's an idea to be
kept alive.
IT IS THE IDEA OF REAL LIBERTY, REAL DEMOCRACY, THAT NOW
inflames India in a vast menacing "sit-down strike"
against the new Constitution ostensibly embodying both,
belatedly imposed as of All Fools' Day upon India by
the British government. It is the idea of international
morality, of reasonable fair trade and equality of treat-
ment that Secretary Hull preaches as he receives the
peace medal of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and
upon every other occasion night and day. Behind all the
explosions good and evil, and actuating them, is the
idea in the hearts of men.
When we have learned to class with cannibalism,
fetish-worship and all the rest of the savagery so thinly
veneered in us by "civilization," the whole business of
war, with all its tragically ridiculous, detestable tech-
niques, its tawdry hypnotizing panoplies, genuflexions,
sham "glories," tyrannies, destruction of all that sanity
holds sacred — then and not sooner will even the gentle
toothsome apricot be safe in the hands of men.
286
SURVEY GRAPHIC
LIFE AND LETTERS:
Parade of Biography
by LEON WHIPPLE
WILLIAM PENN, by William I. Hull. Oxford Press. 400 pp. Price $5.
ONE MIGHTY TORRENT, THE DRAMA OF BIOGRAPHY, by Edgar Johnson.
Stackpole Sons. 595 pp. Price $3.50.
PEDLAR'S PROGRESS, by Odell Shepard. Little, Brown. 568 pp. Price
$3.75.
Prices postpaid of Surrey Graphic
WHAT is BIOGRAPHY? WE KNEW THE ANSWER ONCE — AS WE
knew the answers to other questions, once. Why, a biog-
raphy was a record of the ancestry, deeds, writings of a
public character, statesman, soldier, cleric, mostly, with
something about his Times and his influence thereon. The
mood was of eulogy (why trouble about people who were
not heroes?) so the significance and impeccability of the
man were often overdrawn, and his humanity skimped or
deleted. The Life of John Barnstaple was not his life at
all, but his public relations. It was external, documented,
chronological. Biography was a department of history, and
written in the manner in which men wrote what they
thought was history. The talents needed were industry,
the technique of fact-finding, honesty: these produced our
shelves of Lives, and sometimes when mated to true gifts
of intellect and style, they gave us noble books on the
careers of great human figures. They served us well and
only the ignorant will disparage these achievements, as
Edgar Johnson points out in his survey of four hundred
years of English history revealed in biography.
But nowadays life-writing has become one of the hazard-
ous occupations: first, because of our new demands on
biography, and second, because our presumed new knowl-
edge of the complex and undecipherable nature of any
life lays an almost impossible burden upon the creative
imagination and literary artistry of the author who under-
takes to explore the character or interpret the acts of this
mysterious fellow man. The very word life has become
terrifying to moderns who try to live one. There are depths
and involutions of secrecy and concealment that defy
understanding. There was, for example, an inexplicable
paradox in William Penn that William Hull never com-
pletely resolves in his erudite topical biography of the
Quaker statesman. How did this English gentleman, son
of an admiral, and familiar at court, achieve his remark-
ably democratic outlook? How was he touched with the
Inner Light ? What quirk of vanity made him wear a wig
to replace the hair he had lost in a bitter prison experience?
He was dual in character, on one side missionary-preacher,
on the other, diplomat-governor, so that there were those
who called him duplicitous, and one commentator says:
"He was sometimes a great statesman, at other times a
great Quaker, but he was never both at the same time."
Yet he was of unquestioned moral courage and piety,
exponent of peace and toleration, founder of a common-
wealth on Christian principles, and left a lasting imprint
on human affairs. We must judge by his deeds though we
do not understand his inner springs of action.
This life of William Penn meets all the standards of
scholarship, clarity, instruction, and even inspiration. It is
a contribution to our knowledge of a great man. But the
hunger for biography that seems characteristic of our gen-
eration craves a variety of satisfactions. Some want lives
that are made into "true stories" with all the devices of
fiction, not for edification but for entertainment, where
gossip, and adventure and sex are woven into a rich
brocade of human interest that too often sacrifices truth
to drama. The satisfaction of such a taste is not the true
concern of biography. More significant is the discovery
that we can gain wisdom from the honest story of a type
person who has no claim to importance in history, but who
may be illuminating as a symbol of the times. The biog-
rapher is challenged to make John Doe — the miner, the
politician, the doctor, the journalist — interesting. This
takes a great artist.
But above all we are seeking of biography an awareness
of life through lives. We want not only the history of the
times, but the history of ourselves. We know so pitifully
little of what goes on in other people; yet we might learn
from them some clue to our own maze. We desire to
share other lives even if we share the shadows that are
all even the best biography can offer. The reader of every
life is an explorer in a strange land. To increase human
awareness may be the prime service of the new biography :
it may foster that charity we so deeply need and afford us
a new hope for peace among men. Biography may con-
quer a new realm.
HOW DIFFICULT WILL BE THE APPROACH TO BIOGRAPHY
through our as yet primer psychology is clear. The old
biography postulated a unit self, like other selves, that re-
vealed itself through act and word. But now the self is a
labyrinth in which are consciousness and subconsciousness
and queerest of all the consciousness of the subconscious. I
am too inexpert to go further with the Id, the Ego, the Per-
sona, but I sense that the self may also be viewed as in part
a fragment of some larger consciousness, as a projection of
what we think we are, and as a kind of entity defined by
its relation to other persons and the world at large. So the
man's plain acts and words are inadequate criteria for
passing judgments, but just clues to complexes, and buried
memories, and devices for concealment and compensa-
tion, and even the manifestation of tricks of minute
glands.
In One Mighty Torrent, Edgar Johnson offers not only
a remarkable omnibus of digested biographies as revela-
tions of the changing times since Henry VIII, but also
a running critique of biography as a form. It is a giant
enterprise, founded on a vast reading and written with
gusto and vivid rhetoric. It must have given the author
great fun in its creation. It is fun for the reader, too, in its
keen comment on everything and everybody, and in its
challenge to review our stereotypes about biography and
its uses. Life-writing is an art with an ever widening fu-
ture, and will not be cramped, but served by our new
knowledge of personality. "Pure biography, the attempt to
give in a form of art the whole career and character and
meaning of an individual life, will not disappear or grow
MAY 1937
287
incredible." We shall have biographies of many kinds lor
many purposes. Science will teach specialization so we may
have a life by collaborators of diverse gifts, one reporting
the facts of a career, one revealing its relations to its times,
and one, the artist-psychologist, interpreting the spirit of the
man. There will be the biography based on economic de-
terminism and perhaps even one on hormones. Authors will
no longer be embarrassed by having Marx peering over one
shoulder, and Freud over the other!
These sprightly considerations leave the reviewer in a
humble mood. For such a complex art there must also be
an art of reviewing. But its canons are not clear; we can
only give our impressions of a written life, admitting we see
it twice removed (for the author cannot escape his personal
interpretation) and through seven veils of shadows. For we
can only see this strange experience of a stranger from the
view we have attained of life, and through lenses fashioned
by our own times.
Let us forget these trepidations. Bluntly Odell Shepard's
study of Bronson Alcott is a source of delight and wisdom.
It surely deserves its place as a memorial volume for the
celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the New England
publishers, Little, Brown and Company. No recent book
has given this reviewer such pleasure, for its style, its evoca-
tion of places and people, and in its good sense and idealism.
The author holds that the spirit of American idealism still
lives, and is the heart of our hope. As an example he tells
the story of this Connecticut farm-boy, who left school at
thirteen, became a peddler of trinkets through the South at
seventeen, taught school in Connecticut and Germantown
and Boston, developed from mysterious sources his idea of
Transcendentalism, failed by the material tests of success,
and closed his long life ruling the Concord school of phil-
osophy.
What kind of man was he? That is the core question that
Mr. Shepard seeks to answer, and does answer. He had
rare material in Alcott's fifty volumes of Journals that run
into millions of words, in his correspondence, and in con-
temporary records. From these his imagination has brought
Alcott alive with a loving but just and humorous style. The
conventional image of an irresponsible and garrulous dreamer
who could never make a living vanishes, and we see instead
an educator who so far anticipated many modern ideas
about schools and teaching that even Boston did not support
him; a reformer who finally decided that the only true
reform must be in the spirit of men; a talker, by the road
and in his Conversations, who exerted an unexplained power-
ful influence on his contemporaries to which his dear friend,
Emerson, testifies; and a philosopher who became a principal
incarnation of New England Transcendentalism simply be-
cause he valued the spirit and followed his Inner Light.
I do not agree with Mr. Johnson that you can digest a
biography, so read for yourself. Read that warm and moving
sketch of the little community on Spindle Hill with its clan
spirit, its self-contained economics, its school and church.
Alcott always viewed it as a kind of model for social order;
and when he tried to found a Paradise at Fruitlands, with
such tragic-comic frustration by mere human nature in his
English friend, Charles Lane, he was seeking to restore the
lost society of his youth. Read of his trips with his tin-trunks
through the South where the Virginians passed him along
with kind words, and taught him forever to "act as a great
peer" and where he met the Quakers of North Carolina,
with their Inner Light. Read of Boston and its ministers and
its reticences, of Concord with Alcott building a curved
summer-house on his own plan to support the little family
that bred Louisa, and was his model school; of his trips to
the West where he met hard-headed Germans who knew
Hegel. Emerson is his friend with a kind of noble sympathy;
Thoreau, his walking companion, who borrowed his axe
to fashion the Walden cabin. In short here is the New Eng-
land of the spirit, with its scenery and its great figures —
and a message to our America.
This is true biography for through it all moves an errant
seeking human figure who believed that children had a
wisdom that he sought to discover. His faults are not glossed
over; indeed the author has a chuckle-rousing gift for point-
ing up inconsistency and foible with a kind of pungent aside
born of a deep understanding. That understanding avoids
the kind of cruel exposure some biographers have practiced.
And that understanding illumines Bronson Alcott as a force
and as a soul.
Balfour and Grey
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. FIRST EARL OF BALFOUR, K.G., O.M.,
F.R.S., 1848-1930, by his niece, Blanche E. C. Dugdale. Putnam. 2 vols.
679 pp. Price $10 a set.
GREY OF FALLODON, by George Macaulay Trevelyan. Houghton Mifflin.
447 pp. Price $o.75.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
AFTER TWENTY YEARS WE LOOK BACK UPON THE ENTRANCE OF
the United States into the World War with mixed feelings
and with as much interest as ever in the personalities that
shaped the War era. Of the European statesmen influential
in winning President Wilson and the American public to
the belief that the victory of the Allies would mean the
triumph of democracy and security for the small nations, per-
haps the most conspicuous were Balfour and Grey. Yet the
British Foreign Minister at the very beginning of the struggle
had no such illusions. As he stood watching from his office
the lighting of the lamps on the street below, after his
triumphal speech in the House of Commons that assured
a united Empire's entering the war, Grey's comment was
prophetic: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we
shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
One of the sources of Britain's greatness, the utter devotion
to its service of the best of its aristocratic sons, is evidenced
again in these two intimate and sympathetic biographies, ad-
mirably supplementing one another as did the lives they
describe. For nearly four decades the First Earl of Balfour
and Viscount Grey of Fallodon, though never close friends,
were active in the same or related fields of work in the House
of Commons and in imperial and foreign affairs. Both were
favored children of fortune, endowed with exceptional gifts:
Balfour, with one of the most versatile and brilliant intellects
of his age; Grey, with a fine mind and a rare love of man
and the lesser creatures of nature.
For the son of a Cecil and favorite nephew of the great
Lord Salisbury, as for the relative of Earl Grey (the Reform
Bill Prime Minister) and grandson of Sir George Grey (fa-
mous Home Secretary during the critical period of the
Chartist movement), the door to public office opened without
effort. Neither Balfour nor Grey, however, was ambitious for
political preferment, neither caring for office for its own sake
nor interested in personal or party strife. Had they followed
their own predilections, the one would have devoted himself
to philosophy and metaphysics, the other to the life of the
countryman-naturalist. But neither denied the call of duty,
fashioned by the circumstances of their lives, to serve their
country. As parliamentarians and servants of the Crown,
each in his own way represented the best in Conservative and
Liberal traditions.
From 1891-1905, successively as leader in the House of
Commons, second in command in the Foreign Office, and
Prime Minister, Balfour played a considerable role in help-
ing to prepare the stage for the tense drama of the decade
preceding the World War, when Grey was the chief British
protagonist. Under his uncle, who in addition to being Prime
Minister was also Foreign Minister, and who had complete
confidence in his nephew, Balfour directed important policies
288
SURVEY GRAPHIC
in Persia, where British and Russian spheres of influence were
demarcated; discouraged diplomatic intervention by the "Con-
cert of Europe to prevent the United States from going to
war with Spain; favored a generous settlement with the de-
feated Boers; sought to reach an agreement with Germany
about colonies in Africa; and worked toward a basis of
understanding with Russia that would not weaken the Anglo-
Japanese alliance."
The serious defeats in the Boer War convinced Balfour
that Britain's military preparedness was dangerously inade-
quate in a world moving, as he feared, toward war. As Prime
Minister he refused, at the risk of seeming to cling to office,
to resign until he had firmly built the Committee of Imperial
Defense "into the Constitution" and had advanced the vital
question of army reform and of the new rapid-firing gun
to the point where he could with less misgivings entrust the
security of the Empire to the Liberals, whose handling of
foreign policies and military affairs he heartily distrusted.
It is upon Grey, as Foreign Minister from 1905 to 1916
that responsibility for the maintenance of peace fell. He too,
even more than Balfour, had been reluctant to assume the
burdens of public office. His intense love of the countryside
made him feel a prisoner in London during his years in the
Foreign Office. Yet Mr. Trevelyan convincingly proves mis-
taken the critics who thought Grey half-hearted in the dis-
charge of his duties. He was not that, much as he longed to
flee from Whitehall to his beloved bird and fishing sanctuary
on the Itchen, or to Fallodon.
No foreign minister in any country has been subjected to
more relentless criticism than Grey at home and abroad.
The attacks have come from two irreconcilable points of view.
He is charged by some with having needlessly "encircled"
Germany through the entente with France and the under-
standing with Russia; and by others, with having failed to
transform those relationships into alliances which might have
discouraged German aggression. This reviewer, having been
among those who felt that war might have been averted
had Grey let Germany understand in advance of the fatal
days of July-August, 1914, that Great Britain would fight
if Belgium were invaded, is now inclined to share the author's
conclusion that: "The principles which were the pillars of
his policy still challenge refutation. They failed indeed to
keep the peace in the end; but they kept it for nine years,
and they secured that Britain entered the war with powerful
allies and with a fair name among neutrals on both sides of
the Atlantic. Where he failed no one could have succeeded;
where he succeeded many would have failed."
In the midst of the war, the end of 1916, Grey's public
activities ceased, never again to be resumed. Against the ad-
vice of his doctors, he had carried on until blindness and ill
health forced him to lay down his burdens at the early age
of fifty-two. Balfour, fourteen years Grey's senior, then re-
sumed office as First Lord of the Admiralty in the reorgan-
ized Lloyd George Cabinet. Later as Foreign Minister and
Lord President of the Council, he influenced his country's
policies during the last years of the war at the Peace Confer-
ence and at the Washington Disarmament Conference. The
one public act, however, which gave him the greatest satis-
faction throughout the rest of his life was the issuance of the
famous Balfour Declaration, that charter of hopes for a large
portion of world Jewry.
It was Grey, however, deeply sympathetic with all man-
kind as part of the whole of nature which he loved, who fore-
saw and welcomed the rising power of labor. His letter to
an old friend about the coal strike of 1912 is perhaps as fitting
a note as any on which to close:
"This coal strike is the beginning of a revolution. We shall
I suppose make it an orderly and gradual revolution. But
labor intends to have a larger share and has laid hold of
power. Power has passed from the King to the nobles, from
the nobles to the middle classes and through them to the
House of Commons, and now it is passing from the House
of Commons to the trades unions. It will have to be recog-
nized that the millions of men employed in great industries
have a stake in those industries and must share in the control
of them. The days when the owners said 'this country is
mine; I alone must control it and be master in my own house'
are passing away. The owners still say that, but it has ceased
to be real because they cannot act upon it. The unions may
of course, like blind Samson with his arms round the
pillars, pull down the house on themselves and everyone else
if they push things too far; or if the owners are too unyield-
ing, there will be civil war. But I do think the good temper
and spirit of compromise that is inherent in English char-
acter will save us from catastrophe. Mistakes will be made
and suffering will result, but we shall all learn by experience.
There are unpleasant years before us; we shall work through
to something better, though we who have been used to more
than five hundred pounds a year may not think it better."
New Yor^ JAMES G. McDoNALD
The Child at Large
SOMETHING OF MYSELF, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RUDYARD KIPLING.
Doubleday, Doran. 252 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
"GlVE ME THE FIRST SIX YEARS OF A CHILD*S LIFE AND YOU
can have the rest" is the headnote of the first chapter of
Kipling's autobiography. It might stand as a motto for the
entire book. For after the incomparable three pages of child-
ish memories of Bombay, the remainder of the story of
seventy years seems haunted by the effort to recapture the
wonder and delight of those first years. They were fixed in
memory by contrast with the unhappy years in the home of
the Evangelical landlady at Southsea, whence Kipling drew
the substance of Baa Baa Blacksheep. Then came the years
of school at Westward Ho commemorated in Stalky and
'Co., an adolescence prolonged in the newspaper offices of
Lahore and Allahabad when a childish love of soldiers
furnished him with some of his best material. The awakening
in London to find himself famous was a marvelous fulfil-
ment of a youth's dream, and thenceforth Kipling was free
to wander the earth, indulging a boy's curiosity about men
and machines and processes but finding his deepest interest
in animals and in children. Kipling has written his best /or
children, and about children and animals, an association which
he established forever in The Jungle Book. It is the overflow-
ing of this well of childhood throughout his life that is the
source of Kipling's power, and of the charm which pervades
these reminiscences.
Kipling was a romanticist who sought escape not in nature
or the past or in revolution or opium but in childhood. He is
evidence of the fact, however, that the cult of Peter Pan
is a symptom of the modern world which has its dangers.
Wyndham Lewis once remarked, "To make everybody 'like
unto little children' is not such a bad way (to start with) of
disposing of them." Kipling's fondness for adventure, vicari-
ously enjoyed in intercourse with Rider Haggard, Doctor
Jameson, Cecil Rhodes, Theodore Roosevelt and other strong
childish men, translated itself into politics, and Kipling's
politics were those of a schoolboy. The empire as a cosmic
assumption of the White Man's Burden was his chief field of
mental exercise, and the theme of much of his dashing boyish
verse. Preoccupation with it led him to a patriotism which
found exalted expression in Recessional, and also to an im-
perialism which turned to hate and violence. His memoir is
marred by outcroppings of malevolence sometimes furtive,
sometimes explosive. Kipling hated the Irish ("The Irish
whose other creed is Hate"); the United States ("frank,
brutal decivilization"); the Boers, (a passing sneer at Miss
Hobhouse who aroused England to the horror of the concen-
MAY 1937
289
1 XI) 1T S THY ami ] n LF.X K Ss
Courtesy Weylie Gallery, New York
'THIS LITTLE WORLD
THIS ENGLAND"
There is but one way to know an artist. Such a
biography as Marjorie Bowen's William Hogarth,
The Cockney's Mirror 1697-1764 [Appleton Cen-
tury; 340 pp., price #5 postpaid of Survey Graphic]
with its 33 illustrations, sets one with fresh zest to
reexamining the work of the great satirist and
moralist of England. There were, as the author
shows, other Hogarths. There was the unappre-
ciated portrait painter, the artist of historical
paintings, genre pictures, conversation pieces, even
two murals. Miss Bowen portrays the man, the
homeloving, respectable citizen. She describes the
gross London satirized in Four Stages of Cruelty,
Harlot's Progress, Four Times of the Day, Gin
Lane; the dissolute London of Rake's Progress and
Marriage a la Mode; the stagnant Church of The
Sleeping Congregation; the Methodist movement
of Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism; the
beginning of the industrial revolution shown in
the twelve plates of Industry and Idleness, two of
which are here reproduced. But as Miss Bowen
points out, "It was not the eighteenth century that
he held up to scorn but human nature ... an
artist of his power could extract this essence from
any age." p. L. K,
tration camps); the aesthetic cult ("the suburban Toilet-Club
favoured by the late Mr. Oscar Wilde"). The permanent
value of his reminiscences is found in Kipling's account of
his art and literary workmanship, for here his maturity in
mastering the technique of romantic realism is undeniable.
But it remains true, as Goethe said of Byron, that when he
thinks he is a child.
Chicago, III. ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
Reality Came at Journey's End
BROOKINGS, A BIOGRAPHY, by Hermann Hagedorn. Macmillan. 334 pp.
Price $3.50.
OX JOURNEY, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Vida Scuddcr. Dutton. 445 pp.
Price $4.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
IT WAS A HAPPY COINCIDENCE THAT PLACED HAGEDORN?S
Brookings and Vida Scudder's autobiography in my hands at
the same time. Read separately they would seem to have
nothing in common; considered together they enhance one
another, appearing as two significant strands in the evolving
pattern of American culture. Hagedorn's story is that of the
typical hero of American business, the man of humble origin,
of energy, initiative, and enterprise dominated by the ac-
quisitive instinct; of financial success and discontent with
mere hoarded wealth, who finds escape from his sense of
cultural inferiority in philanthropy and more especially that
philanthropy most prized by successful captains of industry
by virtue of which preeminent institutions of research and
the higher learning in the United States have come to con-
note the names not of scholars or artists or scientists, but
rather the names of imperial masters of steel, or oil, or
bauxite, or as in the instant case of cordage and woodenware.
Vida Scudder's story is the complete obverse of the story of
Brookings; but its peculiarly mystical and introvert quality
seems largely accounted for by the fact that as a non-ac-
quisitive, sensitive artist and teacher in a privately financed
woman's college, she lived in continuously repressed rebellion
against the felt dominance of these imperial and harshly im-
perious minds. Vida Scudder found her escape in St. Francis
of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, fortified oddly enough by
Karl Marx. Ultimately both she and Brookings stepped aside
from the ranks of the forces whose mounting conflict makes
the drama of current American life; both at journey's end
sought peace in remembered things — Brookings, white-haired
and seventy-seven, at the altar-rail of St. Mary Anne's Church,
Scudder as a Companion of the Holy Cross.
Robert Somers Brookings was born on January 22, 1850.
Before he was two, his father died. His early school years he
spent in Baltimore, where his step-father was a carpenter and
builder. At seventeen, having made his way to St. Louis,
he was employed as a receiving clerk by Samuel Cupples of
Cupples and Marston, manufacturers' agents for all manner
of woodenware from clothespins to willow-baskets. At twenty-
one, he was a partner in the business; at thirty, "he had his
million, he was a power." Then he went to Europe, to
Florence where "the lamps dotting the pavements, the bridge
spanning the Arno, the full moon just rising over the Michel
Angelo Plaza made the loveliest sight of my life." Four years
later, he was in Europe again, this time with his violin.
Once the great Joachim aske'd him to play for him. It was
then that he abandoned music as a career. Instead, at
Joachim's suggestion, he bought an Amati. Back in St. Louis,
he built the Cupples Station — "a great business exploit
worth more to the commercial interests of St. Louis than
any other business enterprise attempted by the men of this
generation." Then he turned to educational philanthropy.
He revitalized, rebuilt, reorganized, refinanced Washington
University in St. Louis. Under his direction the University
Medical School rose to first rank. Later he founded the
Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C. In due course,
he had his reward. Harvard University bestowed upon him
the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Then old age and
weariness. Then the altar-rail.
Vida Scudder was born in Madura, India, on December 15,
1861, the child of a young Congregational missionary. Among
her father's books was a slim volume in faded blue cloth
"which I used to read and read — -I can't remember when I
hadn't read it — till its contemplative wisdom had sunk into
the very being of me: the Bhagavad Gita." Her father died
when she was a baby. Her mother brought her back to Massa-
chusetts. Her "real childhood" she spent in Europe. "They
ended, those European years — my sixth to my tenth; and I
know, looking back, that they determined what sort of person
I should be. Two influences had pervaded me which were
always to control my instincts andin large measure to shape
my conduct: devotion to beauty, and awed intuition of the
human past." She was later to be a student in Oxford where
she listened to Ruskin. A graduate of Smith, she went to
Wellesley to teach in 1887, and till 1927 "Wellesley was the
center of my energy." After her profession as teacher and in-
terpreter of English literature, "the settlement movement
became the most engrossing interest in my life." She ad-
dressed the Lawrence strikers in 1912, and as a result of the
controversy that followed, "the request was made that I sup-
press for the coming year my course on Social Ideals in
English Letters." In her Socialism and Character, she at-
tempted a synthesis of the Catholic faith and Karl Marx;
since "the doctrine of economic determinism, or the mate-
rialistic interpretation of history as it was then called, seemed
to me in some of its aspects, as it seems still, extraordinarily
consonant with a sacramental understanding of the universe."
On Journey is a rarely stimulating book. It is a beautiful
book, with the beauty in the light about Giotto's Florence.
It is a cleansing book, as the story of the life of St. Francis
is cleansing. It is the record of a gallant quest for Reality.
But at the end, Vida Scudder finds Reality, not in our
turbulent American life, but in the House of Holiness of
the Companions of the Holy Cross. The rebel saint so near
to Brookings there at the altar-rail of St. Mary Anne's
Church! ROBERT W. BRUERE
A Great American Aristocrat
THE LETTERS AND JOURNAL OF BRAND WHITLOCK, edited by
Allan Nevins. Introduction by Newton D. Baker. Appleton-Century. 597
pp. (Letters); 732 pp. (Journal). Price 2 vols. boxed $10 postpaid of
Suri'ey Graphic.
THE LETTERS AND JOURNAL OF BRAND WHITLOCK, WITH AN
introduction by Newton D. Baker, and an understanding and
sympathetic editing and biographical foreword by Allan
Nevins, is monument enough for any man. The publishers
have framed the portrait handsomely in two large octavo
volumes, as the admirers of Whitlock would have had it done.
There has been no other man quite like Whitlock in
American public life, as there is no other record as complete
with respect to those things with which Whitlock was asso-
ciated. The period of his political life was the fag end of
our early democracy, influenced by the free homesteading
of the west, with such men as Altgeld of Illinois, Pingree of
Michigan, Tom Johnson and Sam Jones in Cleveland and
Toledo, with Bryan and the elder La Follette in our national
life, battling against 'the rising plutocracy that was taking
control of our life. That period differs from our own in
that it was essentially democratic, individualistic and tradi-
tional. It felt the possibilities within the land, and it still
believed that there was enough inherent rightmindedness and
power within the people to correct the abuses that were
enveloping them if they were but given leaders of an under-
standing sort.
Whitlock was unlike the other men. Essentially an aristo-
crat, in the fine sense that William Sumner of Yale used the
291
term, inexperienced in the rough and tumble controversy with
which the other leaders were familiar, acutely sensitive to
hates and misrepresentation, with a desire to devote himself
to literature, to live with those of his own kind about him,
his entire adult life, save for a few years at the end, was cast
in bitter controversy and amidst the sufferings of the world.
He probably chose this unconsciously. At least, he could not
escape from it all. It was a kind of Nemesis. It began in
his youth as a protest against a strict Evangelical environment.
As a newspaper man in Chicago he was thrown among the
unfortunate lowly. He met Altgeld, the then governor of
Illinois, at the time of the pardoning of the anarchists, became
his friend, and was associated with him during those years
in which Altgeld was anathema to the state and to the nation
as well, as were few men of his generation. From Illinois to
Toledo, where his lines fell in with Sam Jones, the golden
rule mayor, who made him his close friend and confidant,
and whose mantle, as mayor of Toledo, fell upon him. All
this has been told by Whitlock in his autobiography, Forty
Years of It.
Then came the election of Woodrow Wilson and the ap-
pointment of Whitlock as minister to Belgium, where he
went like a boy from school, full of high hopes of peace and
quiet, and eager to devote himself unreservedly to literature,
which was his consuming passion. Again he found himself
with the woes of the nation resting upon him, where they
rested for five long years. It is his daily memoranda of
these years and the years that followed, down to 1921, that
make up the entire second volume of his journal, an in-
valuable document from the inside as to what was happening
at the very heart of the War. Then follows his life in Europe,
for the most part on the Riviera, with his books and his
writings, down to his death.
I doubt if American politics ever struck a higher spiritual
pitch than in Toledo and Cleveland from 1901 to 1912, with
Tom L. Johnson battling in the latter city for economic
justice and "A City on The Hill," and Sam Jones and
Brand Whitlock in Toledo, battling for a democratic equality
reflective of the teachings of Christ, of Walt Whitman and of
Tolstoy. Bitter as was the hatred of Tom Johnson in Cleve-
land, it was even more bitter in Toledo, where the public
utility interests, the businessmen, the press and the churches
united in denouncing the teachings of Christ which issued
from the mayoralty's office. Criminals, prostitutes, drunks, the
most unfortunate of the unfortunate were lifted into political
concern as they have never been lifted in any other com-
munity. And it was the treating of these unfortunates as
by-products of a social system rather than as of their own
weaknesses that most affronted the best people of Toledo.
And Whitlock, sensitive to his fingertips, bore this burden
unflinchingly. It aged him but it taught him for his books
as it taught him for his subsequent experience in Belgium.
All this is of a different age than our own. It was the begin-
ning of the battle against special privilege. It was tragic in
that the gains in these two outstanding cities seemed quickly
lost as soon as the protagonists were gone. For big business
swept quickly over their achievements and left little more
than the affection of the masses, their alert public sensibility
and public improvements in the form of planning projects,
parks, playgrounds, and a beautified city as a monument.
And Whitlock wanted to be away, with his books and his
writings, his hopes of doing a life job for the underprivileged.
For that is what he was doing in all of his early writings — •
in his The Thirteenth District, The Turn of the Balance,
a story of the criminal courts, his Forty Years of It.
His journal of the German invasion, of the Slave Drives
in Belgium and Belgian relief, in the form of a daily record
of what was happening, together with his comments on
conditions in the post- War period, have value not alone from
their intimacy with what was going on but from the kind
of mind and background which Whitlock brought to his
reporting.
During the late years of his life in Europe, he kept up
a voluminous correspondence with a large number of people
in many different walks of life, touching on many subjects- —
literature, politics, international affairs. He was disillusioned
as to the political state, as to socialism, as to communism, but
he still held fast to beliefs of an idealistic sort with relation
to democracy, as to an approach to extreme individualism and
to the teachings of Henry George, but with little hope that
his fundamental philosophy would ever be accepted. It was
in these later years, with friends of his own choosing, with
his home where he chose to make it, and with his pen and
his books that he lived himself most completely as an aristo-
crat in mind and spirit, which Whitlock essentially was.
These two volumes, issuing out of the intimate, personal
experience of a philosopher-statesman, are volumes which
no library can afford to be without. Insofar as our own coun-
try is concerned they portray the politics of the city and state
from within rather than from the legalistic textbook inter-
pretations of it. Added to this is a concept of human dem-
ocracy which goes deeper than that of any formalistic under-
standing of it. The record is that of the end of an epoch in
American life; an epoch of protest against things that were
passing and as to which Whitlock and the men with whom
he was associated sought vainly to conserve.
It is fortunate that this record should have been entrusted
to Allan Nevins as editor for its preservation for the future
historians of American life.
Washington, D. C. FREDERIC C. HOWE
A Quaker With a Real Concern
ELIZABETH FRY: QUAKER HEROINE, by Janet Whitney. Little, Brown.
333 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Surrey Graphic.
NOT AS A SOCIAL REFORMER NOR AS A HEROINE, BUT AS A SIMPLE
great-hearted woman who never denied a duty of body or
spirit does Mrs. Whitney present her subject. As free from the
entanglements of Freudian reasoning as was Betsy Fry her-
self, hers is a tender, essentially feminine examination of the
forces that shaped the life of the woman who "just as the
philanthropic nineteenth century was coming into its own
. . . split the rotten timbers of prison administration wide
open."
Betsy Gurney was one of eleven motherless children
brought up by a prosperous, wise father to love the Lord
but not to fear Him. The Gurneys were "gay" Quakers, fond
of "cultivated" amusements, such as music and dancing.
Betsy was eighteen and of a serious turn of mind when,
under the influence of William Savery, an American Quaker
"traveling in the ministry," she first "felt religion" and began
to discipline herself. "I must use extreme exertion to act
really right, to avoid idleness and dissipation." Inevitably,
step by step she "went plain."
At twenty Betsy married the excellent but somewhat
unimaginative Joseph Fry. She cried "hartily" at the wed-
ding but foe was from that moment "my dear, dear hus-
band." Had Joe been of another cut of English Quaker cloth
Betsy's story henceforth would have been a very different one.
In London, where the young couple went to live, her bud-
ding personality was almost swallowed up in the duties of
motherhood and of the placid demands of an incredible
swarm of relatives and visiting Quakers. But some way, some-
how, she found time to nurse all the sick in the huge fam-
ily connection, to visit the poor and to read to the children in
the workhouse. The good Joe admired and respected her and
"countenanced" her expanding charitable concerns.
Elizabeth Fry was thirty-three years old and the mother
of eight children when in the hard winter of 1813 she first
visited Newgate Prison to carry clothing to the children in-
292
SURVEY GRAPHIC
carcerated there with their mothers. "So simply, directly and
humanly was Elizabeth Fry called to that which others have
chosen to regard as her life work."
But four years were to pass, crowded with the birth of two
more children, the death of one and the loss of fortune
before that "life work" moved forward. Elizabeth went to
Newgate again — she had never 'forgotten what she saw
on her first visit — "not because she had decided to take up
prison reform but because she had thought of something
she could do."
From that second visit in January 1817 stemmed the whole
series of events that made prison history, that demonstrated
a theory of humane prison management with which practice
has never yet caught up.
Mrs. Whitney easily passes over the events that rapidly
made Elizabeth Fry a public figure. She does not underesti-
mate the value of all that the modest Quaker lady set going,
but she is less concerned with the reformer than with the
woman, less impressed by the reforms than by the manner
in which Elizabeth preserved a balance between public and
private life that "kept her incurably and triumphantly the
amateur." Probably she is right in this emphasis. There have
been other women reformers, but few if any who have at the
same time maintained such solid, substantial and demanding
family relationships, to say nothing of retaining the "counte-
nance" of a nineteenth century husband. One wishes one
knew more of "my dear, dear husband." What did Joe think
of it all back of the "countenance" he never failed to lend
to the wife who must have had her bewildering aspects?
Mrs. Whitney quotes copiously from various Gurney and Fry
diaries, but not a word from Joe's.
Out of Mrs. Whitney's lovingly written pages Elizabeth
Fry emerges as a modest human creature, unaware of her
own greatness, with no deep social theories and no compel-
ling drive. She did simply and directly what came to her
hand. She was sensitive to the criticisms that fell on her,
especially when they came from the Quaker elders, but re-
mained humble and serene in her sense of Tightness with
God. Her idea of "something she could do" for women
prisoners marked the beginning of a new principle of which
modern penology is little more than the elaboration.
GERTRUDE SPRINGER
Georgia Made a Martyr
LET ME LIVE, by Angelo Herndon. Random House. 409 pp. Price $2.50
postpaid of Survey Graphic.
ANGELO HERNDON, NEGRO COMMUNIST, HAS BECOME IN THE
last few years more than a figure made conspicuous by his
conviction in Georgia for "inciting to insurrection," with the
longest sentence for "free speech" in peacetime ever imposed
— eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. He is a symbol
of a new type of Negro, whose communism is the natural ex-
pression both of racial and working class revolt against in-
justice. Herndon's real offense is characteristic of them —
organizing white and colored workers together without dis-
crimination.
But it was for a more technical offense — -having Com-
munist literature privately in his room, seized by the police
after his arrest — that he was convicted of "incitement to in-
surrection." He has appealed to the Supreme Court of the
United States, where his case has been argued and is about
to be decided.
These facts make timely Herndon's autobiography, Let Me
Live, a volume of four hundred pages, telling simply and
without self-consciousness the dramatic story of the rise of
a poverty stricken boy in Cincinnati to a position where to-
day at twenty-four he commands wide attention and respect.
Not even Herndon's book conveys the selflessness and mod-
esty of one of the most engaging young radicals it has been
my privilege to meet. I presume it is my own feeling of the
MAY 1937
kind of human being he is, rather than his politics, which
makes most appealing the story of his evolution in childhood
and early youth up to his conversion to communism. The
last more than half of his book describes intimately and with
fine sensitiveness his activities since he joined the party and
became through his trial a symbol. The documents in the
case are included in an appendix.
Herndon's story is singularly free from conventional radi-
calism. The same simplicity which marks his manner marks
his words. He is consumed with a passion for service, regard-
ing himself as an instrument of a great cause. After he got
out of prison, ill, and was counseled to take a rest, he
answered in words which sum up his whole outlook: "A
man who loves his fellow-man mustn't mark time; he can't
afford to rest. There's too much work to be done; too little
time to do it; too few to do it."
Herndon's story is a document unique in race relations
and in working class upsurge.
American Civil Liberties Union ROGER N. BALDWIN
Memoirs of a Human Soul
WHY I THINK SO — THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN HYPOTHESIS, by Ethel
S. Dummer. Clarke-McElroy Publishing Company. 274 pp. Price $1.50
postpaid of Survey Graphic.
WHY I THINK So is A BOOK BY THE WOMAN WHO CONCEIVED
the idea of the first psychological clinic for juvenile court
children. In 1898 came the first juvenile court to Chicago.
As other ladies of wealth and position, Mrs. Dummer visited
the new device to save children. The impact of her experience
gave her pain, then joy, like the Hound of Heaven. "What
this child needs is not a judge, but a doctor, a doctor of the
soul." So Dr. William Healy was discovered by her. From
1900 until the Illinois State Department of Criminology estab-
lished the Juvenile Bureau Mrs. Dummer financed the clinic.
It is impossible, in this space, to list the contributions of
this author to that revolution in public opinion which has
changed our treatment of the child delinquent, the unmar-
ried mother, the prostitute, the feebleminded, the truant and
backward and insane. In each of these fields she felt the
emotion of an awakened social conscience, struggled till she
had a workable concept, presented her ideas to "experts and
authorities," stepped into the background, sustained the en-
terprise, insisted that all credit go to the person, or agency
"in charge."
The hypothesis, thus wrought into a personal life which is
like a religion and into innumerable acts of social invention,
is that mental and spiritual integrity is achieved when the
individual is freed from self-consciousness, and when inner
spontaneous interest flows outward to activity for the benefit
of mankind. In childhood, the author was quickened by the
concept of unity between the abstract and the particular,
between the personal and the impersonal. Family life, poetry,
nature, mathematics, religion, suffering, joy, became trans-
lated into spiritual meaning. In maturity, she achieved an
integrated dynamic philosophy of life. The result is told in
Why I Think So.
It is a book for philosophers. Its keynote is the use of the
vast constructive power lying below the level of immediate
awareness. The author has tried to push the scientists, who
are afraid of meanings, into a position where they will answer
the question: What has this to do with the human soul?
She has challenged biologists, physicists, psychologists and
anthropologists.
The book is full of wisdom. "Behavior should be from
the contagion of example." "Offering morals and mathema-
tics to children on a verbal level sets up a cleavage." "Activity
rather than acquisition brings satisfaction." "The ancient
levels of the primitive group thought found in little children
is basic for the development of a fine social conscience."
Those who read with insight will have the experience of
293
the Chicago children after Mrs. Dummer had brought "ex-
perts" to train them in creative education. A visitor dropped
in to the school room and said, "The children have all come
alive."
Framingham, Mass. MIRIAM VAN WATERS
The Man Who Made Radio
MARCONI — THE MAN AND His WIRELESS — by Orrin E. Dunlap, Jr. Mac-
millan. 360 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IN RARE INSTANCES THE CAREER OF ONE MAN BECOMES SO
closely identified with the record of an industry that to men-
tion one is to immediately recall the other.
Such a man is Senatore Guglielmo Marconi and such an
industry is radio. To the genius of this one man the world
owes most that it has today of wireless communications,
radio broadcasting and other branches of electronics. While
the radio art has developed immeasurably since his early ex-
periences gave it birth, nevertheless Marconi's work in the
beginning established radio so firmly among the practical
arts and gave its development such impetus that he always
will be mentioned in the same breath with his great ac-
complishment.
In a very human and readable work, Marconi — The Man
and His Wireless, Orrin Dunlap, radio editor of the New Yor^
Times, has recognized this fact and has graphically explained
the reason for it.
The author has presented a clear cut and sympathetic
picture of the scientist in his youth, at the time of his experi-
ments which led to wireless, and as he is today — not as a
machine-like superman but as an understandable fellow
human being, intent on the one great dream of his life,
striving with understanding and tact to make the world con-
scious of the great force whose possibilities he himself could
see so clearly. In addition to this sympathetic analysis of the
character of the man, Mr. Dunlap has told an exciting story
of Marconi's work while he struggled for the world's recog-
nition of its importance, followed by a comprehensive study
of the enormous development of radio in the past thirty-five
years. He enables the reader to see clearly what one man's
vision has accomplished, and what are the possibilities of
this challenging art.
Perhaps the greatest credit should go to Mr. Dunlap for
his skill in portraying the past and present of a vast and
rapidly expanding industry in bold, clear strokes. Without
wasting time on non-fundamentals, and with a firm grip on
the main thread which leads from Marconi in the early days
to the spearhead of radio progress today, he has stuck to the
essentials and has produced a history of radio interwoven
with that of radio's greatest figure, which will be of value
to the student as well as of interest to the lay reader.
I thoroughly enjoyed Marconi — The Man and His Wireless
because of the breadth and penetration of the author's view
of the great radio art and industry of today.
Radio Corporation of America DAVID SARNOFF
History Likes a Winner
AARON BURR — THE PROUD PRETENDER, by Holmes Alexander. Harper.
390 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
SAM ADAMS — PIONEER IN PROPAGANDA, by John C. Miller. Little, Brown.
•437 pp. Price $4 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
MODERN IN APPROACH, YET VERY DIFFERENT IN TONE AND IN
sense of social values, Mr. Alexander's biography of Burr
and Mr. Miller's biography of Sam Adams show what two
easily misunderstood figures of the history books were really
like. Mr. Alexander is a dashing writer, and Aaron Burr,
profligate, debonair, voluptuous, egoistic adventurer, is just
his meat. There is not much that is new in his excellent book.
I should have liked to see him come to grips with the po-
litical background more fully in the chapters dealing with
Burr as vice-president, staging the impeachment of Supreme
Court Justice Chase to be as theatrical as the Warren Hast-
ings trial; with Burr's escape from conviction for treason
traced more thoroughly to Chief Justice Marshall's charge to
the jury, and Marshall's previous acquittal of two of Burr's
agents; with Burr's selfish anti-intellectual conflict with
thinkers on both sides of leading questions of his day. But
I cannot complain. Mr. Alexander has told a rattling good
story, full of the racy personal quality of Aaron Burr — a
thoroughly engaging, thoroughly bad Tammany politician,
if one wants to be as glib as Mr. Alexander.
Sam Adams seems less remote today than Burr, in Mr.
Miller's thoughtful, well documented, colorful and dramatic
volume. Sam Adams was a rabble rouser of the first water,
almost the inventor of American political propaganda which
appealed to the ignorant man in the street. More constructive
than, let us say, the late Huey Long, he nevertheless helped
promote such illegal gestures as the Boston Tea Party; he
believed in stuffing ballot boxes for democracy, but not on
the other side; drank, borrowed, bluffed, bullied, knew what
smoke-filled hotel bedrooms were like. After the Articles of
Confederation, he orated his way to the governorship of
Massachusetts. Like most successful radicals, he understood
the philosophy of what he was doing, but eschewed logic
in public, and used prejudice and emotion to sway men. He
stuck to Jeffersonianism, and anti-British, pro-French-ism,
during the development of federalism in Massachusetts. To
him, even in his palsied old age — he lived into the nineteenth
century only a few years — the French Revolution was more
real than the Russian Revolution has been to most Americans.
There is no large moral lesson in these two books. Both
Burr and Sam Adams were frequently scoundrelly oppor-
tunists. Both promoted themselves by promoting ideas —
but Burr chose to deal from the top and Adams from the
bottom of humanity's stack of cards. If there is a small moral
in their stories it is that History, like Broadway, loves a
winner! VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
Love and the Law
ACROSS SPOON RIVER, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Edgar Lee Masteri.
Farrar and Rinehart. 426 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Suney Graphic.
IN HIS LIFE OF VACHEL LINDSAY, EDGAR LEE MASTERS in-
sisted now and then that Lindsay was a victim of American
materialism. But for the most part, with deeper wisdom, and
doubtless with desperation, he was content to leave as exact
a picture of his brother poet as possible. It is not granted us
to understand our own lives and times; but if we can pass
on the facts, we help posterity arrive at truth. These remarks
apply also to Mr. Masters' autobiography, Across Spoon
River. The two books are among the first definite examples of
a new honesty in American writing. To my taste their style
is too careless and journalistic, but I cannot be blind to their
great merits.
Mr. Masters appears to have practiced law like a poet, and
love like a lawyer. He used his legal ability to help the
widow and orphan, with a hatred of unscrupulous men that
warms one to the core. But in the world of love (as he now
views it in retrospect) he becomes the lawyer, or rather the
judge. He sits on his bench weighing the evidence for and
against, in the great case of Edgar Lee Masters vs. his be-
loveds and the world in general. Including his parents and
relatives. In the malodorous Chicago courts of the time his
knowledge of Blackstone and the Illinois statutes were a stout
weapon for his stout human sympathies. If in the world of
love he acted uncertainly and without power, it may be that
he had not studied sufficiently his Heloise (meaning her
letters to Abelard) or any other good Blackstone of the emo-
tions. I mean, culture and religion as he had experienced
them did not come to Masters' help. In relations where above
all a man needs a definite view, he was left in the lurch.
294
Much of his book is a grim recital of one attempt at relation-
ship after another. I found it moving.
Masters often speaks of woman as the arbitress of man's
fate, and in other such roles. But he does not speak of her
as a human being whose happiness is apt to depend upon a
man's singleness of purpose and stability in his work, and
upon her own ability to weave over and under man's dread-
ful break between idealism and passion.
The changes one desires in the social view of sex can hardly
come quickly and may refuse to come at all except as a
result of the lives of persons anxious to pass muster with
themselves. We cannot have another "system" till the present
one is done for, and it will not be done for until individuals
like Masters have convinced us of how ignorant and be-
wildered it leaves us, and how it collides with the private
conscience. Such writers accumulate the mass of evidence
needed for another system. Masters is unwilling to have any-
one resign himself too quickly to the feeling of guilt from the
clash of his tendencies with education, surroundings, religion.
The change he demands is in institutions and society itself.
Certainly it is most intolerable today that the problems of
sex should be separated from those of love, that love should
not be clearly recognized as a form of culture and of religion
to which each must make his own adjustment and vow his
personal devotion.
Santa Fe, N. Mex. HANIEL LONG
Negroes in the Arts
NEGRO GENIUS, by Benjamin Brawley. Dodd, Mead. 366 pp. Price $2.50
postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A READABLE, WELL-DOCUMENTED SURVEY ACCOUNT OF THE
achievements of the Negro in the fields of literature, drama,
music and the fine arts from the pioneers o£ colonial days to
the significant figures of the recent "Negro Renaissance." A
little ambiguously for a volume entitled Negro Genius, the
analysis veers at times to the discussion of the Negro theme
by white American artists, which probably reveals the basic
fallacy in any attempt at a separate appraisal of Negro
achievement in such an essentially bi-racial field of artistic
interest and collaboration. ALAIN LOCKE
Other Recent Biographies
THE WOODROW WILSONS, by Eleanor Wilson McAdoo. Macmillan.
Price $3.50.
MARLBOROUGH, by Winston Churchill. Scribner. Price $4.50.
ACROSS THE YEARS, by Charles Stedman MacFarland. Macmillan.
Price $2.75.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, by Edward Shanks. Macmillan. Price $2.
CALVIN COOLIDGE, A PURITAN, by William Allen White, Macmillan.
Price $3.50.
THE HOUSE OF DUPONT, by Lewis Corey. Covici. Price $3.75.
A MAVERICK AMERICAN, by Maury Maverick. Covici. Price $3.
SAMUEL BUTLER, by Malcolm Muggeridge. Putnam. Price $2.75.
MY FATHER'S HOUSE, by Pierrepont Burt Noyes. Farrar. Price $3.50.
LfiON BLUM, by Richard L. Stokes. Coward. Price $3.
DEAR THEO, by Irving Stone. Houghton. Price $3.75.
DAMIEN THE LEPER, by John Farrow. Sheed & Ward. Price $2.50.
KING EDWARD VIII, by Hector Bolitho. Lippincott. Price $3.
PUSHKIN, by Ernest J. Simmons. Harvard. Price $4.
AARON BURR, by Nathan Schachner. Stokes. Price $3.50.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Sir Ronald Storrs. Putnam. Price $3.50.
A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Claude McKay. Lee Furman. Price $3.
MIDNIGHT ON THE DESERT, by J. B. Priestley. Harper. Price $3.
RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE: A POLITICAI, FANTASTIC-
Minton Balch
..Illustrated Popular
Dollar Editions
by Gerald W. Johnson
JEFFERSON DAVIS: His RISE AND FALL
by Allen Tale
SIMON GIRTY: THE WHITE SAVAGE
by Thomas Boyd
RUFUS CHOATE: THE WIZASO or THE LAW
by Claude M. Fuess
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MOSCOW
in the
MAKING
By
SIR E. D. SIMON, LADY SIMON
W. A. ROBSON and J. JEWKES
A vast model city is being built, its population
is being educated, its industries and finance are
being organized in a manner that obtains no-
where else in the world. This book shows how
this gigantic plan is being carried out, what
obstacles lie in the way, what progress is being
made, what ideals give force to the whole
undertaking.
Frontispiece and maps, $2.50
LONGMANS, GREEN & COMPANY
114 Fifth Avenue, New York
215 Victoria Street, Toronto
"These discriminations between real and false
Fascism are tremendously important to every
believer in Democracy, who ought to know what
he has to fight" writes Elmer Davis of
The Fascist: His State and His Mind
by E. B. Ashton
Here you will find a clear, brilliant presentation of the
most serious menace to world peace today! An objec-
tive study of a controversial subject, it shows the political
theory of Fascism; the ideas and emotions that make
it up; the past that produced it; the way it works (as
seen in Germany and Italy) ; its outlook for the future —
in America as well as in Europe.
"It is the first book on Fascism in English that I have
read by anyone who really seems to understand what it
is" says Dorothy Thompson.
"One of the best books on Fascism I have read, and in
some ways the very best," says James Truslow Adams.
WILLIAM MORROW & CO., INC.
386 Fourth Ave., New York, N. Y.
Gentlemen: Please send me cop of THE FASCIST:
HIS STATE AND HIS MIND, by E. B. Aahton, at *2.BO per
copy, postpaid.
Send C.O.D. Q Check enclosed D
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A practical guide for the layman on
the newest methods of treating
man's mental ills.
THE MIND
OF MAN
By WALTER BROMBERG, M.D.
SOCIAL workers, physicians and every-
one faced with the problem of dealing
with abnormal mentalities will want this
absorbing new book by the Assistant Pro-
fessor of Psychiatry at New York University
and senior psychiatrist at Bellevue hospital.
In it, the author first describes the story of
man's fight against mental disease from the
earliest times. He then offers a careful
survey of modern treatment of mental de-
rangement and neuroses, and of the
techniques in psychology and psycho-
therapy of such men as Jung, Freud and
Adler. $3.50
HARPER & BROTHERS
19 EAST 33rd STREET NEW YOKK
Essays in the Theory of
Unemployment
by JOAN ROBINSON
A penetrating consideration of a timely and
basic problem underlying all social work; by
the author of "Economics of Imperfect Com-
petition." #3.50
Economic History q/
The United States
by HAROLD U. FAULKNER
A completely revised edition of a standard book
in its field. Two added chapters bring its scope
up to date, including discussion of the in-
fluences, aims and accomplishments of the New
Deal. #1.50
THE M ACM ILL AN COMPANY
60 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOKK CITY
HUMAN INVENTIONS
Law
NEW YORK CITY HAS A POOR MAN'S COURT WHICH, IN
two years of existence, has proved such a success that
many communities are watching it with interest. Known
as the Small Claims Court, and prohibiting corporations,
partnerships or assignees from pressing claims through
its channels, it was created two years ago to serve people
with claims from one cent to fifty dollars only. Wage
earners may present claims in person at a cost of 21 cents.
In cases not involving wages the usual fee is $1.25. Last
year the court heard 24,956 claims. Three quarters of
the plaintiffs and defendants had no lawyers.
Schools
CULTIVATION OF THAT FIRESIDE MANNER is TAKING THE
place of oratory in the public speaking classes of some of
the country's universities. At New York University, for
instance, the United States Office of Education and the
principal broadcasting companies are cooperating in a
course for the next generation of teachers on how to talk
through the microphone to their pupils far away. . . .
In Seattle the public schools, finding that many of their
graduates take jobs in retail stores, are training pupils
specifically for retail careers. Through the cooperation of
local merchants, each retail student goes on a store pay-
roll at full pay for a brief practice period during the year.
The commercial coordinator of the city school system
reports that last year when a group of jobless highschool
graduates took a retailing course at the vocational school,
the class was constantly reduced; a little special training
often resulted in jobs for the young people.
Cooperation
THE SINE QUA NON OF THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT IS A
common denominator. In Sweden it's the Swedes. In the
United States, where there are so many different kinds of
people, with so many different kinds of things to buy and
sell, co-ops thrive best where people are most alike — in
the rural sections; among kindred spirits in the cities.
Whether orange growers who need customers or dairy
farmers who need cottonseed meal, this homogeneity
often is racial — the Scandinavians in Minnesota, for ex-
ample. It's Indians, too. The Chippewas are turning out
standard one pound packages of wild rice, marketed by
an Indian co-op, with Chippewa managers, buyers and
producers. In Kansas the Choctaws, to the dismay of
the reader of thrillers who doesn't realize what Indians
have been up against through the hard times, have a
cooperative harvesting association, a happy reversion to
tribal ownership in the form of manure spreaders, corn
binders, feed grinders and a hay press. Not to be outdone,
the Wa-Pai-Shone craftsmen, near Carson, Nev., have
put their arts and crafts on a cooperative selling basis.
There, an Indian craftsman pays dues of only 25 cents,
but inactive white members are welcomed at a three
dollar fee.
Books
IN THE BACK COUNTRY OF GRAYSON COUNTY, VA., BOOKS
travel by footback to the remote mountain dwellers on
what is sometimes called the roof of the Old Dominion.
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296
The roving book troubadours are school boys and school
girls, set to work by the National Youth Administration
at the unique chore of taking books to the hills. The idea
has caught on. Some of the mountaineers never had a
book in their cabins before. They asked for Huck Finn,
romances, even Shakespeare. One bashful hill-billy asked
for a book on psychology to help him in his courting; a
Negro cook insisted upon Chic Sales' The Specialist. One
formerly desperate character reports that books keep him
from going out and getting drunk when he's bored. The
footback librarians have added a wrinkle of their own.
They "set awhile" and read to illiterates. To such an
audience any reading is marvelous. A thirty-year-old
magazine is fresh as yesterday.
SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
At the Bureau of Standards
by HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM
LEATHER-LUNGED BARKERS NEVER TAKE SIGHTSEERS IN THE
nation's capital past the Bureau of Standards, just four
miles from the Washington monument. Yet these scientific
laboratories with an annual $2 million appropriation
have an infinitely larger influence on American life than
the Lincoln Memorial, National Cathedral, Arlington
House or other scenic showspots that figure in every tour
of the city. Carefully guarded in a Bureau of Standards'
vault are two pieces of platinum-iridium alloy, the founda-
tion for most of our business transactions. They are the
country's standard meter and standard kilogram and the
bureau's scientists help to maintain exact measures for in-
dustry and commerce.
Besides providing for weight and length, the 1901 Act
of Congress which established the Bureau of Standards
charged it with "the determination of physical constants
and the properties of materials when such data' are of great
importance to scientific or manufacturing interests and are
not to be obtained of sufficient accuracy elsewhere."
Little did congressmen of the robust Theodore Roose-
velt period realize that research in this field a generation
later would help revolutionize the traditional concepts of
matter. Yet that is just what happened because a young
Bureau of Standards research worker was able to obtain
the first samples of heavy hydrogen and thus to open up an
entire new field of chemistry, physics and biology, which
is of far reaching social consequence, especially in the field
of health.
The discovery of heavy hydrogen was as disconcerting
to the traditional concepts of chemistry as would be the
announcement that we are all dual personalities with con-
flicting characteristics. For centuries scientists accepted
hydrogen as one of the definite things in a changing world
and agreed it was the fundamental unit from which the
elements of all other matter were built. While not as plen-
tiful as oxygen which animals need to live, it was found in
more compounds than any other chemical.
Yet the work of Drs. Harold C. Urey and G. M. Murphy
of Columbia University and Dr. F. G. Brickwedde of the
Bureau of Standards proved that there were two kinds of
(Continued on page 298)
(In answering advertisements please
297
What has happened
in America's
Middletown
in the ten eventful years since
the Lynds made its name fa-
mous? And what lies ahead?
That first famous book, it now
appears, set the stage for the
action, the conflicts, the new
developments revealed here.
BY ROBERT S. AND
HELEN MERRELL LY\»
MIDDLETOWN
IN
TRANSITION
A Study in Cultural Conflicts
This new study of Middletown is as
full, detailed, and scientific as the
first. Here are remarkable new
findings about what ten chaotic years
of boom and depression have done
to change Middletown. Here is the
American way of life — business,
sotial, educational, political — set
forth in a fascinating narrative. A
book as absorbing as it is important,
because its absorbing topic is our-
selves! 604 pages, $5.00
For a detailed circular on
"Mitlillftinrn in Transition"
consult your bookseller or
write to the publishers.
HARCOURT, BRACE & CO.
:t8.1 Madison Ave., New York
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Practical advice on the choice of a
vocation
STUDENTS AND
OCCUPATIONS
E. G. WILLIAMSON
Director, University Testing Bureau,
University of Minnesota
This new book is an invaluable source of
information for social workers and counsellors
who arc continually called upon to give voca-
tional advice. It explores all the major occupa-
tional fields and their various subdivisions in
detail, and discusses frankly their aptitude and
training requirements. Thorough, practical and
realistic, it is exhaustive in scope and extremely
helpful in its recommendations.
Order your copy now - Ready in June
HENRY HOLT
257 Fourth Avenue
AND COMPANY
New York
LOG of the TVA
By ARTHUR E. MORGAN
Director of the TVA
An attractive paper-bound book, containing all instal-
ments of the running story of the Tennessee Valley
Authority, written by its Director for SURVEY
GRAPHIC.
Illustrated with photographs and maps.
Price SOc postpaid
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will gladly offer suggestions and information.
(In answering advertisements
hydrogen: the ordinary kind and a sort of Kate Smith
twin which weighed twice as much as its more frequently
found companion. For his work, Dr. Urey won a Nobel
prize; his associates became world famous scientists.
THIS DISCOVERY OF DUAL POSSIBILITIES IN HYDROGEN AND THE
additional findings that subtle differences in physical prop-
erties exist opened up a whole new range of compounds,
each potentially different from its ordinary, known twin.
Even the staid National Academy of Sciences became
jubilant over this "scoop" for American science.
"This opens up the possibility of forming an entire new
group of hundreds of thousands of organic chemicals, with
properties differing somewhat from those which are now
known," the academy's science advisory board reported.
"This is a most interesting problem, whose technique is
pretty well mapped out, which is of enormous extent, and
which is practically certain to yield chemical compounds
with valuable new properties— particularly in the field of
drugs, medicines and dyes."
Dr. Brickwedde still looks younger than his diirty-four
years and has the modesty of a recent college graduate
instead of a scientist with an international reputation. He
is tall and has slightly wavy brown hair. Practically his
entire interest centers in science; his only relaxation is
walking, preferably through the woods.
In 1925, Dr. Brickwedde was graduated from Johns
Hopkins University, a young Ph. D. research student in
quest of a job. He joined the corps of workers at the Na-
tional Bureau of Standards who, month after month,
tackle complex problems to give Americans a better and
fuller life. His first assignment was working out color
tests. Because of the advancement it offered, he shifted a
year later to low temperature research, a field in which
he now has an international reputation.
A principal duty of the low temperature laboratory is to
maintain the standards for the measurement of low tem-
peratures which are becoming increasingly important to
industry. Temperatures as low as 310 degrees below zero
Fahrenheit are regularly used in some of our basic indus-
tries. At present, the laboratory is engaged in extending
this nation's standards of temperature measurements to
— 440 degrees Fahrenheit.
In 1931, Dr. Urey, then a 38-year-old Columbia Univer-
sity professor who was interested in the theory as well as
the practical side of research, wrote an article for the Jour-
nal of the American Chemical Society in which he postu-
lated the possibility of a hydrogen molecule which had
a weight double that of the ordinary gas. Anxious to prove,
if possible, that his theory was correct, it was natural for
him to write to Dr. Brickwedde asking for the help of the
Bureau of Standards' low temperature laboratory.
The trio of scientists decided that if there really was a
heavy hydrogen it probably would be the last bit to boil
off when the gas had been liquefied and then allowed to
vaporize. The low temperature equipment of the bureau
was dismantled at the time and it was October before the
tests could be run. Dr. Brickwedde performed a distilla-
tion of hydrogen at the necessary low temperature.
It was a laborious process because of the difficulty in con-
trolling such low temperatures when a jump of several
degrees, like a magician's trick, will send the entire liquid
vanishing into gas. Eventually the temperature was regu-
lated and the gas slowly escaped leaving a tiny residue
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
298
which should, if the theory was correct, contain the higher
concentration of heavy hydrogen.
The precious liquid was sealed in a glass flask and sent
to the Columbia laboratories. Dr. Urey and Dr. Murphy
tested the mixture for heavy hydrogen. They knew that if
it actually was present it would cast fine, shadowy lines in
the spectrum of the light produced when an electrical
discharge was passed through a glass tube filled with the
gas they had received from Washington. Try as they
might, the Columbia experimentors could not locate the
tell-tale lines. The tests had failed.
Was it possible that the theory was wrong? Or had the
method for distilling been at fault?
The trio worked for several weeks on new ways to
check their research and hit upon the idea of performing
the distillation at still lower temperatures. This, they knew,
would tend to spread the differences in the volatility of
ordinary hydrogen and heavy hydrogen. The temperature
was lowered by reducing the pressure in the distillation
apparatus but the difficulty was to control the pressure
without at the same time allowing air to leak into the
flask. Dr. Brickwedde solved the problem by a compli-
cated equipment and another flask which was believed to
contain heavy hydrogen was sent to New York for study.
Would it contain heavy hydrogen or was this experiment
doomed to fail, too?
The Columbia pair found the faint "flags" on a photo-
graphic plate. The flask contained heavy hydrogen.
Jubilantly they advised their colleague in Washington. To
prove their results, two other flasks were distilled under
low pressures and they too showed the faint lines of heavy
hydrogen. The experiment had been double checked.
AT THE 1931 CHRISTMAS MEETING OF THE AMERICAN CHEM-
ical Society in New Orleans, a paper was presented an-
nouncing the discovery of heavy hydrogen. The phrase of
"Urey, Brickwedde and Murphy" soon became known to
scientists throughout the world. A new scientific tool had
been found, but it was not until compounds of heavy hy-
drogen had been subjected to biological, physical and
chemical tests that the full implications of the discovery
were learned. By right of discovery, the trio christened
their new substance of heavy hydrogen as deuterium.
Dr. Brickwedde, who speaks in a subdued, unemotional
tone, explains that the trio thought little of the social
implications of their work as they labored over flasks six
years ago. They knew their success would be a step for-
ward in understanding materials. The social aspects were
developed later.
Dr. Brickwedde and his associates at the Bureau of
Standards now are trying to find out why the weight dif-
ferences which distinguish hydrogen from deuterium
should make such an unexpectedly large variety in proper-
ties. They are comparing the properties of hydrogen com-
pounds with their corresponding deuterium twins and
then seeking a theory that will explain the observed differ-
ences.
If they succeed, science will gain a better understanding
of one of the reasons why different substances have dif-
fering boiling and freezing points. The implication of this
work, like most investigations with heavy hydrogen, ex-
tend to all matter. In this way, the laboratory worker con-
tributes to the general store of knowledge from which
others may draw to advance our health, our standard of
living and our general well being.
(In answering advertisements
Old A
Social Seen
By THOMAS L. NORTON
H*r». for th* firtt tiff*. '» in *<Uqu*U diiciH»a« of ttw old-«o. pr
r.i.oni of Hw SOCIAL SECURITY ACT TKcH ttttiont of th* «t m.or
difficult •conomic *nd politic*! probUmi which muit b« field .1 -« •
r*l -irk oU •• iucew.(ul.
Dr Norton •i*m>Mi not only th« lit nation confronting the ,
bul «lto ttw ponton of ioc*ty n t ohol*. o( th* implor*r. ind of th«
ptnon b*n*fit*d by ttw Uv
Dr Norton it • r«og«i«d iuthority on tt.it lubJKt. Mil obl*rv<tio«|
<ndi»t« th» direction which rtvineni of trw Uw mutt <*b«.
Those Who NEED This Book-
Economists
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Editors
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ON SALE AT YOUR BOOK STORE
FOSTER 6- STEWART
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HANDBOOK ON SOCIAL WORK
ENGINEERING
By June Purcell Guild and Arthur Alden Guild
This book about the study of social problems and
money-raising, written by two experienced social
workers, can be understood by laymen and they are
able to apply the principles outlined to their own
local problems. Agency board members join
professional social workers in proclaiming Social
Work Engineering as something new in the field
of social organization and financial support, prac-
tical, readable, authoritative.
£1.50 prepaid from THE SURVEY GRAPHIC
A Treatise and Casebook for Court Workers, Pro-
bation Officers and Other Child Welfare Workers
Social Treatment
In Probation
and Delinquency
By PAULINE V. YOUNG, Ph.D.
The University of Southern California
McGRAW-HiLL PUBLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY — $4.00
Considers the problem of juvenile delinquency and probation from a so-
ciological, psychological, psychiatric, and social case work standpoint.
Stresses the "how-to-do-it" from the point of view of every agency
discussed.
Gives a thorough discussion of the utilization of community resources
such as religion, the school, recreational facilities, etc., in the work of
unadjusted youth and parents.
Provides, for the first time, material and examples of social case treatment
of the family group.
SEND THIS McG RAW-HILL ON-APPROVAL COUPON
McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 330 W. 42nd St., N. Y. C.
Send me Young's Social Treatment in Probation and Delinquency
for 10 days' examination on approval. In 10 days I will send $4.00,
plus a few cents for postage or return book postpaid. (We pay postage
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WCTKBCCK
i TRAVEL VENTURES)
of Distinction
Stimulating experiences in foreign lands, not just tours. South
America with Harry Franck, famous author and vagabond traveler;
Brewer Eddy Survey Tour of Europe; Mediterranean Tour in the
Wake of History; (Augustan Pilgrimage and Cruise) led by Dr.
R. V. D. Magoffin. Dr. David Robinson and Dr. Louis E. Lord;
Oriental Seminar with Egbert M. Hayes; Russia with Professor
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, Professor J. Frank Copeland
and Brewer Eddy; British Isles by private motor with Mrs.
William M. Barber; Scandinavia and Central Europe with Royal
Bailey Farnum; Alaska Cruise with Dr. John B. May; Grand
Tour of Europe with Mrs. Helen Jackson Beale; European Art
Schools under the direction of Raymond P. Ensign and El ma
Pratt; Paris World's Fair and Art Congress Tours; also Corona-
tion Tour.
Send for thirty-two page booklet E
WILLIAM M. BARBER
BABSON PARK MASSACHUSETTS
A SUMMER HOLIDAY TO
GREECE
ALBANIA
ITALY
Visiting unusual places in the Aegean Sea, Adriatic and the
Mediterranean.
Perionally conducted by Mr. Elliot Taylor of the Near East
Foundation.
SPRING AND SUMMER VACATION TRIPS—
Florida Bermuda Nova Scotia
California West Indies Great Lakes
Descriptive folder on request
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T,
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Specializing in
FREIGHTER VOYAGES and CARGO LINER CRUISES
Booklet (No. 2) of Voyages Up to 50 Day«, on
request, 44 Beaver St., N. Y. C. BO. 9-8850.
A European Study Tour to Investigate
HOUSING AND CITY PLANNING
in England — Norway — Sweden — Holland — Belgium —
France.
Leaders — Dr. Carol Aronovici — Professor Dorothy Schaffter.
7 weeks — Sails on Queen Mary July 28.
POCONO STUBY TOURS
945 Fifth Avenue New York
M EXI CO . . . 30 DAYS *
Comprehensive Itinerary, Limited Groups
24 Full Days in Mexico
SPECIALISTS IN MEXICAN THAI EL
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Brochure on request.
220 West 42nd Street, New York Wisconsin 7-2929
•Individual and limited time tours arranged.
Seven Countries by Motor — Sixty-two Days from #497.00
Tours to Scandinavian Countries
Cruises to North Cape, West Indies, Mediterranean,
Round the World
Complete information on request
Baxter Travel Service, Inc.
522 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Summer Courses Abroad
SUMMER SESSIONS OFFERED BY EUROPEAN EDUCATIONAL INSTI-
tutions are becoming increasingly popular with Americans
and opportunities for combining study with a trip abroad are
available in almost every country.
July and August are the usual months in which these
courses are held, the length varying from one week to four
months. No credits are given as a rule, nor are entrance or
final examinations held.
Taking such a course is less expensive than continued travel,
and affords intellectual stimulation and an opportunity to
become better acquainted with the language and people of a
country. A useful booklet, Holiday Courses in Europe, giving
complete information on summer courses offered in European
countries, is published by the International Institute of Intel-
lectual Cooperation, Columbia University Press. (Price 50
cents.) The booklet contains an indexed list of 148 courses,
organized in eighteen different countries, covering languages
and literatures, history, geography, anthropology, art and
archeology, music, theater, physical culture, dance, education
and physiology, philosophy and religion, the exact sciences
and the social sciences, medicine, law, business, librarianship,
technology, journalism. . . .
Chinese Language Summer School
SOCIOLOGISTS, ECONOMISTS, AND OTHERS DESIRING TO ACQUIRE A
knowledge of the Chinese language, may find an opportunity
for study at a Chinese Language Summer School to be held in
July and August at the University of Michigan. Only gradu-
ate students and professional people whose work will defi-
nitely be assisted by a knowledge of Chinese will be admitted.
The course is to be given by Professor Kennedy of Yale Uni-
versity, assisted by Mr. Chi Pei Sha of the University of Cali-
fornia. A few scholarships are available.
Vagabond Cruises
THE GROWTH IN POPULARITY OF THE FREIGHTER CRUISE IS ONE
of the highlights in ocean travel. This leisurely method of see-
ing the world appeals to various types — to globe trotters seek-
ing new sights, to those seeking health, to those to whom the
unconventional appeals in preference to de luxe travel, and to
those whose limited budgets would make it impossible other-
wise to see unfamiliar lands and sights.
Federal Tourist Bureau — U.S.A.
AND NOW, AT LONG LAST, WE ARE TO HAVE A UNITED STATES
Tourist Information Office, created by Harold L. Ickes, Sec-
retary of the Interior, with Nelson A. Loomis, associate recre-
ational planner in the National Park Service, as director.
According to the newly organized federal bureau, twenty-
eight of the forty-eight states have organized publicity bureaus
and issue travel literature of their states.
Special Tours
MANY INTERESTING TOURS, UNDER SPECIAL LEADERSHIP, WILL
wend their way to foreign countries during the summer
months. Space forbids a listing but the Travel Department
will gladly give any information at its command to interested
readers.
( Travel Books fill be featured in this department for June)
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
300
Happy Ending
by MARION DUNCKEL COTA
As A WPA FAMILY, EXISTING, ALL TOLD, ON $16 A WEEK, WE
had come as strangers to the most dilapidated house on the
street. All that our neighbors knew about us was that we
were broke. We could take no real part in civic activity, con-
tribute nothing to local causes. Only the postman came to
our door.
When my husband finally got a job again, his new com-
pany told him to report for work the next day. When they
saw him without his overcoat, they told him that he must
wear trousers that matched his coat, as his coat looked funny
with the ones he had on. His answer was that the coat would
look even funnier without them, as they were the only
trousers he had.
So he reported for work two hundred miles away, and
left us behind "in hock," while his first pay checks went
to restore his personal appearance to that of the traditional
gentleman. When, as a brisk active man, he returned to plan
our moving, our frank stares embarrassed him, made him
feel that his new clothes were a costume of some kind.
Quickly and surely he sketched our new life for us, told
us what it would be like. There would be sufficient salary
to cover living expenses. Profits would come at the end of
the year as a percentage of work done. For himself he would
at all times have expense money in his pocket for traveling
and business purposes. He had taken a house at a rental
higher than planned, as he felt the necessity of abruptly
jerking our standard of living from out the depths in which
it had slumped. We listened, open mouthed, to his tales of
pleasant living, of people who had time and inclination to be
agreeable.
His eagerness to return to the new life startled me. What
if he found it so satisfying that he no longer needed me as
he had in the bad days. ... I was ready and anxious to join
him, but now it was so near the mid-term exams in school,
that I felt I must be sensible and wait for the children to
finish their terms before changing their schools.
But my thoughts had gone on to the new house. I went
from cellar to attic in the old one, deciding what things to
take, and what to discard. I wanted to take along as few re-
minders of our depression days as was practicable. Some of the
old second hand chairs had disintegrated as completely as
the one boss shay. I actually had them on the rubbish heap
when I recalled that in the beginning of our money troubles
we had borrowed some on a chattel mortgage. Until the last
penny of that was paid, those chairs were not mine to dis-
pose of. So, after arranging with the mortgage people for
our transfer to another town, I carefully laid them away in
a packing box.
I was ready long before the time set to go. We had lived
here for three years, but, our small business affairs wound up,
there was practically no one to say goodbye to.
The furniture was to come over night by truck, and our
twelve-year old son, much to his delight, was to have the
nocturnal adventure of riding down with it. When the furni-
ture was loaded, the rest of us set out on foot for the railroad
station, heads high, conscious that all the street watched from
behind curtains. We had to wait sixteen minutes for our
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CONSULT YOUR TRAVEL AGENT
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545 Fifth Avenue, New York
360 North Michigan Ave., Chicago 756 South Broadway, Los Angeles
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
301
SPEAKERS OF NOTE
For Forums, Clubs, Universities, etc.
SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA
JULIEN BRYAN
MARY AGNES HAMILTON
KAREN MICHAELIS
MORRIS L ERNST
JOHN T. FLYNN
KLAUS MANN
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
HEINZ LIEPMANN
DR. LEWIS BROWNE
BARONESS UNGERN-STERNBERG
TONY SENDER
DR. RUTH GRUBER
BRUCE BLIVEN
DR. HENRY J. FRY
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD
DR. HENRY PRATT FAIRCHILD
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DR. S. L. JOSHI
NATHANIEL PEFFER
DR. KARL POLANYI
Send for complete list of 68 outstanding speakers.
Open dates, terms, Individual circulars on request.
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WILLIAM B. FEAKINS, INC.
500 Fifth Avenue New York
HOTEL PARKSIDE
NEW YORK
In Gramercy Park
The Parkside is one of New York's nicest hotels . . .
maintaining traditionally high standards and homelike
atmosphere. Directly facing Private Park.
SINGLE ROOMS FROM $2.00 DAILY
Attractive weekly and monthly rates
Moderate priced restaurant
A few minutes' walk to majority of the Welfare Coun-
cils, social agencies. . . . Convenient to all important
sections of the city. Write for Booklet S.
20TH STREET at IRVING PLACE
UNDER KNOTT MANAGEMENT
(In answering advertisements pl<
302
train at the station, the longest sixteen minutes of my life,
the old life ended, the new throbbing to begin.
ABROAD IN THE WORLD ONCE MORE, AFTER OUR LONG RETIRE-
ment, we felt timid. The day coach of the heavy express
train, with its individually upholstered seats and modern ap-
pointments, was much too grand. I had the feeling some one
would come through and ask what we were doing there.
We reached our new home late on a rainy evening. The
house was privately owned and vacated only the day before.
Fires had been kept going. Gas and light were connected.
Flooding the house with light, we explored it from coal bin
to skylight, immensely impressed with the fact that there
was actually hot water automatically on tap. Forgetting
we'd had no supper, we each had a long lazy hot tub to
wash away the last traces of our old life.
Before breakfast, the furniture arrived. Our boy, to his
disgust, had slept most of the way. His bicycle unloaded,
he was off to explore the neighborhood. By night he had
a "best friend," and a telegraph set up to communicate with
him during the short intervals that they were apart. His
comment when I tucked him in that night was, "Gee, this
is swell; seems like I'm visiting, and soon I'll have to go
home."
After breakfast, the woman next door, spic and span at
that early hour, stopped in on her way to market to see if
she might leave an order for me. A young man from the gas
company came to inspect my stove and heater, to see that
both were functioning safely and efficiently. Such solicitude
on the part of a gas company astounded me. My last en-
counter with one had resulted in long use of a kerosene stove
because I had mistakenly paid something on account instead
of the entire amount due. There followed a procession of
milkman, baker and laundryman, each with his little speech
of welcome.
A pleasant young hostess called to welcome us officially
to the city, bringing maps and information, inquiring into
our likes and dislikes, so that she might recommend suitable
services to us. She brought with her three shopping bags
filled with various items of local manufacture so that we
might familiarize ourselves with them, — a loaf of bread, a
quart of milk, a pound of bacon and of lard and so forth
finding their way to my empty shelves at the opportune
moment. A gracious older lady came to the door for flood
contributions, asking that I imagine myself in the position of
these victims, cold, hungry, their possessions gone. I shud-
dered. I could, all too well, and apologized for giving ^ her
so little.
This complete change of environment gave us an ideal
chance to draw up stringent new rules and regulations for
the family. We are starting a completely new life. What we
make of it is in our hands, so we must proceed warily.
Back of us are seventeen years of experience as a family unit,
and our memories. From these we must chart a new course.
We have no illusions, and, I hope, no bitterness. Our home,
that was for so long a detached refuge from the world out-
side, is now, once again, a part of this world, with all the
forces of world currents flowing through it.
Our daughter no longer feels conspicuous and out of step.
In the large city school, the other pupils do not even know
she is a newcomer. Because of her established study habits,
her instructors consider her scholarship material.
In our new home we have absolute quiet and complete
privacy. Once again it is possible to sustain thought. When
a new streamlined sedan was delivered to our door the name
of my husband's employer was on it. Once we would have
scorned riding in a car labeled "commercial." Now we are
proud to appear in it, for it is public announcement that
we have a job, that we are a part of a world.
(Written from her own experience, Mrs. Cola's article is a
sequel to We Were Only Brol(e for a Time, see Survey Graphic,
December, 1936.)
'ease mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
Mrs. Parrish
and the Justices
by FRIEDA S. MILLER
WITHIN A FEW DAYS FOLLOWING THE MINIMUM WAGE DECI-
sion by the U. S. Supreme Court, a number of states and the
District of Columbia had taken steps to further legislation of
the sort. Early in April the U. S. Department of Labor
called its minimum wage committee together to frame a
possible model law. So that Mrs. Elsie Parrish, the Wash-
ington chambermaid who was enriched by $216 by the
decision of the highest court may get her wish that her case
"will make things easier for other working women."
The press has carried much about the larger constitutional
bearings of this reversal of itself by the court as something
which may exert as profound an influence on the social his-
tory of this country as did the Dred Scott decision on its
political history. But what of the woman in the case, the hotel
interests that were behind this suit and others like it clear
across the country, the current effort to make the most of
her successful action?
MRS. PARRISH, WHO is FORTY-THREE YEARS OLD AND A GRAND-
mother, went to work as a chambermaid at the Cascadian
Hotel, Wenatchee, Wash., in 1933. When her job ended, the
hotel offered her $17 for the balance due for her services.
But she and her husband knew that a state board, acting
under the state minimum wage law for women, passed in
1913, had fixed $14.50 a week as the minimum pay for her
work. They sued in a local court for the difference of $216,
which they contended was due her under that scale. Mrs.
Parrish lost in the county court, but she appealed the case
to the Washington state supreme court, which upheld the law
and ordered payment. The West Coast Hotels Company car-
ried the case to the U. S. Supreme Court, and the State of
Washington intervened in defense of its law. The five-to-four
decision of the Supreme Court on March 29 upheld the
legality of minimum wage laws and ordered the hotel com-
pany to pay Mrs. Parrish the money due her, plus an addi-
tional sum for court costs.
Upon being informed of the decision, Mrs. Parrish, ac-
cording to an Associated Press dispatch, immediately thought
of the millions of wage earners who would benefit as a result
of her fight and said, with quiet simplicity, "I hope this deci-
sion will make it easier for other working women through-
out the country."
IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE THAT THE HOTEL INTERESTS HAVE
consistently appealed minimum wage legislation to the higher
courts, and in several instances have gone on record as op-
posing this type of legislation. The hotel association assisted
in financing the appeal of Tipaldo, the Brooklyn laundry
owner who ran afoul of the New York minimum wage law.
[See Survey Graphic for July 1936, page 412.] In the Wash-
ington case it was a hotel company which tested the law in
that state. Counsel for the Iowa Hotel Association openly
boasted, "In Iowa we have for twenty years fought the mini-
mum wage bills for women, and successfully defeated them."
The Hotel Association of Ohio assisted in the preparation of
the brief attacking the constitutionality of the New York
minimum wage law, and "inspired" the two cases brought
before the federal district court contesting the validity of the
Ohio law. The official organ of the association, the Service
Bulletin, thus expressed its stand on minimum wage enact-
(ln answering advertisements please
303
If all you want is a house
— we're sorry
But if you had a taste of country living during yout
youth and want more, with easy commuting to the City,
Nassau Shores is for you. Fine schools are here, and
fine companions for youngsters. They play to their
heart's content, as do their elders, at their own beach and
country clubs, complete and on the property.
In this unique new neighborhood are homes selected
by the American Society for Better Housing to illustrate
the best in architecture, construction and equipment.
Prices begin at $6,490. Nassau Shores is on the Merrick
Road in Long Island, !/2 m''e west °f Amityville.
HARMON NATIONAL
140 Nassau Street, New York BEekman 3-9260
Kindly mention the Survey Graphic
WHY NOT LIVE THE
GOOD LIFE?
* •
IN THIS HOUSE, ON THIS GROUND, YOU
CAN. Secluded atop a Westchester
hill, within easy express commuting
to Grand Central, it is an ideal coun-
Front view — rear wing not
showing try home, summer and winter. The
owners, with an itch for remodeling another farmhouse, are moving
up the road a mile. They would like to sell this place to a family
that would enjoy the swimming pool, the badminton court, the trees,
the view, the ski-ing (and even golf on the adjacent course of a
local club). o^^K Remodeled
galore. Four bed- rooms, two baths
and lavatory, «P- Badminton court with a view stairs. Good
storage attic.
Two-car garage; workshop with forge; between three and four
acres; large flower and vegetable gardens. Complete with copper
screens, storm windows and doors; oil-burner; unfailing artesian
water with automatic pump; paths; terraces; incinerator and
outdoor grill, this little country
estate is easy and economical to
maintain — a bargain at present
price of $17,000. The owners
will finance responsible purchaser.
For details of down-payment, lo-
cation and inspection, write VW,
Survey Graphic, 112 East 19th
Street, New York City. The pool just off rear terrace
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
§imi minium uiiiiiiiiiiiin iiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiuiiiuiii IINIIIIIIIIIIIIIIUIIIII i img
I HOW SMALL LOANS (
1 FOSTER FAMILY FINANCIAL (
I RECONSTRUCTION |
imiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniii iiNiiiiniiniiiinini iiiiiiiiiniuil
• Social workers not intimately
acquainted with the small loan
business frequently fail to appre-
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building family financial health.
Nearly cvcrv family who borrows
at Household Finance does so to
meet an emergency or prevent a
financial crisis. In the majority of
cases a loan is needed to pay over-
due bills— to rescue a family threat-
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Household Finance advances
sufficient cash to pay up all out-
standing indebtedness and return
the family to solvency. Repayment
of the loan in monthly installments
requires only a small percent of cur-
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nearly normal purchasing power to
the family — keeps it going as a self-
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But a loan by itself serves only
as a first aid measure. To prevent
future financial crises the familv
should learn and practice monev
management. So Household shows
borrowers how to budget their ex-
penditures— how to stop monev
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So every day Household Finance
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Social workers will be interested
in the practical material Household
Finance has prepared to facilitate
this work of family financial recon-
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may assist your clients. They cost
very little. Some arc free. You arc
invited to check the titles below
that interest you and mail the
coupon.
HOUSEHOLD FINANCE
CORPORATION and Subsidiaries
Headquarters: 919 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago
. . . on* of the leading family finance organizations, with 223 offices in 145 cities
NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINIIillllllllfflflllU
ORDER BLANK — EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE
Published by
BURR BLACKBURN HOUSEHOLD FINANCE BERNICE DODGE
Research Director CORPORATION Home Economist
"DOCTOR OF FAMILY FINANCES"
Research Dept., SG-5, 919 North Michigan Avenue. Chicago, Illinoit
Check the booklets you want. They will be sent promptly, ttoslpaid.
-FREE BULLETINS-
D Money management for Home-
holds, the budget book.
Marrying on a Small Income, Finan-
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"Let the Women Do the Vl'ork," I — I Stretching the Food Dollar, full
an amusing but convincing argu- I — I of ideas on how to save money on
ment for making the wife business
manager of the home.
food bills; presents a pattern for safe
food economy.
D Credit for Consumers — Installment credit and small loan agencies
and how to use them; published by Thi Public Affairs Committtt.
-BETTER BUYMANSHIP-
The titles of the series to date are listed below. The price of these booklets is two
for five cents, or three cents each.
A sample copy of the latest number in this series may be secured fret by calling at
any Household Finance office.
D Poultry, Eggs and Fish G Kitchen Utensils
D Sheets, Blankets, Table LJ Furs
Linen and Towels
Wool Clothing
D Fruits and Vegetables, U Floor Coverings
Fresh and Canned
D Shoes and Stockings
D Silks and Rayons
D Meat
Dairy Products
D Cosmetics
D Gasoline and Oil
Enclosed find $
NAME ..
ADDRESS
D ElectricVacuumCleaners 3 Gloves
....in stamps; please send booklets checked to
D Children's Playthings and
Books
G Soap and other Cleansing
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Q Automobile Tires
1 Dinnerware
J Household Refrigerators
-- Home Heating
CITY
STATE
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
304
ment a year ago: "Our Association has been in there pitching
for its member hotels. It hasn't left a stone unturned to pre-
vent this government regulation being inflicted on hotels."
Labor standards of hotels and restaurants are notoriously low,
as was brought out in an investigation under the New York
minimum wage law.
The Supreme Court, by the decision in the Washington
case has approved a minimum wage law based on cost of
living, and that is the line being taken in writing a new
minimum wage law for New York State. The bill now before
the legislature provides that, "It is the declared policy of
the State of New York that women and minors employed in
any occupation should receive wages sufficient to provide
adequate maintenance and to protect their health."
DEFINITE ACTION HAS RECENTLY BEEN TAKEN BY OTHER STATES
and the District of Columbia on behalf of minimum wage
legislation. In Wisconsin a bill to repeal the oppressive
wage provision and to restore the cost of living basis was
submitted to the state legislature. Minnesota amended its
law to include girls between eighteen and twenty-one, and
asked its attorney general for a ruling on the status of the old
cost of living minimum wage law which was declared un-
constitutional by an attorney general of the state in 1925.
The Utah legislature appropriated $20,000 for the adminis-
tration of the state minimum wage law. Nevada enacted a
minimum wage law providing a wage of $18 and a forty-
eight-hour week for women. The governor of Massachusetts
submitted a special message to the legislature recommending
amendments to strengthen the existing minimum wage bill.
A bill was submitted in the New Jersey legislature asking for
an appropriation of $50,000 for a minimum wage division in
the Department of Labor. And in Washington, D. C., the
U. S. attorney general ruled that the District of Columbia
minimum wage law, invalidated in 1923, was reinstated by
the recent decision. Minimum wage bills have been intro-
duced in the legislature of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and
South Carolina.
SIXTEEN STATES NOW HAVE MINIMUM WAGE LAWS. A NUMBER
of states have continued to operate under minimum wage
laws enacted before the adverse decision in the Adkins case
in 1923. Other states have enacted minimum wage laws
since 1923. In Illinois directory orders have been issued for
three industries and a wage board is being formed for. the
garment industry. In Massachusetts directory orders have
been issued for ten industries. Directory orders have fixed
minimum wages for three industries in New Hampshire, and
the commissioner has accepted a wage board report for
hosiery and knit goods. Ohio has mandatory orders for three
industries, and a hotel and restaurant mandatory order will
go into effect May 1, 1937. In Rhode Island there is an
order for the jewelry industry, and in Connecticut an order
has been issued for homeworkers in the lace industry.
That in brief is the picture of minimum wage legislation
in the various states at the moment. In the short period that
has elapsed since the decision we have seen such stirrings
for this type of legislation that I believe most of the states,
if not all, will make minimum wage laws an integral part
of our modern society.
As Chief Justice Hughes said in his majority opinion,
"Liberty in each of its phases has its history and connotation.
But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization
which requires the protection of law against the evils which
menace the health, safety, morals and welfare of the people."
"I'm not sure I understand all the things but I'm glad
its all over," said Mrs. Parrish when the decision was an-
nounced. Health and safety and a living wage were things
she did understand. Perhaps she had in mind the legal
ramifications of the minority decision.
EMPLOYERS AND THE SPY BUSINESS
(Continued from page 266)
experienced strike breakers available for "guard duty." Many
others are recruited from well-known hangouts — "a certain
place" at 42nd Street and Broadway in New York, around
the Reading Depot in Philadelphia, near Randolph Street in
Chicago's Loop.
Like "Chowder Head" Cohen, men with "records" are
often drawn from the underworld for strike breaking "jobs."
Mickey Martel, a character well known to the police, co-
operated in supplying "guards" for the Pioneer Paper Stock
Co. of Philadelphia during a strike. The assistant city solicitor
in charge of labor relations, testifying before the committee
produced the police department records of thirty of these
strikebreakers, with arrests on numerous charges, including
automobile theft, robbery by holdup, burglary, carrying con-
cealed weapons, rape, assault and battery, possession of
narcotic drugs. Of thirteen strikebreakers whom Railway
Audit and Inspection put into the general materials strike in
St. Louis in 1932, seven were "wanted" by police of other
cities on serious charges. E. J. McDade, "investigator" for
Railway Audit and Inspection was one of 700 guards "brought
in" by the Wisconsin Light and Power during "trouble" at its
Milwaukee plant in 1934. These "guards" were recruited in
Chicago and New York, and McDade estimated that "about
20 percent" had police records.
In a decision in the case growing out of the recent Rem-
ington Rand strikes, the National Labor Relations Board, on
the basis of facts found after extensive investigation and set
forth in its opinion, summarized the methods of strike-
breakers hired from the BergofJ, Burns and Foster agencies.
The board held that the attitude of the company and the
president, James H. Rand, Jr., "exhibited a callous, imper-
turbable disregard of the rights of its employes that is
medieval in its assumption of power over the lives of men and
shocking in its concept of the status of the modern industrial
worker."
Some industrial concerns, like Ford, have their private
secret service; some combine to the same end. The National
Metal Trades Association is such an organization, serving 952
plants in the East and Middlewest, including among its
members Pratt and Whitney Aircraft, Delco Remy, Continental
Can, American Toolworks, Allis-Chalmers, Otis Elevator,
Wright Aeronautical Co., Worthington Pump and Machinery.
The association is something of an anomaly — a closed shop
organized to maintain the open shop. "So you have an
organization which has all the possibilities of collective action
on the part of the employers?" Senator Thomas asked Homer
D. Sayre, commissioner of the National Metal Trades Asso-
ciation. "Yes," Mr. Sayre replied, "I presume that is correct,
in the preservation of the open shop." The association stands
ready to supply its members with "special contract opera-
tives," strike breakers and guards. From membership dues,
assessed at the rate of 20 cents a month for each plant
employe, the association has accumulated a "war chest"
of $214,928, invested in tax-free bonds, on which it can draw
when a member plant becomes involved in an "approved"
strike or lockout.
The association supplies "a clearing house of information"
and other services to its members. For instance; Mr. Sayre
told of the foremanship training the organization has carried
on for some years. The association has developed a course of
fifty-two lessons, which has been "effective in establishing co-
operation between employer and employe. . . . We want
a foreman trained so he is going to be fair . . . fair in the
sense of the open shop, fair for the industrial plant, fair in
his dealings with his men." The association also has "a sec-
(Continued on page 306)
(In answering advertisements please
305
Antosha meets her beau
on the corner
PAPA KOWALSKI rages— Mamma Kowalski
pleads — but Antosha won't let her new beau
call! "Not in this dirty house!" she cries, and
flaunts out.
It isn't Mrs. Kowalski's fault. She tries to keep
things neat — but two hands can't do everything!
A good way to help Antosha — and all the
Kowalski's — is to show Mamma Kowalski how to
get more cleaning done with less effort. And that's
where Fels-Naptha Soap is well worth suggesting.
For Fels-Naptha's richer, golden soap and plenty of
naptha loosen dirt quicker — even in cool water.
Write Fels & Co., Philadelphia, Pa. for a sam-
ple bar of Fels-Naptha, mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CtEAN NAPTHA ODOR
PLANNING A TRIP?
Look over the interesting travel sug-
gestions on pages 300-301 of this issue.
Delving for words
can sometimes be as hard a labor as digging ditches. For
the Executive or Staff, pressed with the immediate tasks of
social service, it is often especially tedious as well.
If you are puzzled about the phrasing or revision, style or
plan or format, of your Letter, Leaflet, Bulletin, Report,
Story
let me help you.
The written interpretation of social needs is my pleasure
and my business.
MYRTLE de VAUX HOWARD
247 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts
Tel. — Commonwealth 4077
USED BOOKS
40% Off Regular Price
for books displayed by our field workers. In
good condition, but without that new look)
For complete list write
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC.
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112 E. 19th Street New York. N. Y.
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Survey Graphic — Monthly — $3.00
Survey Associates, Inc., 112 East 19th St., New York
Name Address 5-1-37
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
tion for the education of apprentices," Mr. Sayre testified,
collects and passes on information about employe representa-
tive plans [company unions], and "calls attention to legis-
lation that we feel is not sound from our point of view and
asks our members to communicate with their Congressmen,
express their views and opinions."
No company which has a union agreement is eligible for
membership in the association. Any member firm which
negotiates a strike settlement or enters into a union agreement
"contrary to the principles of the association" is "got rid of."
According to the testimony of metal trades employes and
union officials, the N.M.T.A. has developed to high efficiency
the "black list," one of the oldest methods used by manage-
ment to "break the union." If a worker is discharged by a
member of the association because of his union activity, his
name is circulated among the other members as a "trouble
maker." No member will employ him, and the ban becomes
one of the crudest weapons used in industrial warfare.
According to the testimony he may be virtually barred from
his trade. Thus a member of the International Association of
Machinists, who testified at Washington, told how the presi-
dent of the local union was fired by Pratt and Whitney Air-
craft: "He is one of the best grinder hands that I ever came
across. This man is now driving a bakery wagon because he
is black-listed and cannot get a job as a machinist."
THERE is A LARGE TRAFFIC IN TEAR AND SICKENING GASES,
machine guns, and ammunition to arm private guards and
strike breakers engaged in industrial conflict. The combined
sale of tear and sickening gas by the Lake Erie Chemical Co.,
the Federal Laboratories, and the Manville Manufacturing Co.
from 1933 to 1937 amounted to $606,572.15. Gross sales of the
Lake Erie Chemical Co., income tax returns show, increased
from $149,941.58 in 1932 to $318,879.17 in 1934. While these
materials are sold to police departments and sheriffs, indus-
trial concerns and detective agencies are important customers.
Among the firms recently supplied with gas and gas equip-
ment, the Lake Erie's records showed Firestone Tire, Good-
year Tire and Rubber, Electric Auto-Lite, Youngstown Sheet
and Tube Co., Columbia Metal Stamping Co. Federal Lab-
oratories, Inc., according to its own invoices and to reports
of the Senate Munitions Committee made large shipments
of its products between 1933 and 1936 to Jones and Laughlin
Steel Corporation, American Sheet and Tin Plate Co., Frick
Coal and Coke Co., Carnegie Steel Co., Bethlehem Steel Co.,
Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Sales of gas and munitions to
detective concerns are often concealed by dummy accounts,
or by shipment to peace officers of "goods" billed to others.
A Detroit salesman of the Erie Chemical Company wrote the
home office in 1933, ordering a shipment of clubs, guns and
shells to the chief of police in Flint, instructing the company:
"Do not bill the City of Flint for this material. Instead bill
to the Manufacturers' Association of Flint, 901 Industrial
Bank Building. For your information only, I have reason to
believe this material is for the Chevrolet Motor Co. . . ."
In correspondence recommending their products, the Man-
ville Company stated that:
"Our equipment was used to break up the strike of the Ohio
Rubber Co. at Willoughby, Ohio, and to break up the strike
of the gear plant at Toledo, Ohio; was used at the Eaton Axle
plant at Cleveland; at the Real Silk Hosiery Co. at Indianap-
olis; and at a great many small places. In each of the above
cases the equipment was used by the detective agencies
brought in."
Testimony as to the sales of machine guns, gas and other
implements of industrial warfare showed, just as did testi-
mony before the earlier Senate Munitions Committee, that
munitions makers welcome conflict. Thus a letter from a
Lake Erie Chemical salesman to his home office read: "I am
doing a lot of missionary work in anticipation of a strike this
spring and I'm in a position to send in some good orders, if
it will only mature. Wish a hell of a strike would get under
way." Another salesman for the same concern reported to
his firm on a meeting of national officials of the United
Textile Workers at Providence, R. I., and added, "I hope
that this strike develops and matures and that it will be a
damn bad one, we need the money."
A pin map made by the Senate committee's staff showed
that munitions are at hand in every important industrial
community in the country, with heavy concentrations in the
rubber, auto and steel towns. Lists of known purchasers
of such supplies contain the names of many clients of espion-
age and strike breaking agencies.
THE SENATE COMMITTEE HAS DEALT WITH PRACTICES RESORTED
to by anti-union employers, notably in the mass production
and machine industries and made them a matter of record.
Thus the evidence, known to be incomplete, shows that in
eighteen months ending July 31, 1936, General Motors paid
$839,764.41 to detective agencies for labor espionage. The
investigation is by no means finished but the work of ex-
posure has had bearings on current developments which it is
perhaps too early to judge. In the course of the February
hearings, Harry W. Anderson, labor relations director for
General Motors, stated that he had been opposed to labor
espionage "for a long time," and that "this investigation
gave us the opportunity to wipe it out." While the hearings
have been in process, have come the CIO strikes in the auto
industry and, through Governor Murphy, General Motors and
Chrysler have made collective bargains with the United Auto
Workers of America.
But the evidence the committee has so far accumulated
raises the question whether the evils of labor espionage and
strike breaking can be left entirely to voluntary reform on the
part of employers who have used them. Some partial reme-
dies have been indicated by the testimony. Thus it has
been brought out that espionage does not flourish in Wis-
consin, where a state law requires detective agencies to register
the names and addresses of their operatives. The Byrnes law,
passed by Congress last June after the preliminary hearings,
makes it a felony to transport guards across state lines with
intent to interfere with peaceful picketing. This law seems
to have hindered "professional" strike breaking to some
extent, though several agencies are reported to have circum-
vented it by having "guards" leave trains or buses and walk
from one state to another, or by having them enroll for
"guard duty" only after they reach the scene of the strike.
The evidence shows that, as the international arms traf-
fic uses war and rumors of war to boom sales, so the sales-
men of "industrial service," gas and "riot supplies" use in-
dustrial conflict to "build up business" and increase profits.
Similarly, the spy business itself is a parasitic industry, de-
pendent upon unwholesome industrial relations, stimulated by
industrial strife. The testimony shows too how far many of
the employer patrons go in their use of labor espionage and
strike breakers' to invade labor's "right to organize and bar-
gain collectively." It is to be hoped that the Senate inquiry
will continue until the facts about these practices are suffi-
ciently well known to shape legislation to end them, and to
give such laws the enforcing support of informed public opin-
ion. For clearly there can be no lasting industrial peace in this
country while "Chowder Head" Cohen and Mr. Pinkerton,
their associates and competitors can carry on with hundreds
of employers a lucrative traffic in espionage, betrayal and bit-
ter conflict.
SIT-DOWN STRIKES
The newest and most controversial of labor tactics will be inter-
preted and appraised in an early issue of Survey Graphic by the
ranking industrial expert among Washington correspondents,
Louis Stark of the New York Times.
306
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State experience. 7437 Survey.
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lescent problems. State full qualifications in
letter. 7434 Survey.
SITUATIONS WANTED
American Negro Ph.D. (Jan., 1937) University
of Dijon, France : college teaching experience ;
wants directorship of boys' work or princi-
palship of an agricultural school in the
Americas or Africa. 7408 Survey.
Worker with long successful experience in settle-
ment boys work available June or September.
Keen understanding of boys. Highest refer-
ences. 7414 Survey.
DIRECTOR OF BOYS' INSTITUTION desires
change of position beginning September. Ex-
perience in group work, community centre
activities, camping and case work. College
graduate, social work training. Progressive
education viewpoint. 7422 Survey.
Case Worker (Woman), experienced, desires
opening with social organizations. Preferably
New York City or vicinity. 7435 Survey.
Woman, 2 years graduate study at school of
social work, experience as case supervisor in
family welfare and public welfare, 2 years
in social research, wishes position in either
case work, research or teaching. Salary and
position quite secondary to opportunity for
advance as prove adequate. 7436 Survey.
MATRON— DIETITIAN— 12 years' experience
wishes position Jewish Institution. Excellent
references. 7413 Survey.
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-littteratiij of
of
AtmtintHtrattmt
SUMMER QUARTER, 1937
First term, June 16 • July 21
Second term, July 22-August 27
Academic Year 1937-38
Begins October 1
Announcements on Request
THE SOCIAL SERVICE REVIEW
Edited by GRACE ABBOTT
A Professional Quarterly for Social Workers
SIMMONS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Social Research
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
A catalog will be sent on request
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months* course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the caae study method, leads to tha
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from a
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalog** and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
SUMMER QUARTER— TERM B
July 26 — August 31
This quarter is planned for professional social
workers who wish to study during the summer. In
Term B the School can enroll a larger number of
students for courses than in other quarters of the
year. Among the courses to be offered are the
following:
Probation and Parole
Juvenile Delinquency
Children in Substitute Paren-
tal Care
Public Relief Administration
Conflict and Integration in the
Social Process
Current Concepts and Problems
in Case Work
William McKerrow
William McKerrow
Ethel Taylor
Arthur Dunham
E. C. Lindeman
Grace Marcus
For special summer catalogue write the Registrar.
122 EAST 22ND STREET
New York N. Y.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
Graduate Professional Training and Senior College Pre-
Vocational Courses in preparation for Social Work in Public
Service and in Private Agencies.
Particular emphasis on the Training of Men for Work among
Delinquents and other types of Public Service.
Courses leading to the degrees of Bachelor and Master of
Science in Social Service and Doctor of Social Science.
Electives available in the University include over a hundred
and fifty credit hours on a graduate level which have vocational
value.
Addntt
84 Exeter Street
DIVISION OF SOCIAL WORK
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Boston
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
SUMMER SESSION
1937
JUNE 21 - AUGUST 14
The following are among the Courses offered:
Dramatics and Personality Development
Recreational Therapy
Family Case Work
Psychiatry for Social Workers
Publicity for Social Work
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
Chicago Avenue Chicago, III.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
308
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
FOR JEWISH SOCIAL WORK
offers graduate professional curricula for
the acquisition of the necessary knowledge
and skills for social work, leading to the
Master's and Doctor's degrees.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SOCIAL
WORK AGENCIES
increasingly require such knowledge and
skill from candidates for positions.
April 30th is the last day for fil-
ing applications for fellowships.
For full information write to
DR. M. J. KARPF, Director
The
Graduate
School
For
Jewish
Social Work
71 West 47th Street, New York City
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Plan A The course leading to the Master's degree consist*
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
social agencies in various cities. This course ia
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session
and the first winter session, and receive the Mas-
ter's degree upon the completion of the require*
ments of two summer sessions and one winter
session of supervised case work. Limited to forty.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks is open to expe-
rienced social workers. A special course in case
work is offered by Miss Ruth Smalley. Limited to
thirty-five.
Plan D An advanced course of training in the supervision
and teaching of social case work, conducted by
Miss Bertha Capen Reynolds, Associate Director of
the School, and staff. Graduates of schools of social
work with two years' case work experience are
eligible for admission. The course consists of two
summer sessions at Smith College and, in con-
sultation with the School, a winter of supervision
and teaching during which the student may hold
a paid position in a social agency. Limited to
twenty-five.
Seminars of two weeks on the following topics are open to •
limited number of qualified persons :
1. Application of Mental Hygiene to Present-day
Problems in Case Work with Families. Miss
Grace Marcus and Dr. Evelyn Alpern. July
12-24.
2. Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case
Work. Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss
Beatrice H. Wajdyk. July 26-Auguat 7.
3. The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn
Jackson and Miss Mary Whitehead. August
9-21.
For further information writ* to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The Regular School offers two years of graduate professional training upon the completion of which
the degree, Master of Social Work, is conferred by the University of Pennsylvania. The curriculum
includes courses in
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
The Advanced Curriculum offers training beyond the two year course to graduates of accredited
schools of social work who have had successful professional experience. This curriculum includes
advanced technical courses in
Supervision and teaching of social case work
Psychological treatment of children
Social work administration
Applications JOT the 1937-1938 session should be filed by May 15. A bulletin will be sent upon request.
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SURVEY
JUNE 1937
GRAPHIC
1 A G A Z I N E OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
EACH FIGURE REPRESENTS A MILLION PEOPLE
PICTO»[AL STATISTICS, INC.
IMMIGRATION 1820-1930
Pearl Buck Discovers America
THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES AND THEIR PREJUDICES
Sit-Down Strikes
Who Will Pay the Piper?
LABOR'S NEW TACTIC: LOUIS STARK W. P. A. PARKS AND PLAYGROUNDS: ROBERT MOSES
Our Spiritual Maladies by Richard C. Cabot, M. D Saving the Coal Industry by H. O. Rogers
Hillman of the C.I.O. by Nathan Shaviro . . . Can the C.C.C. Blaze a New Trail? by Howard Rowland
30 CENTS A COPY
$3.00 A YEAR
Moby
Has TWO
New Dresses
JL WO dresses for less than her mother
used to pay for one. Mary's new ready-
made dresses, compared with those her
mother bought 20 years ago, are in better
style, have fast colors, and are chosen
from a far wider range of exciting new
fabrics.
Why can Mary have two new dresses today?
It is because of the amazing progress the
textile industry has made in the last two
decades. It is because research scientists
and engineers have worked to improve
processes and to give the public more for
its money. More goods for more people —
at less cost.
It is because General Electric engineers
and research scientists have contributed to
this progress. More than forty years ago,
they initiated the first use of electricity in
the textile industry. Today, every modern
loom has its individual electric drive,
and electric control which governs the
quality of the unrolling yards of fine, sleek
fabric. General Electric scientists have
perfected instruments to test and match
the colors, and to keep the weft straight
and true.
Electric equipment — much of it especially
designed by G-E engineers for textile
applications — increases production, pro-
tects expensive machines, prevents delay
and spoilage, lowers costs. In short,
General Electric engineers are in the
"efficiency business," and the economies
they help to effect enable millions of
American Marys and Helens and Ruths
to buy two new dresses where otherwise
they could buy only one.
G-E research has saved the public from ten to one hundred dollars for every
dollar it has earned for General Electric
GENERAL m. ELECTRIC
"I have never seen
among any peas-
antry of Europe
poverty so abject
as that which ex-
ists from Arkansas
on to the East
Coast." — Secretary
Wallace.
Human Erosion in
America: (Above) A
Highlander Folk
School neighbor with
baby doctors say is
dying of starvation.
Pellagra, a disease of
starvation, is eight
times more prevalent
in South than in rest
of nation. (Center)
Classless shack of
type in which hun-
dreds of thousands of
Southerners live and
(below) Ty pi cal
Southern mountain
children, descendants
of early American
pioneers. Organiza-
tion of their fathers
into strong unions will
mean a better life for
these children.
WILL YOU HELP
LABOR COLLEGES
In Fight To Raise
Living Standards
Of The South?
HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
Monteagle, Tennessee
(Founded 1930)
Bloody I hnhm has drama.
It makes the headlines.
But all through the South
a less spectacular mass
tragedy involving millions
of men, women and chil-
dren is being enacted.
Low wages, long hours and
the lethargy born of gen-
erations of malnutrition
and misery have eased the
way for establishment of a
system of feudalism and
peonage entirely alien to
the American standard of
life.
Organization of workers in
industry and agriculture is
the first step in the fight
to end this system. How
can it be done with a
minimum of strife?
Trained Southern leaders
are needed — leaders who
know their people, and
against whom the prejudice
of sectionalism cannot be
used . . . leaders intelligent
in their approach . . . lead-
ers who know how to coun-
ter the vicious class and
racial hatred techniques
COMMONWEALTH COLLEGE
Mena, Arkansas
(Founded 1925)
long used to keep the
workers "in their place.''
To train such leaders the
Southern Resident Labor
Colleges have been estab-
lished. These two schools
draw students from the
farms, the Kentucky-Ten-
nessee mining areas, the
textile mills, the Birming-
ham steel center, Florida
citrus fields — and return
them to their own people
prepared to lead the fight
for a better life.
Both faculty and students
are showing heroism and
self -sacrifice in the fight to
end unconscionable exploi-
tation of human beings in
factory and on tenant
farm. Faculties work with-
out pay and with students
perform all necessary man-
ual work. They carry on in
face of threats and actual
violence. Every dollar is
stretched to its utmost
effectiveness.
Help Southerners win a square
deal for Southerners!
Every dollar counts! Will you
send a contribution today?
SOUTHERN RESIDENT LABOR COLLEGES
18 East 48th Street, New York City, N. Y.
Enclosed find dollars for Southern
Resident Labor Colleges.
Name . .
Address
SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn,
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310
The Gist of It
AT A TIME IN HISTORY WHEN PREJUDICES
and intolerance have swept like a plague
across the western world, it is heartening to
read Pearl S. Buck's story of her discovery
of America. (Page 313) She finds Americans
guilty of race prejudices and of alien-baiting
and of downright ungratefulness to the men
and women from the great wide world who
have come here and helped build a nation.
Between the lines, lynchings, 100 percenter
Congressmen, statistics on the deportation of
worthy aliens, may be interpolated by the
urgent-minded reader. To Pearl Buck it is
unthinkable that these individual hurts can
multiply into a general catastrophe among
our happily varied population. The author
needs no introduction to Americans. All
classes and creeds have read her books, es-
pecially The Good Earth.
Louis STARK, DISTINGUISHED INDUSTRIAL
authority on the Washington staff of The
New York Times, writes about the sit-down
as a labor phenomenon. (Page 316) He
draws upon first hand observation, as well
as upon constant contact with informed em-
ployers, labor leaders, legal authorities, so-
cial philosophers and government officials.
A SOCIOLOGIST INDICATES THE NEW TRAIL HE
would have the CCC begin to blaze in the
woodland areas. (Page 321) Mr. Rowland,
on the faculty of Pennsylvania State College,
has made special studies of exclusive private
camps, of transient camps set up under
FERA, and of CCC camps. To him camp
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SURVEY GRAPHIC— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
THE SURVEY— Monthly— $3.00 a Year
Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors;
RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD, RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPER, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MARY R. ANDERSON, adver-
tising manager.
JUNE 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 6
Cover Design PICTORIAL STATISTICS, INC.
New England Settlers by Maurice Sterne : FRONTISPIECE
On Discovering America PEARL s. BUCK 313
Sit-Down LOUIS STARK 316
Can the CCC Blaze a New Trail? . .HOWARD ROWLAND 321
H. o. ROGERS 326
330
Saving the Coal Industry
Ministers and Spiritual Maladies RICHARD c. CABOT, M.D.
Painting and Sculpture — American Artists Congress 332
Who Will Pay the Piper ? ROBERT MOSES 334
Labor Leader NATHAN SHAVIRO 338
Through Neighbors' Doorways
We Tearful Crocodiles JOHN PALMER GAVIT 340
Life and Letters
Escape from Dilemmas LEON WHIPPLE 342
Textiles: A Self-Diagnosis LEIFUR MAGNUSSON. .346
Servants of the People
At the National Archives HILLIER KRIECHBAUM 348
Ellerbe Learns By Doing ROBERT LITTELL 350
© Survey Associates, Inc.
life is a wholesome stop-gap for youth, but,
as his questions reveal, it may be institu-
tional, artificial, and isolated from the pleas-
ures and problems of the workaday world.
A DIAGNOSIS OF THE ILLS OF THE SOFT COAL
industry and how they effect those Americans
who mine coal and those who burn it is
offered, page 326, by H. O. Rogers, who
also outlines some of the remedies now
being tried. Mr. Rogers, at present in the
editorial division of the U. S. Bureau of La-
bor Statistics, was from 1926 to 1933 with
the Bureau of Mines. The direction of his
thinking about coal, he writes us, as well as
much of his factual data, derive from the
notable work of Dr. Frank G. Tryon, F. E.
Berquist and their associates in the bureau.
WE WELCOME THE RETURN OF RlCHARD C.
Cabot, M.D., to our pages with his provo-
cative article on spiritual ills and the way
the Protestant clergy might minister to them.
(Page 330) In his work and teaching in
medicine, philosophy and social ethics Dr.
Cabot has ever remembered the human spirit.
What Men Live By, published by Houghton,
Mifflin in 1914, is as fresh and inspiring now
as the day it was written. Readers will re-
call his article which by good chance we
were able to publish at the time of the bank
holiday in 1933— What Men Rise To. His
present article looks bravely ahead, not nos-
talgically back, upon the possibilities of reli-
gion in modern life.
BUILDER IN BIG WAYS, KNOWN THE WORLD
over for his imaginative creation of Jones
Beach and the Long Island parkways, Park
Commissioner Robert Moses of New York
City threw his program into high gear when
emergency funds began to flow. Now he asks
(page 334): After WPA, What? His answer,
in terms of his super-job in the country's
metropolis, is of interest to small commun-
ities as well as large American cities that
have expanded recreation areas and play-
grounds and now face the problem of main-
taining them.
NATHAN SHAVIRO WHO WRITES, PAGE 338,
about Sidney Hillman, co-worker with John
L. Lewis in the Committee on Industrial
Organization, is himself doing economic re-
search for the CIO. Formerly financial econ-
omist for the Securities and Exchange Com-
mission, Mr. Shaviro has also been a teacher
of journalism at New York University and
an editor of the Journal of Commerce.
FROM WASHINGTON, LEIFUR MAGNUSSON
reports (page 346) on the meeting of textile
men from all over the world, early in April,
to face their interwoven problems, under the
auspices of the International Labor Office.
THE WORK BEING DONE IN THE NATIONAL
Archives to preserve movie films as social
documents is described by Hillier Krieghbaum
on page 348.
ROBERT LITTELL, WELL KNOWN AUTHOR AND
social critic, personally visited the Ellerbe
School which has lifted progressive education
by its own bootstraps in North Carolina.
(Page 350)
311
We are all immigrants —
in the long view that Miss Buck expresses in our leading article this month. And so we present one of the out-
standing public monuments in the United States, Maurice Sterne's memorial for Worcester, Mass., to the settlers
of New England, as it looks from the rear: to give a sense of a procession of America's discoverers and settlers
in which we— foreign-born and native offspring— march after these earlier men and women. Mr. Sterne, who is a
distinguished painter as well as sculptor, came to this country from Russia as a boy of twelve
JUNE 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 6
SURVEY GRAPHIC
On Discovering America
by PEARL S. BUCK
In a moving challenge to all Americans who foment prejudice and back
legislation against the foreign-born, Pearl Buck, long an alien in foreign lands,
and recently returned a stranger to her own country, brings personal observa-
tion and the wisdom of the long view to her picture of America, as it is, and
as it is bound to be
I HAD LIVED ALL MY LIFE AN AMERICAN AWAY FROM
America. Then I returned, a sort of immigrant among
immigrants, except that I came to my native land. But it
was as new to me as though I came from Sweden or from
Italy or Greece. I knew almost as little what to expect be-
fore I landed.
But we all have pictures, we immigrants, of what the
America is to which we come. They must be pleasant
pictures, or we would not have come. People do not
easily leave all they know unless they hope for something
much better. Of course I suppose most of us hoped for
a better chance for a living, for more money, for more
education, for more room. Some of us came for freedom,
freedom to think as we liked, to be ourselves unhampered
by family and traditions. Some of us, like me, came be-
cause we wanted to come home, never having known
what it was like to be at home, having lived always
among an alien race, spoken a foreign tongue and walked
the streets and roads of every day as a foreigner. We have
all come to the America we each thought we saw.
I wish I could find out what other people have found
in America. But I only know what I have found. I came
from China, a land of long homogeneity and of unity,
except perhaps for that least important of all, political
unity. The Chinese are of the same general race. They
have had an unbroken history of thousands of years.
Their religions are the same, organized into three great
types, mutually tolerant, non-evangelical, and mellowed
by long human experience to a philosophy of humanism.
Social customs are firmly fixed and such impacts as come
from modern usages come against a solid whole which
they can penetrate only gradually and therefore without
great upset. Even the language is not really diversified,
because three fourths of the people speak one language,
or some form of it. Out of this great security of long
established unit I came to America.
Now I had my picture of America, too. It was made
up of visual images of my mother's much loved country
home, of which she told me many stories, of a land of
great plenty and ease, from which came money for the
poor Chinese, because all Americans were rich and
Christian. It would not have occurred to me that there
were illiterate Americans, or unwashed or poor Amer-
icans, or criminals. As I grew older and understood better
inevitable human nature this picture was modified and
reason did indeed compel me to understand that heaven
existed nowhere. But still something of this early picture
persisted.
I BELIEVED, FOR INSTANCE, THAT IN LEAVING CHINA I WAS
leaving forever the sight of hungry people whom I was
powerless to feed. I thought I was leaving behind the
sight of wasting floods and dried and sun-baked, treeless
lands, swept by dusty winds. I thought I was coming to
a country which had organized itself into economic plenty
and moral clarity. I had heard all my life that America
was rich, and I did not think of these riches as being
selfishly gained or used. Money was poured generously
out of America into China for famine relief, for Christian
propaganda, for many and endless causes. Americans,
then, though they were rich were generous, interested in
a world culture, international-minded. I longed to meet
my countrymen, whose idealism seemed almost fantastic
to the materialistic philosophy of China.
When I first came here, then, I endeavored to find
this recognizable country of my own. I looked first for
Americans. But I could not find them. It seemed to me
the country was full of foreigners. I found delightful
people, for I came home under the best possible circum-
stances, having done a sort of work of my own which
somehow made me friends. The people were wonderfully
kind to me, but they seemed to me like English people.
313
or Europeans. I kept thinking, "Where are the Amer-
icans?" It was very puzzling. 1 bored everybody by ask-
ing continually, "Where does one find the real Americans?
What would you consider the typical American?" To
my bewilderment everyone replied the same way — that
is, he was American, his ancestors had come over in the
Mayflower or before the Revolution or before the Civil
War or something, and he was the typical American if
there ever was one.
So AFTER REPETITIONS OF THIS SORT OF THING, I HURRIED TO
American literature, reading every book which was
praised by critics as being American, and endeavoring to
find out in this way what was American. But the books
varied even more than the people and each might have
been written about a totally different country and people.
There are the people of New England; and there is this
city of New York, so full of people born elsewhere, who
are the staunchest New Yorkers; and I live in a part of
Pennsylvania which might as well be a corner of Europe
for all it has to do with these places, where a good
Pennsylvania German neighbor said with enthusiasm of
my Chinese friend Lin Yutang when he visited us that
he must be a fine man because "he talked German so
good"; and when I go south nothing I have learned or
seen north of the Mason and Dixon line does me any
good; and there are the far reaches of the West, where
other kinds of people live and none of them is American
— and they are all American. I came to see that these true
Americans I had been looking for did not exist at all, and
there are no typical Americans. I have come indeed to feel
that if there is a typical American it is the one least typical
of anyone except himself. The one hundred percent
American, for instance, is one hundred percent nothing
except himself, and represents nothing else. And America
is wherever you happen to find yourself between Canada
and the Rio Grande and the great oceans east and west;
and American food is codfish and baked beans and Hun-
garian goulash or scrapple, and beaten biscuit and fried
chicken, or cornpone and salt pork, or hot tamales or
whatever is put on the table before you wherever you
happen to be. And the American religion is to be found
in little pentecostal chapels or in great Fifth Avenue
churches or in Catholic cathedrals or nowhere at all.
The only thing you can be sure of is that if you keep
going, you'll not eat the same American food two days
alike, or hear the same God preached two Sundays the
same, and you will certainly hear, in English, nasal with
New England winter, in English German-tinged or
Italian-haunted, or dying with the fading inflections of a
slave-ridden past in southern swamps, the conviction that
whatever is fed you or preached to you is the real Amer-
ican article.
And everywhere I was hurt and confounded by the
amazing hatred among all these Americans for each other.
I have heard such hatred for black Americans from white
Americans, such venomous sullen hatred for white Amer-
icans from black Americans, that in another country I
would have been afraid of immediate race war. And the
hatred burns like wildfire in a hundred different direc-
tions. There is the hatred of the Jew and the Christian,
of the native-born and the foreign-born, of the Protestant
and the Catholic, and these are only a few of the greater
hatreds. It is true also that combating each separate
hatred, like a leash upon a beast, is an organization of
people working for peace between any two opposing
groups. But it is a question whether the leash is strong
enough for the beast. At least, a sensitive mind at first can-
not but be frightened and oppressed by the fearful
prejudices of race and creed which possess the feelings of
the average American.
Thus afraid and oppressed, therefore, I began to delve
into these dark feelings which few Americans, it seems
to me, are willing to face and acknowledge. For feeling
is the basis of these hatreds which take such strange and
violent open expressions as lynching, as unjust treatment
of aliens, as inhuman deportation laws. With my Chinese
training, I cannot get excited over a particular individual
or over a particular bill in Congress, but I can get deeply
excited over why people should want to commit murder
by lynching, or why people should want to deport, whole-
sale, persons who are honorably fulfilling their places as
human beings in our country, if not as citizens. The rea-
sons why we hate each other are very important indeed,
and there is no cure for individual injustices until those
causes are clearly understood.
From whence, then, do all these diversities of hatred
come in our country? I know very well that when I use
the plain word "hatred" there will be many who shrink
from it and will say, "It isn't hatred, exactly, it's some-
thing else." But to the observer and to the person who
suffers from it, it is hatred in its appearance and in its
effects, and must be treated as hatred. Why then, do we
Americans so hate each other and especially so hate
those whom we consider aliens among us? I will not
here dwell upon my complete astonishment in discover-
ing that we, who are so generous to foreigners in their
own lands, who rush relief to Belgium and Czecho-
slovakia and China and Japan, are so ruthless to the same
foreigners who find themselves aliens in our own country.
It must have bewildered others than I. A hundred reasons
are given me for it. I am told by many that the chief one
is economic. But I do not believe people hate each other
in groups fundamentally because of economic conditions.
Poverty and stress merely augment already existing
hatreds. What I want to know is, why do the hatreds exist
at all, and why do they burn with such fearful heat in
America, still the richest country in the world?
I HAVE GONE BACK IN MY SEARCH, "CHINESE FASHION," TO
our beginnings. I find we are all immigrants, we Amer-
icans. Not one of us is really native in any profound
sense. Everybody in the United States, except the Indians,
is now or was once, foreign-born. I find it ridiculous to
hear a man whose great-grandfather came to this country
look down on a man who comes in now, and call him
"alien." For what is a hundred or two hundred years in
the life of a nation? The nation is and will be for cen-
turies to come made up of the foreign-born, that is, people
from all countries. And looking at all these people, I
discover in them all the diversities of the world in race,
in culture, in religion. They have only one thing in com-
mon with which to become Americans. They are all rest-
less.
For we Americans, we are the restless, the restless of
all nations. None but the restless has ever come to Amer-
ica. The quiet-hearted, the contented, the peaceful minds,
are still on old country farms, in old country shops and
business offices. They are not here. Not one of us belongs
to them. A similar spirit has driven us out from among
314
SURVEY GRAPHIC
them and has driven us together. When visitors speak
with wonder of the ceaseless hurry and activity which is
such a part of the American temperament, I am not
surprised. For were we not naturally restless, none of us
would be Americans at all. There would be no America
and Indians would roam our hills and valleys still.
Restlessness, then, is our essential nature.
BUT WHEN WE COME TO AMERICA, WE DO NOT ENTER ONLY
as restless individuals. We come as races, as nations, as
transmitters of the past to a country without a history,
whose only past is that of forests and streams and moun-
tains and plains and endless seashores and rivers flow-
ing into the sea. America's history is only what we all
bring as our own individual histories. What goes to make
her is what has gone to make us. The prejudices of all
peoples on earth are now American prejudices. Hun-
garian Catholics still hate Hungarian Protestants on these
new shores, and pugnacious Irishmen still wear the green,
remembering forever and with joy that once they were
killed for "wearin' o' the green." Everyone of us has this
present and this past, the present of a new country, whose
very newness makes us hold the more closely to whatever
past we have. If we could have come here and exchanged
that inherited culture for another, it might have been
easier. It would be easy, for instance, to become a Chinese.
One has only to give up all of one thing and accept all of
another — give up what one has had and accept another
definite, clear system of life and philosophy. But when
we come to be Americans there are many systems and
many philosophies, and which shall we accept? If we
accept all, we are lost in diffusion, and so it is inevitable
that we cling to what we have had before, to what we
brought with us. We change, perhaps, the material aspect
of our lives. We use electricity and running water and
we buy an automobile, but inside we do not change. We
remain what we are, and to America's endless variety we
add our own bit, and so we become American. And even
one's children are different from another's children. They
have a veneer of similarity — the radio and motion picture
and cheap magazines and the public school system see
to that — but their hidden unrecognized roots are, through
their blood, in their bones. And I observe that those roots
never become lost — at least, not yet. Everyone knows what
his old country was even though his ticket was on the
Mayflower. It will take hundreds of years yet before we
forget we came from England or Ireland, Germany or
Italy or France.
And I am not at all sure we shall do well to forget, even
then. We ought not to forget, or allow our children to
forget until in long common national life we have
achieved a government, a tradition, a philosophy, which
is secure and integrated and expressed enough to shelter
and guide a people — in short, until we have an American
culture. And we cannot make an American culture by
sitting down and thinking about it and writing it down
and giving 'it out to the newspapers. The Supreme Court
cannot do it, and even President Roosevelt cannot do it.
Nobody and nothing can do it except time, passing un-
consciously and effortlessly over all our diversity, and
gradually, with infinite slowness, wearing away differ-
ences, and leaving those essentials which will survive our
struggles and our climate. It may be five thousand years
hence — it can scarcely be less than a thousand — before
the real American culture is here, and before we have a
race of Americans. There will be no Negro questions
then, because there will be no Negroes, there will be no
Jews and Christians, no foreign-born — nobody but that
person nowhere to be found today, a pure American. I
cannot but believe he will be an extraordinary person,
that pure American, who will be standing in my place
five thousand years from today. He will have what no
other human being has had in just the same richness, the
inheritance of all ages, all races, all cultures. He will have
a fine direct eagerness which will be our restlessness, re-
fined by centuries, but concentrated, too, into a driving
force which will carry him to heights of human knowl-
edge which we cannot even dream of now. He will be a
true superman, standing on the shoulders of those from
all nations and races of the earth.
And I hope even then that we shall still be taking into
our established America the stimulus and the irritation of
immigrants. When we cease to allow people to come
in from all over the world, we shall ourselves begin to
die, as other nations are dying. New people, coming to
a new country, bring new impetus in themselves. They
arc a fresh infusion, uncomfortable perhaps, and even
painful, but they are life. We cannot do without them.
It is too soon to close our doors. It may always be too
soon. For statistics show that those we call our foreign-
born are still our best. Crime is less among them than
among the native-born. The foreign-born are amazingly
the stronger in the creative arts. To shut them out would
be to rob ourselves and the future not only of industrious
laborers but of great exploring creative mental energy.
Bt'T I KNOW VERY WELL THAT WHEN I THINK OF OUR
America a thousand years from now and five thousand
years from now that I am thinking Chinese and not
American. The Chinese thinks instinctively in terms of
centuries and he sees hirroelf as a particle in time. But the
American stretches his imagination to pain if he thinks
two generations ahead to the grandchild that is an actu-
ality or a possibility. That is a trait of the restless. We
cannot and will not wait, though the truth remains that
the only true view is the long one, and the present will
not be right if it is an end in itself instead of being as well
a foundation for the future. We Americans, that is, cannot
and will not think of our nation as a whole in time and
space and so choose nationally, though perhaps at im-
mediate inconvenience, what permanent stuffs we want
in our making. We demand to know what we shall do
now, in our momentary situation, with "aliens," as we
call them, in our jobs, on our relief rolls, and sending
good American money out of the country.
Unfortunately for me as an American, I cannot froth
about any of these things. I see these "aliens" first as
human beings, and I observe that many, indeed most of
them, are honest and industrious, or as honest and indus-
trious as the upstarts who dare, at this early date in our
history, to call themselves, "the Americans." Citizens or
not, I cannot see why these good people should be de-
ported. We need honesty and industry. No nation can have
too many people with these qualities. I cannot see why
they should not be relieved if they starve, nor why they
should not send money back to Italy or anywhere else.
I should think the more money circulates the better. The
richer the Italians are, the better for American markets.
And in return for this money the people have given goodl
hard labor on roads and (Continued on page 353)i
JUNE 1937
315
Photos by International
Sit-Down
by LOUIS STARK
The newest, most controversial of labor tactics interpreted and
appraised by the ranking industrial expert among Washington
correspondents
No LABOR QUESTION" IX RECENT YEARS HAS AROUSED SO MUCH
bitterness as has the sit-down strike. On one hand some
labor groups regard it as a new technique to win labor's
rights which can be sharpened with use and made to be-
come a responsible factor in the age long struggle of
labor for status. On the other -hand employers denounce
the sit-down strike not only as an illegal and unfair
weapon by labor but one that may lead to revolution and
the overthrow of government.
In between these two extreme groups may be found
others whose views take cm a variety of gradations; con-
servative labor leaders who side with employers in attack-
ing the sit-down weapon and fear it may lead to restrictive
labor laws; others classed as "progressive" whose unions
have come through the long struggle for recognition and
who feel that the wave of sit-down strikes are part of the
"growing pains" of collective bargaining but that they
will subside.
Then, also, there are the employers who, while opposing
the sit-down as illegal, are aware that mere denunciation
will not help in the absence of more constructive measures
and a more enlightened viewpoint by the "die-hard ele-
ment" in their ranks.
In the halls of Congress and in state legislatures our
public representatives "view with alarm" what they con-
sider the "menace" of the sit-down while still others de-
fend this technique. Here and there a state legislature
has passed a law making a sit-down strike a felony.
The Senate has adopted a resolution declaring sit-downs
"illegal and contrary to sound public policy" and also
coupled with it, condemnation of company unions, em-
ployer opposition to the right of collective bargaining and
industrial espionage.
The sit-down strike cannot be isolated and viewed as a
phenomenon by itself without reference to its origins and
history. As one form of labor s struggle to improve its
conditions it goes back many years. Professor Don D.
Lescohier of the University of Wisconsin has found that
even before Columbus discovered America construction
workers on the Rouen Cathedral sat down on their scaf-
folds and inside the partly finished structure to enforce
a better wage bargain and even threatened to destroy the
edifice if the army were sent to eject them.
Bakers who attempted a sit-down strike in Lyons in
1565 were driven out by the army. Almost two hundred
years later typographers in the same city were similarly
driven out when they occupied the print shops. In 1750
Lille textile workers staged a sit-down, were ousted after
a bloody battle with the army and their places taken by
weavers imported from Germany and Belgium.
There were sit-down strikes in the textile mills of
England in 1817 and when the troops were sent against
the strikers they burned the factories.
Analagous strikes dot the history of the American labor
movement. In 1H77 and again in 1885 striking railroad
workers took possession of company property. In the latter
year the Knights of Labor conducted a strike on the
Missouri Pacific and took charge of yards and shops.
Their demands were met a week later.
BOTH IN EUROPE AND IN THE UNITED STATES THE DEPRES-
sion seems to have given an impetus to the sit-down strike.
Three years ago stay-in strikes were conducted in Jugo-
slavia, Hungary and Poland. In 1935 copper miners in
Spain and coal miners in Wales staged a stay-down move-
ment. Last year a million French workers sat down and
caused the immediate passage of laws recognizing unions,
the forty-hour week and vacations with pay.
In this country employes of a western packing house
took part in a sit-down strike in 1933 but large scale
316
SURVEY GRAPHIC
development of this labor weapon waited until the rubber
workers of Akron used it in scores of cases two years ago.
They are still using it but more sparingly.
Perhaps the first strike in which workers remained in
the plant overnight was that of the Bendix Company in
South Bend, Ind., last November. This was followed by
short sit-down strikes in plants making automobile parts
and accessories in Michigan and then, on the last day of
the year, came the sit-down strikes in the two Fisher Body
plants in Flint and in other General Motors Corporation
plants in Detroit and Anderson, Ind.
Hardly had the forty-four-day strike against General
Motors been settled than a sudden sit-down was declared
in the Chrysler plants. Production workers to the number
of more than 150,000 had been made idle by the General
Motors strike and some 65,000 were affected by the
Chrysler strike.
Coincident with the Chrysler strike a virtual epidemic
of sit-down strikes broke out in Detroit. There were strikes
in hotels, restaurants, department stores, five and ten cent
stores, cigar factories, motor parts plants and other manu-
facturing establishments.
In a few places the police evicted the stay-in strikers
and in one or two places it was alleged that racketeers had
attempted to extort money from employers under a
promise to end the demonstrations.
The Michigan epidemic was followed by sit-down
strikes among department store workers in Rhode Island,
airplane craftsmen in Santa Monica, and clerks in New
York City.
The question may be asked: why the rash of sit-down
strikes today rather than a year ago or five years ago?
The answer, it seems to me, lies in a certain crossing of
events and circumstances that spell out this phenomenon.
Chief of the circumstances to which I refer was the
election of President Roosevelt in 1932. Three years of
depression had wrenched
many working men and wom-
en from their relatively safe
moorings and swept them
down a river of doubt and un-
certainty. In general, those
who were members of trades
unions, more secure for a while
than the others, held out
longer but they too finally had
to join the millions on relief.
Trade union treasuries were
drained in a few years. The
job market was saturated with
the millions of idle and wages
dropped and dropped while
hours lengthened.
Then came the passage of
the National Industrial Re-
covery Act, the creation of
the Recovery Administration,
the establishment of codes of
fair competition in hundreds
of industries and last, but not
least, assurance that employes
covered by the Act would
have the right to bargain col-
lectively without fear of coer-
cion from employers and to
elect workers of their own choosing to represent them.
The NIRA released a wave of organization sentiment
among masses of workers in American industries that
rolled on and on for a year before it began to subside.
Unions which were on the verge of bankruptcy picked
up at once and in hundreds of industries employes, almost
spontaneously, organized themselves. The American Fed-
eration of Labor and the national unions comprising it,
as well as independent unions, were unable to keep up
with the demand for guidance made by the newly
organized.
Almost immediately the need for a vertical or industrial
form of labor union presented itself. Industry was being
organized almost overnight virtually on a cartellized basis.
To bargain collectively with such vast aggregations of
capital there appeared only the usual variety of craft
unions. The times however demanded a new policy and
a new technique from labor but nothing happened except
annual debates at the AF of L conventions from 1933
to 1935, and the experiment with federal unions. In the
meantime the first wave of organization had subsided
and it was another year before a second wave began.
EACH WAVE SWEPT THE LABOR MOVEMENT FURTHER ALONG
the road but its recession was accompanied by disillusion-
ment, especially in the basic industries where the waves
shot membership up like a temperature chart and then
dropped it to disappointing figures.
General public sentiment since 1933, it should be borne
in mind, has registered itself on the whole as favoring
collective bargaining. The educational value of public
discussion was never more apparent than in the years of
labor disputes and discussion following the creation of
the first National Labor Board (the Wagner Board) and
its two successors guided by Lloyd K. Garrison, Francis
Biddle and J. Warren Madden.
Sunday morning prayers during New York City's first big sit-down in an F. W. Grand store
JUNE 1937
317
The wave of trade union organization was accompanied
by another form of organization, that of the company
unions and (or) employe representation plans. Set up in
nearly all cases upon the initiative of employers, this form
of presentation of grievances was put forth as a substitute
for trade union collective bargaining.
Another important component of the capital-labor pic-
ture that was being drawn in the first four Roosevelt
years was that of the repression of unions by many
employers, a number of whom resorted to the use of
industrial espionage and the discharge of union members.
Now ALL THESE FACTORS THAT I HAVE DESCRIBED BEGAN TO
come together like the strands of yarn on a loom about
sixteen months ago. First, John L. Lewis, president of
the United Mine Workers of America, formed the Com-
mittee for Industrial Organization in November 1935.
Then in many factories where the employe representa-
tion plan existed, there began to appear signs of disillusion-
ment among employes.
The attitude of the AF of L had always been to leave
the company unions severely alone and to damn them as
creatures of the corporations, but the CIO carried on an
intensive campaign to wean the employe representatives
away from the employe representation plan. This cam-
paign was carried on simultaneously in steel, rubber and
automobiles. By February, the CIO had breached the
united front of the basic industries in winning a contract
with General Motors Corporation. A few weeks later the
U.S. Steel Corporation, citadel of the open shop, also
capitulated.
The ferment of organizational sentiment then broke
for the third time in the Roosevelt administration into a
wave of unionization which is still swiftly mounting.
The La Follette Committee's disclosure of
shady aspects of union repression, the work
of the National Labor Relations Board, the
clarifying debate on the craft-industrial
union issue, the refusal of a great many em-
ployers to bargain collectively — all these
played a part in forming the attitude of the
workers which finally expressed itself in sit-
down strikes.
It is indeed significant that the sit-down
strike is being used chiefly in industries
where employes have battered hopelessly for
years against the wall of union opposition.
In many areas of these industries even re-
quests by the union for a conference were
met with immediate refusal. The sit-down
strike is a can opener prying the conference
open, but once a conference is arranged and
a bona fide collective bargaining results in
an agreement, the technique is no longer
necessary.
For years prior to the NIRA the AF of L
unions sought conferences, for example,
with leading automobile manufacturers
without success. It was reported at the New
Orleans convention of the AF of L (1928)
that a request for such a conference with one
large corporation had not been answered.
These refusals over the course of years,
together with industrial espionage and dis-
charge of union members, were responsible
for building up such a sentiment of mistrust of company
policy and of the company officials that they led to the
first sit-downs.
Since the recent collective bargaining agreement, how-
ever, the inexperience of the local unions, plus the hang-
over of mistrust extending back over many years, led to
unauthorized sit-downs in General Motors and Chrysler
plants. To expect the new technique of genuine collective
bargaining in the automobile industry to work perfectly
from the beginning when it was also obvious that some
foremen of the "old school" as well as some "hard boiled"
plant managers were unable to reconcile themselves to
the new dispensation immediately, was to expect too
much.
It takes a long time to heat iron to a white molten state
and a long time for it to cool down. Perhaps when the
present relation between certain industries and the unions
gets past the present tension both sides may cool down
to that state which has been attained by the railroad
brotherhoods in their relations with the carriers. However,
one must not overlook the fact that this much-to-be-
desired relationship is the result of many years of associa-
tion and is a gradual growth. It does not spring full
panoplied from the brow of Jove.
Approaching the sit-down strike from the legal angle
we find that employers and their attorneys regard the sit-
downers as trespassers who "maintain their position by
means of a conspiracy among themselves and their con-
federates on the outside." As the Law Department of the
National Association of Manufacturers states it: ". . . the
holding of another's property against his will, under threat
of permanent occupancy unless he will accede to their
demands, is itself a species of extortion.
"The notion that a sit-down striker is not a trespasser
Sit-downers in the Busy Bee hosiery mill, Berks County, Pa.
318
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Upholstered cushions made sitting down comfortable in Fisher Body's Flint plant
because his entry on the premises is with the permission or
license of the employer, is of course fallacious," the opinion
of the manufacturers' counsel states. "Wrongful entry on
the premises of another is of course a trespass, but it is
only one form of trespass. One may become a trespasser
by his subsequent conduct even though his entry was
under license. . . .
". . . trespass may be committed even after rightful
entry . . . the continuation of a sit-down strike after a
court order has been issued on the ground of a trespass
is a combination to obstruct public justice and becomes
actionable not only as a contempt of court but as an
indictable conspiracy. . . ."
Dean Dinwoody, editor of the United States Law Weet^,
says that "under well settled principles of property law,
the employer has a legally protected right to the exclusive
possession of his factory or plant just as the householder
has to the exclusive possession of his home . . . although
a person may have lawfully entered upon another's prop-
erty, if he remains after the owners request him to leave,
he is a trespasser under the rules of law governing the
defense of property from wrongful intrusion."
On the other hand Henry T. Hunt, counsel for the
National Resources Committee, held that the relation be-
tween employer and employe was not a simple contract,
that it had social implications and implied an obligation
on the part of the employer to permit collective bargaining.
James M. Landis, dean-elect of the Harvard Law School,
evoked a storm of criticism when he observed that "the
history of our law is replete with illustrations of the crea-
tion of new rights"; and then intimated that the courts
might in time recognize the sit-down as legal, submitting
that its future status "will depend in part upon the
emphasis that law will give to the concept of property and
its inviolability in its industrial and corporate setting to
economic pressure of this type — and in part, perhaps, on
the capacity of our law to devise new concepts and
mechanisms to meet the needs out of which this type of
economic pressure has been born."
But Senator Borah could not conceive of any legal con-
cepts that would make legal a sit-down strike. Yet he
refused to vote condemna-
tion of the sit-down strike.
A new turn to the debate
was given by Leon Green,
dean of Northwestern Uni-
versity Law School, who
held that the sit-down did
not constitute trespass so
long as the property was oc-
cupied in good faith awaiting
the adjustment of differences
growing out of the industrial
relation. This relation he de-
fined as something quite new,
arising from the joinder of
the two great interests of
property and personalty. The
sit-down strike he regarded as
"but the latest step in the
struggle between a large mass
of employers operating under
an institution known as an
industrial corporation and an
equally large or larger mass
of employes operating or attempting to operate under a
somewhat similar institution known as a labor union, to
work out their respective rights, duties and privileges in
industrial enterprise — enterprise resulting from the joint
efforts of what we over-simplify as capital and labor."
In both the Chrysler and General Motors cases, how-
ever, the courts held closely to the law of possession and
ruled that the sit-down strikers were trespassers.
The merits of the National Labor Relations Act, its
alleged denial by the employer, were set aside by the
courts. Yet this was really the nub of the employes' case.
They invoked the doctrine of "clean hands" and held that
the action of the employes had been caused directly by
refusal of the corporation to abide by the law.
Despite the injunctions in the General Motors and
Chrysler cases, the sit-down strikers were not evicted by
law officers. Why? It was generally recognized that evic-
tion would still leave the dispute on collective bargaining
just where it was — unsettled.
Now the court had no power to settle the dispute.
However, if the strikers had been ejected violently, the
strikers might well have been demoralized and their
strike lost. Thus the court's intervention on the sit-down
issued would have killed the strike.
THE STRIKERS HOWEVER WERE "NEGOTIATED" OUT OF THE
plants. The collective bargaining issue was kept intact.
The state government, represented by Governor Frank
Murphy, took neither side and acted to help build joint
machinery for industrial peace. This was undoubtedly a
better procedure than shooting or beating workmen for
violating the law of trespass.
Enhanced bargaining power is one of the primary rea-
sons for the sit-down strike. When the employer is unable
to operate his factory because of a strike the employes'
bargaining power is increased. The sit-down weapon is
superior to the walk-out strike for this reason.
The sit-down strike however presents labor with
dangers. Minorities, sitting down of their own volition,
may disrupt union plans and render them futile. Without
considerable opinion among the employes in favor of the
JUNE 1937
319
sit-down, the demonstrators may arouse the wrath of
other employes and accomplish only their own ejection.
In cases where agreements have been made and sit-down
strikes continue they endanger the contracts.
THE SIT-DOWN MAY BE USED TO DISCREDIT THE UNION UPON
instigation of an employer who may wish to prove that
"the union is irresponsible." Its use in a factional struggle
within the union for control is possible but unlikely, as
both sides would quickly see the joint loss they would
suffer if a union agreement were thus discredited.
In a speech to automobile employes after the Chrysler
settlement John L. Lewis spent a considerable time ex-
plaining the necessity for upholding contracts and for
responsible conduct of union affairs by officers. It was
apparent that he was aware of the limitations of the new
weapon and was in accord with its use only within rigid
limits. He called upon some miners who "stayed in" at a
Pennsylvania colliery to "come to your senses" and to
invoke existing machinery to settle their grievance. Presi-
dent William Green of the AF of L opposed it unquali-
fiedly as a device that would discredit labor in the eyes
of the public but it has been used by AF of L units as
well as by affiliates of the CIO.
Talks with sit-down strikers made it clear to me that
they felt they had a property in their jobs. They did not
use legal terms in giving expression to their views but
their meaning was unmistakable.
"Our hides are wrapped around those machines," was
the way one man in the Fisher Body plant expressed it.
A sit-down striker used his overcoat to protect a delicate
machine in a small steel plant when he thought that the
cold air from a broken window might affect the mechan-
ism. The window was broken in a tear gas attack.
Unquestionably the NIRA had an important effect on
the attitude of employes towards their jobs. While courts
had held that the right to a job was akin to a property
right the NIRA for the first time fixed penalties for de-
priving an employe of his property, i.e. for discharging
him if he joined a union.
The concept of a property right in a job has gained
impetus in the last four years and this had a bearing on
public opinion when the sit-down strikes occurred. The
public saw that the strikers were not attempting to operate
the plants and did not claim the property as their own.
In a strike public opinion is the weather vane to watch
and both sides are aware of the need for capturing it.
The government plays an exceedingly important part in
forming public opinion. In the General Motors and
Chrysler strikes the statements of public officials like
Secretary Perkins and Governor Murphy were calculated
to divert the negotiations into peaceful channels. By con-
trast the utterances of Premier Hepburn of Ontario mud-
died the controversial waters of the General Motors strike
in Oshawa, for he immediately adopted a belligerent tone
before an attempt had been made to invoke mediation.
Some fear has been expressed concerning the "revolu-
tionary implication of the sit-down strike." Talks with
many strikers have convinced me that far from wishing
to take over and run the factories, the employes would be
well satisfied with a workable plan of collective bargain-
ing for the adjustment of grievances. The American
worker is middle class in his viewpoint and outlook, not
revolutionary. His desire for a wage contract is non-
revolutionary in distinction to that of the small number
of those who talk of social ownership of the means of
production and distribution.
Out of the turbulent discussions by lawmakers, em-
ployers, employes, the press and the public one fact stands
out clearly: the problem of the sit-down strike is simply
a matter of collective bargaining in a complex industrial
civilization. No matter what its legal and social implica-
tion may be, place collective bargaining on a sane, civil-
ized basis and the sit-down strike will vanish.
Now that the Supreme Court has validated the National
Labor Relations Act sit-down strikes may be expected to
drop sharply if not to disappear altogether. With a
National Labor Relations Board properly implemented to
handle cases involving unfair labor practices by employers
opposition to trade unions will diminish.
HOWEVER, THE PROBLEM OF "NEXT STEPS" IN COLLECTIVE
bargaining will remain even when opposition to trade
union organization vanishes. Suppose then collective bar-
gaining conferences are abortive. Here, it seems to me,
is the place where a joint understanding involving em-
ployers, employes and government may be worked out to
bring into play effective mediation and concilation ma-
chinery with voluntary arbitration as another step in the
bargaining process.
Labor fears that compulsory mediation may involve un-
due delay to the detriment of its position, while employ-
ers seem to feel that a long waiting period before a strike
is invoked will save them from threat of impulsive action
by employes. It is in this twilight zone of emotion that the
government may function, to assist both sides toward a
clear appreciation of their obligations, to exhaust every
effort to make agreements and to maintain them. This
does not mean imposing bodily the machinery of the Rail-
way Labor Act on all manufacturing industry regardless
of the status of collective bargaining in those several indus-
tries. It does mean assisting employers and employes in
newly organized industries to erect those mechanisms and
safeguards in the course of their continued relations.
Panic does not beget reason. Those who see the sit-down
strike as an augury of the world's end should glance down
the perspective of the years and they will observe that a
little over a hundred years ago in England a worker, even
when acting singly, was limited by law as to the amount
of wages he might demand.
Justice Brandeis points out in one of his notable dissent-
ing opinions (Tritax v. Corrigan) that until 1824 a work-
man in England was punishable as a criminal if he com-
bined with his fellows to raise wages, shorten hours, or
affect the business in any way, even if they did not strike.
"Not until 1875 was the right of workers to combine in
order to attain their ends fully conceded. Not until 1906
was the ban on peaceful picketing and the bringing of
pressure upon an employer by means of a secondary
strike or boycott removed."
In short, every move by labor towards attainment of its
goal, collective bargaining, has been fought bitterly by
employers, both on the industrial field and in the courts.
The working men and women who, in the history of
labor's struggle for a redress of the imbalance inherent in
the employer-employe relationship, fought for the right of
free association in trade unions at the beginning of the In-
dustrial Revolution, were denounced as rebels against the
existing order just as sit-downers, whose philosophy goes
no further, are today.
320
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Can the CCC Blaze a New Trail?
by HOWARD ROWLAND
A sociologist who has studied camp life suggests new social landmarks
that he believes the CCC should aim to reach
CCC YOUTH ARE THE BABIES OF THE WORLD WAR GROWN
up in a period of unprecedented depression. Life in a
work camp is no substitute for the more complete satis-
factions of full participation in the established community
and in industry; but, unfortunately, opportunities for jobs
and self-development have not existed in their home com-
munities. The CCC is an interlude. It fills a gap in the
lives of its recruits. In many cases it does a great deal
more than that. For some, of course, the camp means
tyranny and servitude; but for the majority it is a fascinat-
ing opportunity, an awakening to a new conception of
man's relation to man and to nature. For city youths the
journey to the CCC camp is often the first introduction
to the expanse of rural America. "It sure was a ride I'll
never forget," wrote one boy to his parents. "We traveled
3105 miles until we hit Colorado. We saw the sun rise
above the Rockies. It is a sight that cannot be described
by words." The camp, as a functioning, well equipped
social unit, is a revelation to many. "We are far from
anything," wrote another youth, "but the camp is like a
town all in itself. We have a doctor, canteen, hospital,
library, auto-shop, etc. We even have a laundry, and a
fellow who develops films and a barber."
For the first time many underprivileged boys had whole-
some food regularly and in abundance. "Yesterday, we
had ham, potatoes, salad, dessert, coffee, bread, lots of
JUNE 1937
butter, string beans, and something else. There are guys
standing and waiting for you to empty the platters, then
they go fill 'em up. You can only take three helpings,
but everybody is full on one. All the sugar you want, and
all the butter, too."
But life in the forest wilderness is not all sugar and
butter. The influence of the army in inculcating orderly
habits is not always appreciated by the CCC rookie. Jake
Bowersok wrote home about the policing of the camp for
inspection by a Corps Area officer: "Orders have been
issued about the neatness of the camp, and they are pretty
strict."
There is a saying in the camps that if the work project
runs smoothly everyone is happy. There is not only
discipline in work habits but also a fundamental educa-
tion in life. The following excerpts from letters home
are typical:
"Mom, I'm enclosing a few twigs from the many different
kinds of trees found here."
"One of the boys here in camp received as a present from
a sheep herder, a cougar skin or hide. A cougar is what is
called a mountain lion. This "cat" when killed, measured
seven feet from tip to tip. When this one was shot he was
carrying a 150 pound sheep away.
"You ask what I am doing. Right now I am helping put
321
in a new catch basin for the sink discharge. It's just a hole
in the ground, 10'xlO'xlO'."
"Now I'm 'tailing' the road grader. Have to throw rocks
and sticks off the road after the grader goes along. At present
we're near Coyote Camp."
But the influence of the home environment is not en-
tirely lost to the boy enrolled in Uncle Sam's tree army.
Every letter contains some reminiscence, some yearning
for home. For example, Bob Murphy, camp cook in an
Arizona soil conservation camp, wrote, "Now, mom, I
hope that you are all right, are you? If Minn goes to
the hospital, don't you strain yourself so much that you'll
be sick too."
A New Blend in Government
PRESIDING OVER THE DESTINIES OF THESE YOUNG EMERGENCY
conservationists is Robert Fechner, general vice-president
of the International Association of Machinists, on leave
of absence from his union post since April 5, 1933. His
advisory council consists of one representative each from
the Departments of War, Labor, Interior and Agriculture.
Many have attributed the success of the conservation pro-
gram to its unique plan of organization. In this plan
involving the effective cooperation of four federal depart-
ments much credit is due to Mr. Fechner.
The War Department is charged with the administration
of the camps — discipline, feeding, housing, clothing, trans-
portation and medical care. Members of the Reserve
Corps of the United States Army and Regular Army
officers were made camp commanders at the start. Regu-
lar Army officers have gradually been replaced by Reserve
Officers, many of whom are recent (more or less unem-
ployed) graduates of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps
in the land-grant colleges. The United States Office of
Education, called into the program to act in an advisory
capacity to the War Department on educational matters,
appoints the camp educational advisers and recommends
programs of instruction.
The conservation activities are directed by the Depart-
ments of Interior and Agriculture. The actual work in
each camp is in charge of a project superintendent, who
is employed by the federal department having jurisdiction
over the work project carried on by the particular camp.
The total strength of the Civilian Conservation Corps
was 300,000 in the first enrollment period in 1933. The
numbers increased to the peak figure of 506,000 enrolled
in 2562 camps in 1935. At the end of the year the
President directed that the enrollment should be reduced
to 300,000. This move met with .strong Congressional
opposition which resulted in the stabilization of the pro-
gram on the basis of 350,000 enrollees.
At the time of writing about 10 per cent of the CCC
camps serve unemployed war veterans and the remainder,
known as the junior camps, serve jobless youth between
the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, including Indians
on reservations. Eight percent of the personnel in the
junior camps are "local experienced men." The remainder,
called junior enrollees, receive $30 per month, of which
$25 is sent home to a needy relative. Leaders and assistant
leaders who make up 6 percent and 9 percent of each
camp's population, receive $45 and $36 per month
respectively.
The United States Employment Service is charged with
responsibility for recruiting the junior enrollees. The
actual selection has been delegated to relief agencies in
the home communities. All enrollees must come from
families of relief status. Certain standards of physical
and mental health are maintained. Individuals with a
known criminal record are excluded.
Personnel of the Tree Army
SOCIAL DATA COMPILED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
indicate that the age groups of seventeen and eighteen
years predominate, representing over one half of the junior
enrollees selected in the spring of 1935 and fall of 1936.
The majority of those enrolled have not gone beyond the
eighth grade in school. Less than 10 percent have been
graduated from highschool. Of the recent enrollees, ap-
proximately 20 percent report that they have had no
other employment prior to the CCC and the majority of
the remainder report from one to twelve months of un-
employment before going to camp.
Statistical appraisals of the CCC reveal that the weakest
part of its record is the loss in personnel prior to the
expiration of the enrollment period. Out of 563,182 dis-
charges issued during the fiscal year 1936, only 289,436
finished their term of enrollment. Of the remainder,
68,425 deserted and 46,490 were discharged for disciplinary
reasons. Of the other withdrawals, 145,531 left presumably
to accept employment. The number giving this reason
for leaving camp does not always indicate a real job
contact. Often this reputed reason may mean just a
polite declaration of desertion.
From the standpoint of the relief or social agency which
sent the boy to camp, the "over-the-hill" policy of dis-
missals for disciplinary reasons is particularly trying. This
policy and the large number of desertions add new and
unsolvable problems in community adjustment for the
youth who did not make a go of it in camp.
In 1934 and 1935 the Federal Emergency Relief Adminis-
tration conducted several studies of former members of
the CCC. The FERA research bulletin of April 15, 1934
stated, "The total picture that emerges is of a group of
highly transient and markedly under-employed boys and
young men." There is not yet time for optimism about
the rehabilitative achievements of the camps.
One serious problem is raised by the practice of dis-
missing enrollees who contract a venereal disease. After
infection is detected enough treatment is given to make
certain that the disease is not immediately communicable
and the enrollee is sent home. It is then very difficult
for an interested social welfare organization or any other
responsible community agency to be sure that the disease
will be cured.
From the standpoint of cost, the CCC is the most ex-
pensive form of work relief as yet devised by the federal
government. During the first twenty-seven months of
the program the expenditure per enrollee for each twelve-
month period was $1175. The largest item is $372 for the
enrollee's salary. Next is $155 for supervisory and tech-
nical personnel. Other items are: clothing $131; food
$140; shelter, $85; medical care $18; transportation $50;
all other costs $224.
With this gigantic spending guaranteeing adequate care
of immediate physical needs, the enrollees, once out of
sight, are often forgotten by welfare agencies in their
home communities. Yet there are problems of community
and camp adjustment which have not yet been solved and
which can hardly be solved except by social workers.
Some professional social workers object to the CCC be-
SURVEY GRAPHIC
cause they see in it fascist implications. Some view it as
excessively costly and feel that greater community bene-
fits would derive from spending the same sum for all
around benefits to the family of the enrollee. Some see
the camps as another form of custodial care, the monster
which social work has been slaying for years.
Some, of course, have pointed out the need for closer
working relationship between home, community and
camp. Personnel records in the camps, for example, are
woefully inadequate. Likewise, personnel practice. A
boy not adapting himself to the camp routine is dis-
missed, usually with little chance to discuss his situation
with a sympathetic adult, or to leave at his own volition
without the stigma of dismissal.
On the other hand too much camp life is not good
for many boys. Every camper goes through a process
of institutionalization, and a youth often goes stale if he
stays in a camp beyond a certain period of time. This
varies with each individual. The large number of with-
drawals can by no means be blamed entirely upon the
management of the camps.
So Far, Robustly Civilian
THE CCC, IN ADDITION TO ITS INFLUENCE ON YOUTH, HAS
affected the philosophies and activities of the permanent
governmental departments cooperating in its management.
The army has discovered a new social usefulness in
the peace-time affairs of the nation. Instead of depression
curtailment of its officer personnel, it was able to expand
and to offer valuable training to reserve officers. This
experience encouraged army men to adopt a more human
approach than ordinarily characterizes their leadership.
The army staff found itself participating in civilian affairs
in the far reaches of the nation. Instead of thinking
entirely of war, army leaders began to glimpse a vision of
domestic and world problems, of the social and economic
relations of a people.
The National Park Service increased, the scope of its
work. One of the youngest of established federal agencies,
the Park Service before the CCC was the museum keeper
of certain natural preserves and national monuments,
and handled thousands of tourists a year. It performed
its job well. Since 1933 the service has been expanded
to include the supervision of all work carried on by the
Conservation Corps in local and state parks throughout
the country. In addition, many new federal projects have
been made possible. The Park Service can now view its
work as a functional part of a nation-wide approach to
the recreational needs of an entire people. Another phase
of national readjustment is the retirement of submarginal
lands. Such areas have been turned over to the Park
Service under the conservation program to be made into
public domains for permanent recreational use. This is
a new form of federal aid to states and localities. We
have come to realize that the maintenance of public out-
door recreational facilities represents a major national
responsibility.
The U. S. Forest Service has benefited from the CCC
even more than has the National Park Service. Gov-
ernment officials assert that the work of the Conservation
Corps has advanced its program twenty years. Thou-
sands of acres of national, state and privately owned
timberlands for the first time have been properly devel-
oped and protected. Roads have been built which make
possible better fire control; insect pests have been effec-
tively checked; overcrowded areas have been thinned;
new trees have been planted on burned and cutover areas;
and what is more important, a youth population of work-
ers has become forestry conscious.
A million youths fired with an enthusiasm for forest
conservation may do more to make the United States
aware of its conservation problem than all the propaganda
of the U. S. foresters for the past thirty-five years. The
imagination of professional foresters has been unloosed to
the point where these men are now visioning, in the words
of Arthur C. Ringland of the U. S. Forest Service, "a
new pattern of American rural life and with it the socio-
economic stabilization of the population through the sus-
tained, rather than the fugitive, use of the natural products
of the soil."
MEANWHILE, DESPITE THE GREAT STRIDES THE CCC HAS MADE
in conserving natural resources, the task of more fully
conserving the youths themselves is far from complete.
A great emergency job has been done. But looking to
the future, to the youths' place in the workaday world,
some questions must be realistically faced : What happens
to the boy when he returns home? Is industry ready to
receive him? Has he learned things that will contribute
to his happiness and to the strength of the American
community of the future? The Office of Education has
been confronted with some of these questions. Educa-
tional advisers have tried to organize informal education
for thousands of these young men. Learning on the
job has been stressed. Wherever there was a demand,
classes were formed, and kept close to the life needs of
the class members. A major task of the educational
adviser in each camp has been to enlist the active coopera-
tion of the camp commander, work superintendent, chap-
lain, forester and any other technical staff member.
Forum groups, camp theatricals, athletics, a camp paper,
movies, lectures, college and university extension courses,
classes in nature study, reading, composition, arithmetic,
civics and so forth, characterize the CCC educational
program.
There is a good deal of feeling in the Office of Educa-
tion and elsewhere that solidly planned vocational train-
ing related to industrial opportunity should become a
major aspect of a permanent Civilian Conservation Corps.
The writer has been told by persons close to the program
that such training has been effectively blocked to date
in the interest of organized labor to avoid any threat to
the existing union hierarchy in the United States. Labor
union men feel that trade training is not possible apart
from the job itself. Others who object to specific trade
training in the camps feel that it would be unrelated to
the work and life of the CCC and therefore would not
meet with a hearty response from the enrollees. The
cost of such a vocational training program would also be
an obstacle.
Skills entering into trades are of course transmitted in
the camp as it is now constituted. Some knowledge of
carpentry, plumbing, electric wiring, cooking, motor me-
chanics, truck driving and the use of other heavy motor
equipment (tractors, air compressors, etc.), road building,
office routines, foremanship and so on, must of necessity
be picked up by many enrollees in every camp. It has
been pointed out that fundamentals of woodwork and
woodcraft, motor mechanics, office practice, cookery and
road work might be taught as basic courses without
JUNE 1937
323
6 A. M. AND 10 BELOW
IN A WISCONSIN
CAMP
Sketches by
TOM ROST, JR.
SUNDAY PAPERS
setting up shops for more involved trade training.
In addition to forcing numerous governmental depart-
ments into unconventional thinking and action, the CCC
has helped modify our conception of government. It
has redefined many areas of federal-state responsibility
and cooperation. It has broadened the task of conserving
both natural and human resources. The horizons of the
permanent Forest and Park Services of the federal gov-
ernment have been extended. Relief officials have found
new encouragement. The Office of Education is . busy
working at solutions for its many unsolved problems.
The Department of Labor has a vision of hope rather
than despair for unemployed youth.
Is It the Moral Equivalent of War?
WILLIAM JAMES HAS OFTEN BEEN REFERRED TO AS THE
spiritual father of the CCC. In his essay, The Moral
Equivalent of War, he wrote:
If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of mili-
tary conscription a conscription of the whole youthful popu-
lation to form for a certain number of years a part of the
army enlisted against Nature, the injustices would tend to
be evened out, and numerous other goods to the common-
wealth would follow.
They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own
part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they
would tread the earth more proudly, the women would
value them more highly, they would be better fathers and
teachers of the following generation.
So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a
whole community, and until an equivalent discipline has been
organized, I believe that war must have its way.
It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and
of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunity.
Approximately 1,635,000 depression youths have enlisted
in an army against nature and paid the "blood tax." But,
on the other hand, the rudiments of war preparation form
an integral pattern of the scheme which proposes to at-
tack the problem of conservation by enlisting the nation's
youth. This is true whether or not the army is present
in an administrative capacity. Should the army be elimi-
nated from the CCC, the enrollee must still be disciplined;
there will be first aid, the stretcher, the ambulance call.
There must be roads to the camps, making possible the
transportation and billetting of troops in case of actual
war. Soil and forestry development are as essential to a
war economy as to peacetime activity. Remove the army
from the CCC and it will lose no essential features which
make it as useful in war as in peace.
Americans can not come to an understanding of the
Civilian Conservation Corps by confusing themselves with
pro-military or anti-military propaganda regarding its past
or future. As a social experiment it must be studied in
terms of its efficiency in fulfilling an assigned task —
placing in useful work for a limited period that age group
of young men out of school and not yet absorbed in
industry.
With unemployment concentrated in the large industrial
centers, the logical solution was to send these youths to
work in the national forests and parks. Such areas, espe-
cially in the Far West, had never been carefully developed.
So the largest number of recruits were sent there. Fur-
ther, the problem of soil conservation which had never
been realistically tackled offered an abundance of socially
useful work. The "lost generation" of depression-wasted
youth was given a chance to do it. They have done
it well.
The President now proposes that the CCC be made per-
manent. In considering its extension, let us ask a few
questions:
If this nation, through the next decades, is to face
squarely the task of genuine conservation of natural re-
sources, shall we permanently delegate the bulk of this
work to, young men recruited from the towns and cities,
seriously dislocating these youths, some of them perma-
nently, by enlistment comparable to foreign service insofar
as its effect upon community ties is concerned? Can
the problem of the urban youth be solved outside his
natural habitat? Should he be kept out of the city away
from the problems of a struggling industrial civilization?
Is the city youth as suitable an agent for a permanent
forestry policy as the rural or mountain youth? Admit
that the city youth can be made hard and tough, without
"callousness" — but the city to which he will return re-
quires a different kind of toughness. In comparison with
the problem of the industrial system and its factories,
forestry problems have been long since nearer to a
solution.
FROM MY OBSERVATIONS OF CAMP LIFE AND FORESTRY, I BE-
lieve that what is needed for permanent forestry and
park advancement is the encouragement of communities,
people with families, homes, schools and churches in the
forestry areas. Forestry-minded youths need a foothold
in the social system. The rudiments of such communities
now exist. In such a scheme a permanent CCC might well
be a school of woodmanship in which every enrollee
would be required to take courses as in college. Every
adult staff member should be a teacher as well as a tech-
nical expert in some aspect of the work of the camp.
Eventually the army could be eliminated, not because it
is not useful, but because it is not useful enough. Such
schools should be headed by a forester or other conserva-
tion expert who is essentially an educator in the broadest
sense. These schools of the forests should become integral
to the entire life of the adult civilian life of conservation
areas. The male population of such areas would in-
evitably dedicate their careers to the forests in a socializa-
tion of man as well as timber. City youths need not be
excluded, but they should be youths with a natural zeal
for rugged simplicity, for the calmness of nature, its vast-
ness and its perversity.
A permanent conservation corps could embody the
principle of absorbing urban labor in time of widespread
unemployment; but to overstress this policy may prove
to be non-economic.
The transition to a permanent forest school basis could
be gradual and should be based upon the solid training
of the right kind of personnel. We can not dismiss U. S.
Army aid too quickly or the loss will be greater than the
gain. A new philosophy and educational psychology
must emerge with the kind of camp I have in mind
Some of its features would come from John Dewey, but
other aspects have not yet been invented.
This proposal envisions in the development of a perma-
nent CCC the ultimate demobilization of the CCC as it
now exists. Even its drab khaki uniforms are too remin-
iscent of the depression. They should be put in the past
and forgotten. If we are to have uniforms in the future,
may they be of forestry green.
325
Saving the Coal Industry
by H. O. ROGERS
A coal authority describes the developments which have brought the
industry to today's new stage — signalized by the Guffey-Vinson Act
and the recent wage agreement with the union
FOR YEARS BITUMINOUS COAL MINING WAS THE STEPCHILD OF
our national economy. Today, thanks to the developments
of the past four years and particularly to the recent enact-
ment of the Gufley-Vinson coal bill, the whole outlook
for the industry has changed. From a long range view it
is not at all certain whether the measures adopted have
actually initiated an adequate recovery program for the
industry. But in March 1933, it was patent that an articu-
late plan for the rehabilitation of bituminous coal mining
was long overdue.
During the decade 1923-32 production was reduced 45
percent, sales realizations were cut in half, nearly 5000
mines were forced out of business, and the enormous
profits of the industry in the years immediately following
the War were transformed into a net loss of $51,167,000.
Significantly enough, moreover, a major share of these
losses occurred prior to 1930, when virtually all other
American industries were being swept forward by the
riptide of post-War prosperity. Even in 1929, when the
pinnacle of the post-War boom was reached, the bitumi-
nous-coal industry operated at a net loss of $11,822,000.
The lean years that followed in the wake of 1929 served
merely to accentuate the plight of the industry.
Although the operators did not escape unscathed, it
was the mine workers who bore the brunt of the hard
times. Between 1923 and 1932, nearly 300,000 soft coal
miners lost their jobs, and the earnings of those who
were fortunate enough to remain on mine payrolls were
drastically reduced, partly because of curtailed operating
time and partly because of an epidemic of riotous wage
slashing. According to the wage surveys made by the
U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the actual hourly earn-
ings of all wage earners in the industry fell from an aver-
age of $0.857 to $0.411 during the ten-year interval, a re-
duction of 52 percent.
But even these figures fail to show the bottom level of
wages. Evidence was introduced in the Carter Coal case
showing that in the spring of 1931 it was not at all un-
common for a coal miner in West Virginia to receive at
the end of two weeks from 15 to 20 cents in cash. Many
workers, moreover, reported that they had seen hardly
any cash within two years, but had been living entirely
on company scrip. Another witness in the same. case tes-
tified that in one district in the southern Appalachian
region in 1931-32 wages averaged $1.25 a day and that
$7.20 might be considered typical of a miner's earnings
during a two-week pay period. From this amount, $2.50
was deducted for rent, $2 for powder, $1 for the company
doctor, 75 cents for coal, and 25 cents for blacksmithing.
In all, these deductions amounted to $6.50, leaving the
miner and his family a balance of only 70 cents for food.
In the central competitive fields, the former stronghold
of the United Mine Workers of America, the miners
were only slightly better off. With the tightening of com-
petition caused by shrinking markets and falling prices,
non-unionism became a precious business asset. As early
as 1925, scarcely a third of the soft coal output was being
produced by mines operating under contract with the
UMWA, whereas three years before nearly 70 percent of
the coal producing capacity was closed when a strike was
called by the union. After the expiration of the Jackson-
ville wage agreement, moreover, the movement away
from the union was accelerated. In the late twenties,
the collective bargaining machinery collapsed completely
and by the winter of 1932-33, little remained of what was
once the most powerful labor contingent in the United
States except the anthracite miners of Pennsylvania.
The cluster of influences responsible for the demorali-
zation of coal mining have been relatively familiar since
the middle twenties. Indeed, the ills of the industry
formed the basis for a ponderous body of literature and
many a rigorous thinker of the New Era almost made his
fortune by discovering an unsuspected symptom or con-
triving a new nostrum. Consequently, a comprehensive
catalogue of the problems of the industry is hardly neces-
sary at this time. The focal points of disorder, however,
were: excess mine capacity; competition of other sources
of power and heat; advances in fuel efficiency; techno-
logical changes in methods of mining.
Of the four principal factors, excess mine capacity has
probably been the most important. For as far back as
the record reaches, there is unmistakable evidence that
the industry has been burdened with a fantastic surplus
capacity. (See chart, page 328.) The high water mark
was reached in 1923 when the mines in operation had po-
tential capacity of 970 million tons, indicating that the in-
dustry was geared to produce nearly 70 percent more ton-
nage than the market has ever been able to absorb.
This enormous disparity between capacity and market
requirements was due
first of all to the com-
mon law concept of land
ownership that carried
with it the right to ex-
ploit subsoil mineral de-
posits for private profit.
As a result, over half of
the world's coal reserves
quickly passed into the
hands of private owners,
each burning with the
desire to translate his
holdings into pecuniary
terms. Under such cir-
cumstances, orderly de-
velopment of the indus-
1923
1929
1932
1935
Coal consumed per kwh of elec-
tricity generated. Each symbol
represents one pound
326
SURVEY GRAPHIC
try was out of the question. Nor was the task made easier
by the railroads in their mad scramble for the highly
profitable coal traffic. Uneconomic expansion was further
encouraged by recurring strikes, which served as a sharp
spur to the opening of new mines in unorganized areas.
Overdevelopment was serious enough before the War
when the markets for coal were expanding. From 1898
through 1918 the demand for bituminous coal was in-
creasing at the rate of almost 10 percent a year. Under
such circumstances, there was always the possibility that
eventually demand might catch up with capacity. Since
the War, the markets have been shrinking instead of
expanding and the problems of the industry have accord-
ingly multiplied.
The shrinkage of demand since the War has not been
due to any decrease in the energy requirements of the
nation. Indeed, according to studies of F. G. Tryon of
the United States Bureau of Mines, the country's total
energy requirements increased substantially between 1918
and 1930, in spite of the sharp contraction in the demand
for coal. What happened in the eleven years immedi-
ately following the War, then, is not that the country's
energy budget became smaller, but that there was a broad
shift in the sources of power. While the proportion of the
total furnished by coal dropped from 81.8 percent in 1918
to 60.4 percent in 1929, there was a corresponding in-
crease in the combined portion supplied by petroleum,
natural gas and water power. During the depression coal
lost still more ground and in 1932 coal furnished only
slightly more than half (52.5 percent) of the total energy
requirements of the country.
The most striking gain during the decade following
the War was registered by domestic oil. In 1918, petro-
leum's share of the national energy budget was less than
10 percent. In 1929, by contrast, the contribution of do-
mestic oil amounted to nearly 23 percent. It is important
to note in this connection that these calculations include
not only the petroleum used as fuel oil under boilers,
and consequently competing more or less directly with
coal, but also the energy used in the form of gasoline,
kerosene and other refined products. Even these refined
products involve a measure of indirect competition with
coal.
Hardly less striking than the increase in domestic oil
are the gains registered by coal's other competitors. The
markets for natural gas, imported oil and hydro-electric
power likewise more than doubled between 1918 and
1929, a period of marked industrial expansion.
Important
1923
1929
1932
1936
Employment in bituminous coal mining. Each
symbol represents 100,000 workers
as has been
the influence
of competi-
tion from
other sources
of heat and
power, it was
not sufficient
to account
for all of the
slowing
down in the
demand for
coal. Of al-
most equal
significance
was the remarkable advance in efficiency of fuel utiliza-
tion. The history of the steam engine is a record of suc-
cessive economies in fuel consumption, but it is evident
that improvements in general practice were especially
rapid in the decade following the World War. No epoch-
making inventions comparable to those of Neilson and
Watt were made during the period, but consumers found
many ways to save fuel and the cumulative effect of many
small improvements had a profound influence on the coal
industry.
BY FAR THE MOST SPECTACULAR PROGRESS WAS MADE BY THE
electric public utilities. From 1919 to 1929 the electric
power generated by central stations increased 150 percent,
but the quantity of coal consumed by the electric utilities
during the same period showed a comparatively modest
gain of only 35 percent. Part of this difference was due to
the rapid development of water power, but even after
allowance is made for this it is clear that the consumption
of coal failed to keep pace with the increase in the produc-
tion of electricity generated at the steam plants. The rea-
son for this was that during the intervening years the
consumption of coal per kilowatt hour of electricity pro-
duced was virtually cut in half. Whereas in 1919 it re-
quired 3.2 pounds of coal to generate one kilowatt hour
of electricity, the same work was being accomplished in
1930 with 1.62 pounds of coal. During the depression still
further progress was made and in 1933 the average con-
sumption per kilowatt hour was 1.50 pounds.
The records of the railroads reveal a similar trend. Al-
though a decrease is shown in the total consumption of
coal by the railroads in the decade following the War, this
was not due to a decrease in the physical volume of trans-
portation. As a matter of fact, both the freight ton-miles
and the passenger-train car-miles increased during the
period. Increased consumption of fuel oil by the railroads
accounts for part of the decline, but not all of it. The
decrease is explained in large part by the fact that be-
tween 1919 and 1929 the consumption of coal in freight
service was cut from 164 pounds per 1000 gross ton-miles
to 125 pounds, a saving of almost 24 percent. At the same
time, consumption in passenger service was reduced from
18.1 pounds per passenger-train car-mile to 14.9 pounds.
For the iron and steel industry, another important con-
sumer of coal, the record is much the same. In 1919 the
consumption of coking coal per gross ton of pig iron pro-
duced was 2310.2 pounds, but by 1929 only 2058.6 pounds
were required. Another cause that had a part in arresting
the demand in the iron and steel industry since the War
was the rise in the use of scrap iron and steel. Thus the
output of steel during the period 1926-30 was 30 percent
greater than the average for the period 1916-20, but the
production of pig iron increased only 8 percent.
Still further evidence of the increase of fuel efficiency is
available in many other directions. Indeed, wherever rec-
ords of fuel performance are kept, clear cut evidence of
reduced consumption per unit of product will be found.
The rapid rise of the by-product coke oven, for example,
represents an enormous saving, since the old beehive oven
wasted a third of the heat value of coal. Great economies
have also been affected by general manufacturing estab-
lishments, cement plants and petroleum refineries.
Coupled with the contracting market for coal have come
far-reaching changes in mining technology. Since the War,
a veritable mechanical revolution has taken place in bitu-
JUNE 1937
327
BITUMINOUS COAL. PRODUCTION. REALIZATION ~»
MINE CAPACITY » T«« UNITED STATES 1899 - 1934
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Mil Mm
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U. S. Geological Survey and U. S. Bureau of Mines. Charts
prepared by Bituminous Coal Unit, Division of Review, NRA,
under direction of F. E. Berquist
minous coal mining. Developments in the direction of
mine mechanization include not only the widespread
adoption of mechanical loading, but also the adoption of
machine cutting, power drilling of shot holes, more effect-
ive explosives, electric haulage, larger mine cars, improve-
ment in hoist and tipple equipment, mechanical sizing
and cleaning, the rise of strip mining and scores of lesser
improvements.
To a large extent the brilliant progress made in the
field of technology was the outgrowth of the economic
difficulties of the industry. Faced with extinction by the
tightening of competition, improved technique has come
to the rescue of many producers and prolonged their eco-
nomic life span. But translated into human terms the ad-
vance in technology was an important contributing factor
in the displacement of the 300,000 bituminous mine work-
ers between 1923 and 1932.
UNEMPLOYMENT is A GRAVE SOCIAL PROBLEM WHEREVER IT
exists, but it is especially critical in the coal industry, as
more often than not mining is carried on in remote re-
gions that are lacking in other industries for the working
population to fall back on. A further complicating factor
is that even in communities where other industries exist
and jobs are available, there is a marked prejudice against
the employment of miners. "Don't hire a former miner"
is a rule that is closely adhered to by factory personnel
managers. They believe that the peculiar freedom that for-
merly characterized mine labor makes the miner unsuited
to work under close supervision in a factory. Indeed this
reasoning is even echoed at the mechanized mines where
green workers are preferred to the old-time miner.
All of these factors combined to convince the public at
large, notwithstanding a stubborn faith in the sacred pos-
tulates of laissez-faire, that the bituminous coal industry
was ripe for regulation. Uncontrolled competition had pro-
duced results that were beyond peradventure socially un-
desirable. Accordingly, the flowering of the National
Recovery Act in the summer of 1933 promised more for
bituminous coal mining than for almost any other branch
of industrial activity. Moreover in spite of a welter of con-
flicting opinions the bituminous industry was among the
first to submit to code regulation.
The central idea of the Bituminous Coal Code was to
assure profitable prices to the operators. With this as the
bait, the producers agreed to a schedule of minimum
wages and maximum hours and even conceded union rec-
ognition. Although there were numerous evasions, the
code did check the frenzied rout of the industry. Under
the provisions of the code, wage rates for the industry as
a whole were raised appreciably above those prevailing in
1932 and the early part of 1933. In some districts the Uni-
ted Mine Workers claimed that the code advanced wage
rates as much as 100 percent above the pre-code level. For
the most part, however, the gains were modest and in a
few districts which, in the early part of 1933, were still
operating under contract with the UMWA, the adoption
of the code meant virtually no change. As for the pro-
ducers, the code enabled them to show a net operating
profit in 1934 for the first time in years.
So favorably did the industry take to the code idea, it
was the first to ask for an extension of the NRA beyond
the two years prescribed by the Act. Moreover, when the
NRA was invalidated by the Supreme Court in May 1935,
the mine workers and most of the operators united to force
the enactment of the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act
of 1935 (the Guffey Act), a "little NRA" for the coal
industry.
Like the NRA code, the Guffey Coal Act sought to
raise wages to respectable levels by suspending the Anti-
Trust Acts and providing the operators with price-fixing
machinery. In accordance with the provisions of the Act,
a National Bituminous Coal Commission was created
which was authorized to formulate a code of fair compe-
tition for the bituminous coal industry. To enforce com-
pliance, the Act imposed a tax of 15 percent on the mine
price of coal, but operators who complied with the pro-
visions of the code were entitled to a rebate of 90 percent
of the tax. The overshadowing problem faced in draft-
ing the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935 was
the machinery for determining prices. The objective was
clear enough. It was to develop a structure of prices that
would permit the industry as a whole at least to meet its
production costs, without disturbing the delicate balance of
inter-field competition. One of the outstanding character-
istics of bituminous coal mining is the wide variation in
production costs. A special analysis of the Research and
Planning Division of the NRA, for example, showed that
in the Appalachian region alone the average cost of pro-
duction of the deep mines in December 1933 ranged from
$1.21 in one field to $2.73 a ton in another. The average
for the region as a whole was $1.84. The situation is still
further complicated if the stripping operations are inclu-
ded. For the entire country, the average cost at strip pits
in December 1933 was $1.17 a ton, but at the operations in
North Dakota the cost was as low as 97 cents. These fig-
ures are indicative of the far-reaching dislocations that
might result if prices in each district were fixed solely
upon production costs in that district.
The price fixing machinery devised to meet this diffi-
culty was largely based upon the procedures previously
developed under the old NRA code, with the addition,
however, that Congress now provided a yardstick, namely,
that the structure of prices was to yield a revenue not less
328
SURVEY GRAPHIC
than the average cost of production. As a starting point
the commission was instructed to ascertain the cost in each
district. Initial slates of prices for each district based upon
these cost determinations were then to be "coordinated"
in such manner as to permit the maintenance of estab-
lished competitive relationships in common markets. The
complications involved in reaching final determinations on
the thousands of prices for individual grades and mar-
kets may be imagined. The chief defense of the work-
ability of the plan lay in the fact that something essentially
like it had actually been operated under the NRA code.
For better or for worse, the Bituminous Coal Conserva-
tion Act of 1935 never actually became effective. From the
start the Coal Commission was hamstrung by injunctions
and as a result the complicated price fixing scheme was
never put to a test. Within nine months after the law was
passed by Congress, it was declared unconstitutional by
the Supreme Court. The basis for the Court's decision was
much the same as in the Schechter Case.
Now comes a new Guffey law, the Bituminous Coal Act
of 1937. In deference to the climate of opinion prevailing
in the Supreme Court, the present bill contains no labor
provisions apart from a somewhat empty declaration of
policy, favoring collective bargaining. But John L. Lewis
and his UMWA, were willing to support the bill without
the labor guarantees in return for an increase of 50 cents in
basic wage rates. In other respects, the new Guffey law
is essentially the same as its predecessors, the central idea
again being that with price cutting curbed the industry
can be capitalized and decent wages maintained.
But out of the bargain the consumer's coal bills will be
boosted approximately $100 million a year. Supporters of
the bill claim that the increased prices will be borne
principally by railroads, public utilities, and other large
consumers — a naive notion that disregards past experience.
What will be the net result of the Guffey-Vinson mea-
sure on the bituminous coal industry is unpredictable. It
is known that between 1932 and 1936, partly because of our
previous ventures into control of bituminous mining and
partly because of a goodly measure of industrial recovery,
production increased 41 percent, average hourly earnings
increased 53 percent, labor costs per unit of output in-
creased 41 percent, and wholesale prices have increased
from 17 percent for run-of-mine to nearly 37 percent for
Net income « Deficit ofu" Bituminous Coal industry,
Prior to Deductions "* Tax, f« Specified Years
, 1917 - '
prepared sizes. In contrast with the rise of 41 percent in
production, employment in 1936 averaged 17 percent more
than in 1932 and average weekly hours advanced only
9 percent during the four-year interval.
As the new Guffey law is modeled very largely in
the image of the NRA code and the Bituminous Coal
Conservation Act of 1935, these same trends may be ex-
pected to continue. But much depends upon whether the
elaborate ceremonial that has been devised for fixing
prices will be found workable. If it can be made to work,
it is fairly certain that the end product will contain most
of the elements of competitive prices because petty chicane
and sharp bargaining will tend to preserve prevailing dif-
ferentials. Furthermore, by failing to recognize that coal is
only one of several sources of heat and energy, it is entirely
possible that violence will be done to the industry's deli-
cate competitive relationship.
Salient Statistics of Bituminous Coal Industry, 1913, 1934, and 1935
Item
1913
1934
1935
Total production net tons
478,435,297
5,776
75.4
571,882
494,238
77,644
232
51.6
3.61
837
50.7
359,368,022
'6,258
80.5
458,011
384,947
73,064
178
40.0 and 35.1
4.40
785
84.1
12.2
20,789,641
35,853,714
372,373,122
J6,315
80.7
462,403
389,942
72,461
179
35.1
4.50
805
84.2
13.5
23,647,292
39,511,176
Total number of mines (over 1 000 net tons)
Percent of output from mines producing 100,000 net tons and over
Surface . .
Nominal length of full-time week hours
Output per man per day . . net tons. .
Percent of underground output mechanically loaded
Quantity mined by stripping . net tons. .
31, 280,946
22,069,691
Quantity cleaned by wet or pneumatic processes net tons .
iThe increase in 1934 and 1935 over preceding years is largely due to more complete coverage of small trucking mines made possible by eoopcration
of the N.R.A.
2As reported by the operator; not hours actually worked by men.
aFigure for 1914, the year of earliest record.
4Exclusive of central washeries operated by consumers. Monthly Labor Review for April 1937
JUNE 1937
329
Ministers and Spiritual Maladies
by RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D.
A noted physician recommends that clergymen keep records of all
their individual contacts with people in trouble, as doctors and social
workers do
EVER SINCE I WAS AN INTERNE AT THE MASSACHUSETTS GEN-
eral Hospital, in 1892, I have been concerned on account
of the lack of any adequate spiritual service to Protestant
patients. Catholic patients get the daily attendance of a
priest, and have always seemed to me very well looked
after. Protestant patients have had until recently no in-
dividual care. We have had ministers who made occasional
visits to the hospital as a whole but they have never been
able to give time and attention enough to meet the needs
of individuals. If a Protestant patient happened to ask for
a clergyman of his denomination, one was sent for and
no doubt did reasonably good work; but most Protestant
patients never would think to ask for a minister. Many
of them, of course, feel no particular need for one. But
there is an important minority which does feel the need
and until recently has had no satisfaction for it.
Feeling this need urgently myself, I was one of those
interested some years ago in incorporating the Council for
the Clinical Training of Theological Students, with the
object of supplying to theological students some familiar-
ity with the spiritual needs of sick people in hospitals. In
connection with this council there has gradually developed
in Boston a group of ministers giving their whole time
to the spiritual needs of hospital patients. Rev. Russell L.
Dicks began this work at the Massachusetts General Hos-
pital in June 1933; Rev. David R. Hunter began a similar
ministry at our great state almshouse at Tewksbury, Mass.,
in June 1935; and in the autumn of 1936 Rev. A. D. Dodd
became Protestant chaplain at the Boston City Hospital.
These ministers are paid by private funds unconnected
with the hospitals in which they work. They are there to
give, not social assistance nor physical care, but specific-
ally Christian spiritual ministry. Under their supervision
groups of theological students from different seminaries
throughout the country have been getting a sort of interne
service in the summer months.
I am concerned in this article not with the need or the
usefulness of this work but with one special aspect of it,
namely, the collection of case records illustrating (a) spir-
itual needs and (b) their treatment by the minister. These
case records are written by the ministers themselves and
also by the theological students working under their super-
vision. Three examples of such cases are given in the ap-
pendix of the book on The Art of Ministering to the Sick,
published in the spring of 1936 by Rev. R. L. Dicks and
myself. [Macmillan]. It is my hope that on the basis of
cases like diese we may be able to build up a clinical
theology which bears the same relation to its case basis as
medicine does to medical cases, law to law cases, and so-
cial work to social cases.
In the history of medicine and of medical teaching,
330
systematic medicine preceded clinical medicine. Books
were written and lectures delivered for students who had
little opportunity to see patients at the bedside. Statements
were made about disease because it had been traditional
in the medical profession to believe them and not because
they represented a generalization from clinical experience.
Side by side with these and with other systematic medical
courses on anatomy and physiology, there has developed
more and more in the last eighty years a body of clinical
knowledge every bit of which is supposed to be based on
a statistical accumulation of cases proving its truth. If one
says the spleen is enlarged in typhoid fever, one means, for
example, that such enlargement has been found in 71.6 per-
cent of the cases, as in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Series.
We have, then, in present medical teaching, two groups
of courses: (1) those intended primarily to build up the
student's fundamental knowledge of the human body but
not directly to be applied at the bedside; such are the
courses in anatomy, physiology, and especially in embry-
ology (2) the courses in clinical medicine, clinical surgery,
and their branches. The latter courses deal especially with
the commonest diseases and give less attention to those
which the student is likely to see seldom or never.
PARALLEL TO THESE TWO BRANCHES OF MEDICAL TEACHING
there should be, I think, two branches of theological teach-
ing, first, systematic theology, and second, clinical theol-
ogy. Systematic theology deals with all the evidence neces-
sary to build up the student's fundamental knowledge of
God and of man in his relations to God. It should deal
with many problems which the student needs to be famil-
iar with for his own stabilization, but which he will rarely
or never meet in his pastoral work with people in spiritual
distress. Clinical theology would not aim to replace, but
only to supplement systematic theology. In clinical theol-
ogy common spiritual maladies should be dealt with much
more fully than those which are demonstrably rare. By
"spiritual maladies" I mean such troubles as fear of death,
bitterness towards the world and its Maker, or the sense
of hopeless guilt.
It is not always easy to make a correct diagnosis of
spiritual needs any more than it is of the body's needs and
diseases. In the past there have been what we now believe
to be wholly false spiritual diagnoses, such as witchcraft
and demoniacal possession; just as in the past there have
been false physical diagnoses such as "fatty heart." In
treatment, too, measures have been employed in the spirit-
ual as well as the physical field which we believe now to
have been a mistake. The attempt to break the will, to
humiliate the sinner until even his self-respect was de-
stroyed, exemplify this on the spiritual side. Treating tu-
SURVBY GRAPHIC
berculosis by bleeding exemplifies it on the physical side.
There seems to me value in beginning the study of
clinical theology as we begin the study of clinical medi-
cine, from the point of view of symptoms or articulate
needs. Spiritual needs represent one branch of the same
root-craving that has built up science. Science comes out
of our need to get at truth, to follow reality. We have con-
demned "wishful thinking" much too indiscriminately.
All science, as well as all the rest of civilization comes out
of a wish — the wish to find the truth. Wishful thinking
is not only good, it is the source of all man's accomplish-
ments when it is pushed on by the fundamental desire to
know the truth as far and as fast as we can. Whatever
expresses that desire is good alike in science, philosophy
and theology.
HENCE IF OUR COLLECTION OF CASES OF SOUL DISEASES AND
soul remedies is obtained and verified by following the
desire for reality, it can build up a theology that will be as
valid as any other section of truth. It is not at all easy to
recognize correctly the needs of the human soul any more
than those of the human body. They are hidden under
veils of inarticulateness and of self-ignorance, as the needs
of the human body are hidden behind our ignorance of
physical and chemical processes. But by the accumulation
and criticism of a large number of well written case rec-
ords involving spiritual needs as they appear either in sick-
ness or in health, we may arrive in the course of time at a
relatively reliable list of the common ills of the human
soul. I am thinking, of course, not of mental disease or
mental impairment, but of man's vehement questions
about whence, why, and whither — questions which come
to the surface in illness, in bereavement or in disgrace,
though they are hidden ordinarily behind the smoke
screen of daily activities. Theology is the attempt to an-
swer ultimate questions. Many people do not ask ultimate
questions or face ultimate facts most of the time because
they allow themselves either to put such matters altogether
out of sight or to make assumptions about them which
may be knocked to pieces by the clearer knowledge
brought to suffering humanity in times of stress. Then
they sometimes perceive their need of theology.
The case records which we have begun to collect and
desire to see collected on a far larger scale, are not con-
cerned with any attempt on the part of clergymen to heal
disease. At the present time I think any such attempt is a
mistake because it brings the clergyman into competition
In Survey Graphic, April 1933, Dr. Cabot dealt with
situations in which our desires may be shrouded but our
needs revealed. He began that article with the following
words which are no less pertinent to his present article
than they were to that special message in a period of
national stress:
"Everyone knows whether he is hungry, whether he is
sleepy, whether he wishes to loaf, to go home, to get a
job, to get married. Desires are self-evident. But our
sense that we have any particular needs (beyond food and
shelter) is not always awake. Needs, and especially our
central need of growth, are not self-evident. Only a
piercing experience brings them to the surface of
consciousness."
with the physician — a competition in which the minister
is sure to lose, because he will split his parish. The diag-
nosis and treatment attempted by the minister and re-
corded in the cases to which I have referred should be
the diagnosis and treatment of specifically religious needs,
which in my own experience means the need of light on
three problems: the nature or existence of God; the hope
of immortality; the nature of sin or wrongdoing.
It IS MY BELIEF THAT JESUS CHRIST HAS GIVEN US MORE LIGHT
than we can obtain from any other source, both on the
nature of spiritual disease and on its treatment. He did
not feed the needy with theological doctrine but with the
applications of that doctrine; and it is the business of the
Christian ministry today to try to help individuals in
trouble by supplying as nearly as they can the same sort
of food that Jesus supplied to those who met him. It may
be that Christianity is not all that we need in order to
understand and to minister to the common spiritual dis-
eases of mankind. This is a particularly difficult question
to answer because it has been the habit of Christianity
for nearly two thousand years to take up into itself and
make part of its doctrines ideas coming to it from sources
as widely separated as those of Plato and Aristotle and
those of Darwin and Hegel. I believe that Jesus Christ
said what He said because it was true. I do not believe
that anything is true because He said it. He discovered
and fixed in commandments the most valuable truth that
man has yet known.
When ministers attempt to convey Christian principles
and Christian motives, working in a hospital side by side
with physicians, they are apt to catch the experimental
frame of mind. They become genuinely anxious to find
out whether the ideas which they have received about the
diagnosis and treatment of spiritual ills are true. To verify
or upset these ideas by experience, they inevitably find
that they must keep records. Indeed I do not believe there
has ever been any good reason why a clergyman should
not keep records of all his individual contacts with people
in trouble, as a doctor or a social worker does.
These spiritual case records plus adequate reflection on
them and progressive experimentation with the methods of
treatment which reflection suggests, should enable us to
build up a theology verifiable in experiment like the other
beliefs used in hospitals by doctors and by social workers.
The proof of a good foundation for a building is that
it supports weight indefinitely. Theology attempts to put a
firm foundation beneath the guesses, assumptions and tra-
ditions by reason of which men believe that life is worth
living and that a growing life is better than a stagnant
one. To the extent that a theology actually bears weight
and. is not contradicted by the realities of experience, it is
good. If no experience that comes to us in sickness, dis-
grace or bereavement undermines our fundamental beliefs
or diminishes the vigor of our efforts to grow and to help
others grow, our beliefs have been verified, like other be-
liefs, in experience.
Clinical medicine has been built up on a case basis as an
attempt to meet the physical needs of the sick. Clinical
theology should be built up as an attempt to meet their
spiritual needs. It should be established and verified as
firmly as any branch of knowledge and if clergymen will
visit the sick, the bereaved and those in any other sort of
spiritual distress, and will keep records of their work,
clinical theology will be born and grow.
JUNE 1937
331
"A Thousand Threads
Bind the Artist to His
Fellow Men"
AT HOME by Don Freeman
JOBLESS by Tully Filmus
ASTURIAN MINER
AND FAMILY
by Maurice Glickman
Newest to enter the fold of social interpreters is that one-time
isolationist, the creative artist. He is organizing, and aligning
himself with other organizations with a similar purpose, to preserve
democracy and further peaceful economic and cultural progress.
The American Artists Congress, now a year old, has many leading
artists in its membership of six hundred and fifty. Among its
activities in these few months have been three noteworthy country-
wide exhibitions, the most important being the national membership
. -
DAY LABORER by Frank C. Kirk
PIECE WORKER by Paul Burlii
show held in April simultaneously in eight regions of the United
States. The examples here given, from the New York regional
show which five thousand people attended, were selected because
the artists' choice of subject matter testifies to their new awareness
of the world of people. They recognize, as Lynd Ward stated in
his foreword to the catalogue for the regional exhibitions, that "a
thousand threads bind the artist to his fellow men" — threads of
common experience in hard times or good, and of mutual need
Who Will Pay the Piper?
by ROBERT MOSES
Every American community that has increased its recreation facilities through
vast depression spending must face this question. New York's park com-
missioner here answers it in terms of the country's biggest development of
parks, playgrounds and parkways
THE SPREAD OF PARKS, PLAYGROUNDS AND PARKWAYS IN
New York City and the metropolitan area is one of the
silver linings of depression that will tarnish rapidly unless
adequate provision is made for its maintenance. Where
are we to get the wherewithal not only to care for all the
new charges financed by the city itself, but also to groom
the gift horses sent to us by our wealthy federal rela-
tives? Obviously the city will have to pay the entire feed
bill after the relief agencies have turned over to the local
government the improvements made by relief and other
unusual funds. This is the choice that communities, the
country over, must face. Although New York represents
the country's biggest job, and facilities which have been
trebled must be preserved, New York's past and present
experience provides clues to the future that are of applica-
tion elsewhere.
First of all, does the public want these improvements?
Should the park system of New York City be extended
to its ultimate needs? I think so. If left to a popular ref-
erendum I believe the answer would be decidedly in the
affirmative. Public support, of course, will get behind a
parkway program, not only for its maintenance but also
for future additions. The motorist invariably belongs to
the privileged class and realizes that he is paying a tax
on the fuel which propels his vehicle. Real estate men
and property owners will get behind park developments
which improve their properties and increase their value.
The large centrally located parks have plenty of cham-
pions, and what is done in them makes the headlines in
spite of the fact that they do not solve the neighborhood
problem at all and can only be visited infrequently if at
all, by millions of people in outlying sections. Should,
then, the less dramatic and conspicuous but more sorely
needed local neighborhood parks and playgrounds in
neglected and thickly populated areas continue to be
built? The answer is, Yes, if we are really attempting
to solve the recreation problem of the whole city. How-
ever, there remains the problem of who will pay the cost
of acquiring and developing the areas, as well as arrang-
ing for their continued maintenance and operation.
THE POPULATION OF THE NATION IS STEADILY INCREASING,
and because of several factors more people have more
leisure time. Because of the higher tempo of business and
industry, not only is it becoming increasingly difficult
for men over forty-five and those physically weak to ob-
tain employment, but there must be a shorter work pe-
riod. This is already in evidence in the five-day week now
in effect in many businesses.
As a result, larger use is being made of existing recrea-
tional facilities and a greater demand has been created
for them. No matter how difficult the problem of provid-
334
ing these increased facilities may be, and afterwards main-
taining and controlling them, it must be met. It does not
matter how conservative a citizen may be or how much
he may deprecate the expansion of government facilities
into new fields, recreation in cities and municipalities is
not a new field and must be recognized as a vital neces-
sity. There is neither justice, nor economy, nor common
sense in dodging this issue. This is a real field of pre-
ventive action, and neglect spells vast expense in other
fields, some of it measurable in dollars and a great deal
more which can be gauged only in terms of human mis-
fortune. The problem can be solved by proper planning
and financing. We know from experience that the answer
will be reflected directly in a more healthful nation, a
reduction in street accidents and a curtailment in crime.
The federal and state governments have contributed
substantially during the depression by providing a public
works program to absorb employable workers who other-
wise could not find jobs. That period of federal financing
is now rapidly drawing to a close. CWA, TERA and
WPA have put $167 million into the New York City
Park System in the past three years. Not only has this
relief money been available, but approximately $90 mil-
lion have been advanced by the City and State of New
York, by federal government and by authorities financed
by public bond sale to acquire land to construct parkways
and parks within city limits.
In New York recreational facilities have been trebled.
When the present administration took over and consoli-
dated the park system under a single commissionership,
it inherited 119 playgrounds. By July of this year, if the
present relief program is not further curtailed, there will
be over 300 playgrounds. While many of the old areas
were styled playgrounds, they cannot, by any stretch of
the imagination, compare with the modern recreational
centers built during the last three years. They had few
indoor facilities and their earth surfaces were unusable
after heavy rains. Much of the playground equipment was
dilapidated and in an unsafe condition. Twenty-four areas
had to be completely reconstructed. Many of the old and
most of the new playgrounds are now paved, in great
part, with surfaces that make them usable throughout the
year. They are provided with shade trees, modern hygienic
wading pools used for basketball in the spring and fall
and for skating in winter. Recreational buildings have
been constructed to house toilet facilities and to provide
space for indoor activities during inclement weather. The
needs of every age — from the tiny play houses and baby
swings for the children of pre-school age, apparatus for
older children, handball and basketball courts for
adolescents, to croquet, horseshoe pitching and boccie
courts for adults — are provided for.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Usage of park lands has been increased
considerably. That which lay fallow, uncon-
trolled and of no benefit to the public, has
been improved and added to usable acreage.
The recreational facilities have so increased
in size and scope that the system, inherited
in 1934, is almost unrecognizable. Non-rev-
enue producing facilities for the passive en-
joyment of park visitors make up a large
proportion of the system; while space devoted
to active recreation, for which a nominal fee
is charged, takes up an area of approximately
10 percent of total lands.
New construction in old parks, mostly ac-
complished with relief labor, produced such
facilities as the new zoos in Central Park in
Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn and
Barrett Park in Staten Island; the entire re-
construction of Bryant Park and hundreds of
lesser projects, including the modernization of
sanitary facilities, many of which were previ-
ously unusable and closed to the public.
Most of those which were open were un-
sanitary, poorly ventilated, inadequate and
uninviting.
New parkways within the city limits will
have added 31 % miles of modern, landscaped
motor arteries to the system by the end of
this year — the Grand Central and Laurelton
Parkways in Queens; the Interborough, the
new Shore Drive Extension and Marine
Parkway in Brooklyn; the Henry Hudson
Parkway in Manhattan, as well as the Tri-
borough Bridge Parkway approaches in Man-
hattan and Queens. The most spectacular of
these developments is the nine-mile Henry
Hudson Parkway which, starting at 72 Street,
will provide a scenic express highway along
the Hudson River that will take the express
motor traffic of the West Side elevated high-
way from the Battery to the Saw Mill River
Parkway at the Westchester County line.
With the completion of this $22 million proj-
ect in September, the motorist may drive from
Canal Street, a block or two away from the
Manhattan entrance to the Holland Tunnel,
northward into Dutchess County, or across
the Bear Mountain Bridge into Palisades
Park, without the interruption of a traffic
light. Sixteen new acres will have been added
to Riverside Park and the waterfront of the
Hudson greatly beautified.
A NOMINAL FEE IS CHARGED FOR GOLF, TENNIS,
swimming and the use of the new Municipal
Stadium at Randall's Island. These facilities
are, in the main, by-products of the program
of expansion of the last three years. Five
eighteen-hole and three nine-hole golf courses
have been completely rehabilitated and in-
creased to ten full-sized courses, with three
new and two completely remodeled golf
houses. Three hundred and sixty-seven tennis
courts are available this spring, many of
which are hard-surfaced to extend the season
Gowanus playground, Brooklyn — shelter and varied facilities
Bryant Park offers sanctuary in the shadow of the skyscrapers
Typical Queens parkways for the New York City motorist
JUNE 1937
335
of play, particularly in the spring and fall when alternat-
ing nights of freeze and days of thaw make earth-surfaced
courts unusable.
In 1934 the fairly modern but small swimming pool at
Faber Park in Staten Island and one totally inadequate,
unsanitary and unattractive pool at Betsy Head Park in
Brooklyn supplemented the ocean beach of Jacob Riis
Park in Queens in providing outdoor bathing facilities
under the jurisdiction of the Park Department. It is one
of the tragedies of New York life, and a monument to
past indifference, waste, selfishness and stupid planning,
that the magnificent natural boundary waters of the city
have been, in a large measure, destroyed for recreational
purposes by haphazard industrial and commercial devel-
opment and by pollution through sewage, trade and other
waste.
The day of safe swimming in most of the city boundary
waters is past, and at least for many years to come, beyond
recall. The Park Department recognized this condition
and built ten new pools and entirely reconstructed one of
the old ones. Each is the last word in modern construc-
tion. Water, adequately treated with chemicals, is com-
pletely recirculated three times a day. Underwater and
overhead illumination permits night bathing. Modern
bathhouses have been erected and equipped with the best
shower and toilet facilities that can be provided.
At Jacob Riis Park in Queens, the ocean front beach is
being completely reconstructed in anticipation of the mil-
lions of visitors who will throng there on the completion
of the Marine Parkway bridge, which will open July 3
of this year, connecting the southerly end of Flatbush
Avenue with this park and making it as accessible as
Coney Island. The former narrow beach will be more
than doubled, and the world's largest paved parking
space will, in a single unit, provide for 14,000 cars. In
Pelham Bay Park in The Bronx, a new beach has risen
from the ruins of the Pelham Bay Naval Training Station,
famed during the World War. A mile long beach has
been created by the importation of a million yards of
sand. The bathhouse, one wing of which was in use last
summer, will be entirely completed and ready for use for
the coming bathing season and will provide for 7000
bathers. Parking facilities have been provided for 8000
cars. This development is patterned after the successful
layout at Jones Beach and should be tremendously pop-
ular this summer as it is readily accessible to residents of
Manhattan, The Bronx and lower Westchester County.
The Municipal Stadium at Randall's Island, seating
30,000, opened last July with the two-day Olympic Track
and Field Tryouts. This stadium is another recreational
facility made possible by relief funds, supplemented, in this
instance, by a quarter-million dollars in city funds to pur-
chase materials and equipment not easily procurable
through relief channels.
I HAVE SKETCHED THROUGH THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE
expansion program made possible as by-products of depres-
sion. That they are permanently valuable, great potential
assets in community health and bulwarks of a civilized
municipality against accidents, traffic hazards, disease, dis-
order and delinquency, cannot be denied. It is the duty
of those responsible for the city's welfare to see that they
are adequately maintained.
The increased free facilities are going to take more
men to operate them. The parks, which have been and
are being built for the rest and relaxation of citizens who
visit them, and the parkways, which are thronged to ca-
pacity by the motoring public, have in the past been in-
adequately staffed. If it had not been for the assignment
of relief workers, contrary to all relief rules, to augment
the regular forces, they would today resemble neglected
open lots, a collection of weeds and litter. In the play-
grounds which, prior to 1934, operated on a part time basis
and sometimes not at all on Sundays, the hours of opera-
tion, with the use of floodlighting in many locations, are
now extended into evening and the areas are open seven
days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
The Department of Parks requested in its 1937 budget
$8,500,000 for the operation of free facilities — an increase
of only 40 percent over the grotesquely inadequate ap-
propriations which have remained practically unchanged
since 1934. This increase had previously been anticipated
and was based on established principles recognized every-
where throughout the country. Ample notice had been
given the budget authorities. In 1935, when I submitted
the Park Department's budget requirements for 1936,
I stated the following:
I realize that the city is not in a financial condition which
will permit the full assumption of all new burdens immedi-
ately, but serious consideration must be given shortly to an
increase in the regular city budget to provide for ultimate
normal maintenance of the Park Department without relief
funds, because, eventually, when relief funds are no longer
available, playgrounds, parks and parkways must be closed
and fenced off from public usage unless their needs are re-
flected in regular current city appropriations. I assume that
some time will pass before this can be done, but I think a
start should be made soon, and that the city should gradu-
ally assume this burden.
The authorities cut this request by $1,850,000. But after
pressure from both within and without the Park Depart-
ment, they restored $500,000 of this reduction. The budget
for the operation of revenue producing facilities amount-
ing to $1,250,000 was approved in part, with the provision
that if the revenues did not fall behind the cost of opera-
tion, additional funds would be provided. I confidently
expect that even with the low rates established for the
use of these facilities, such as $3 per year for tennis, $10
per year for golf, 10 cents for children and 20 cents for
adults at the bathhouses and swimming pools, they will be
entirely self-supporting.
THE DAY IS PAST WHEN TEMPORARY RELIEF FUNDS CAN BE
counted on to supply men and material for park mainte-
nance. If the city park system is to be continued in such
manner and during such hours as the public has become
accustomed to during the past three years, adequate funds
must be found for the increased personnel and for ma-
terials with which they must work, and for adequate
policing; or it will fall into a state of disrepair, if not
complete deterioration. Space does not permit a full
description of the importance of policing in the park sys-
tem. New York many years ago abandoned special park
police known as "sparrow cops," and turned over the
problem of police protection to the regular police force
under assignment to the park system. We therefore have
a divided authority at the present time. When Police
Commissioner Valentine has cooperated in every way with
the Park Department, he is himself so short of men and
officers that he has not been able to afford half the pro-
336
SURVEY GRAPHIC
tection which the parks need. There are many things in a
park system which ordinary attendants cannot do and
which require the respect and authority which go only
with the policeman's uniform. In the absence of sufficient
police, vandalism is bound to increase and many park
areas become actually unsafe after dark and even in day-
light.
Can it be the contention of those responsible for the
city's welfare that park improvements, brought about
with emergency public works and relief funds, should
not have been undertaken at all, or that there was some
way of putting thousands of men to work at prevailing
wages, with an allowance for material running as high
as 30 percent, without ending up with facilities that would
require maintenance? Obviously the only alternative
would have been either to put the men on the dole or to
have employed them at ridiculous, humiliating and worth-
less tasks to which most of them were assigned in the
parks of the city in January 1934! I assume that this is
not their contention. Nevertheless, the bill will have to
be paid for taking care of the existing park system and
new facilities still under construction, or the system must
be abandoned in exactly the proportion represented by
deficiencies in funds appropriated for its maintenance.
If the city does not provide money in the budget, money
will have to be found elsewhere. The gap can be partially
met for only a short time by relief labor. It does not pro-
vide the right kind of help and it merely postpones the
day when the city will have to meet the obligation. Main-
taining parks with relief workers has already become a
municipal racket, and on any reasonable assumption it
must end not later than July 1, 1938. False economy in
limiting funds for personnel and repairs will cost many
times the savings in major replacements at a later date.
You can beat the devil around the stump but you will
have to deal with him in the end, anyway. Citizens who
celebrate the opening of new park facilities, attend flag-
raising ceremonies and write laudatory editorials on gala
occasions ought to be ready to fight for and pay for main-
tenance when the tumult and shouting are over. There it
is. If citizens, civic groups and others interested in parks
will start pressure for adequate funds for the maintenance,
operation and policing of parks, they will have gone a
long way in answering this vital problem.
THE DEMAND FOR ALL THESE NEW FACILITIES IN THE PARK
system has unquestionably existed. The evidence that
these new facilities have improved health, decreased
juvenile delinquency and accidents is beyond dispute. 1
am not referring merely to the claims of exuberant re-
formers. This is the testimony of hard headed people,
including judges, magistrates, police officers, aldermen,
local political leaders and others who have firsthand con-
tact with the effect of widely diversified new neighbor-
hood recreational facilities on the daily lives of the people
of the city, and particularly on children. I have already
stated my conviction that the non-revenue as well as the
new self-supporting activities of the Park Department
are an actual economy, and that they bring about a di-
rectly traceable reduction in the cost of policing, crime
prevention, operation of accident wards and health admin-
istration. The beneficial effects of park and parkway im-
provements on adjacent property also needs no proof.
Personally, I would like nothing better than to see a
popular referendum on the question as to whether or not
the New York City park system is an expensive luxury,
or whether it is a necessity for the health and well-being
of the people — and one which they are willing to support.
We would then have an authoritative answer, and could
be guided accordingly. I have no doubt of the verdict.
Like Americans the country over, New Yorkers go aquatic during a heat wave. Depression spending built this swimming pool.
JUNE 1937 337
Labor Leader
HILLMAN OF THE CIO
by NATHAN SHAVIRO
EARLY LAST FEBRUARY A GROUP OF MEN'S CLOTHING
manufacturers met with a group of labor representatives in
a New York hotel, and for the first time in the history of that
notoriously competitive industry concluded a union agreement
on a national scale. While the negotiations were in progress,
the head of the union group was repeatedly called in con-
ference by telephone from Washington and Detroit where the
automobile sit-down strike was being settled; he had a hand
in the maneuvers which led to the steel contract; he took
the leadership in the new organization drive in the textile
industry; and he continued his active part in the campaign in
support of President Roosevelt's judiciary program. Thus
Sidney Hillman performs his complex duties as president of
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, charter member and
moving spirit in the Committee on Industrial Organization
and in Labor's Non-Partisan League.
Each of these activities would ordinarily be regarded as a
new departure for labor. Together they represent labor's race
to catch up with history. But in this sudden and tardy
awakening, Sidney Hillman, almost alone among the major
union leaders, has been pursuing an old objective — an alliance
between government and labor in defense of wages, hours and
collective bargaining.
Hillman rose to leadership in the 1910 garment strike in
Chicago. It was a spontaneous revolt against sweatshop con-
ditions by 40,000 clothing workers, most of them immigrants,
unorganized, without leadership or clear objectives. Sidney
Hillman had arrived in this country three years before from
Kovno, a drab old town in Lithuania. His parents had sent
him there at the age of twelve, to enter a rabbinical seminary.
The boy was daily drilled in the learning of the Talmud. He
soon learned, however, to divide his nights between sleep
and pouring over Karl Marx, David Ricardo and Adam
Smith. After two years of this dual educational adventure
he forsook the seminary, found work in a chemical labora-
tory, joined an underground Jewish socialist organization,
and at the age of twenty was ready for America. His early
experience, typical of the immigrant of those days, was a
twelve-hour day in a Chicago clothing shop, a $7 weekly
wage, and constant fear of unemployment.
It was a triumph for the young immigrant when he be-
came an apprentice cutter, on the way to join the English
speaking aristocrats in the shop. Hillman was a full-fledged
cutter in Hart Schaffner and Marx when the strike swept
him out on the picket line. And when in January 1911 a
settlement was reached with his employer young Hillman,
despite his halting English, was the unanimous choice for
chief labor deputy to serve on the newly devised board for
adjusting disputes.
At Hillman's first conference in a Chicago hotel in January
1911, his associates were responsible executives, high-powered
lawyers, economists and other experts. Their concern was to
create industrial relations machinery in the Hart Schaffner and
Marx plant. These efforts, however, were not confined to the
conference room, but were in a large measure shaped by
widespread public interest. The Hull-House philanthropists,
Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Mrs. Raymond Robins, Grace
Abbott, had taken the place the socialist groups unsuccessfully
sought to occupy in the East, in helping to establish indus-
trial relations machinery. They had joined in negotiating
agreements, picketing strikes, appealing for public support.
Some of them left social work to enter this new field. One
especially close to Hillman was James Mullenbach, who gave
up his post as United Charities superintendent to become
chairman of one of the two boards created under the Hart
Schaffner and Marx plan. The whole "Chicago School" pro-
foundly influenced Hillman, and Hillman in turn helped
make it possible for them to function in the industrial field.
It was a new and significant give and take between a
labor leader and social workers. As a Hull-House resident, a
participant in the settlement's work and aspirations, Hillman
learned more than the social workers had to offer. As a labor
representative he had to. And during the Hart Schaffner
and Marx hearings one lesson hit him with the force of a
discovery — that the new industrial government and its im-
partial machinery was not a resting place between strikes but
a perpetual settlement of disputes.
WITHIN THREE YEARS NEW YORK LABOR WAS TURNING TO
Hillman for help in a major upheaval. The storm centered
around the famous Protocol of Peace between the cloak manu-
facturers and the International Ladies Garment Workers,
devised by Louis D. Brandeis, who for six years prior to his
elevation to the Supreme Court in 1916 acted as chairman of
the arbitration board. Arrived in New York in February 1914,
Hillman at twenty-four entered a tense industrial conflict.
His method was to direct the Protocol machinery along the
Chicago pattern, using the same tri-partite arrangement —
labor, employers and social workers. He had with him J. E.
Williams, the Chicago impartial chairman, to serve in a sim-
ilar capacity in New York. He sought out social workers,
especially those who applied their methods to industrial rela-
tions. He even moved to the Henry Street Settlement.
But after less than a year in New York Hillman was
called back west, to his own union. Two months later came
the split which established the Amalgamated Clothing Work-
ers, a new organization with Hillman as its president, outside
the ranks of the American Federation of Labor. For twenty-
two years that division continued, and when Hillman's organi-
zation finally came into the AF of L, it was only to be read
out of meeting a short time afterward, with the rest of the CIO.
Its long isolation served to give the Amalgamated relative
freedom from traditional restrictive handicaps, and to make
it more aggressively militant. Its members have consequently
been more cohesive and disciplined than the usual American
union group, while the leadership remained more central-
ized and stable, with a turnover decreasing toward the top.
Today, at fifty, after twenty-seven years of unbroken lead-
ership, Hillman continues to behave as if he had just assumed
office and were out to win the approval of the members. His
close associates within his own organization are few, of long
standing, and of two distinct categories — union officials who
came out of the shop, and university brain trusters.
In appearance and manner Hillman has not changed greatly
since the Chicago days. He is a trifle heavier; his thick dark
hair has some grey in it; his sensitive angular face is a bit
lined, and his eyes, which in the early days were some-
times alert, sometimes bewildered, are now keen and direct
and occasionally hard. There is too the same keyed up
intensity in speech and movement, indicating amazing re-
serves of energy.
Hillman is at his best at the conference table, as an execu-
tive and strategist, negotiating, bargaining, planning. Early
in his career he proved himself a master tactician. Thus in
1915, only six months after the Amalgamated was launched,
Hillman was negotiating his first agreement with the em-
ployers' group in the New York market. It was a sultry
day in July, and Dr. Henry Moskowitz, who presided, wear-
338
SURVEY GRAPHIC
ily called the meeting to order, expecting interminable days
of haggling and bargaining.
"Well, gentlemen, what do you offer?" Dr. Moskowitz
turned to the employers' group.
"We offer one dollar raise."
"I take it," said Hillman, in a firm, quiet voice.
THE CONFERENCE WAS OVER. As THEY WALKED OUT OF THE
room, Dr. Moskowitz whispered in Hillman's ear, "Why did
you take it so quickly? Why didn't you ask for four and
you would surely get two?"
"If I got two dollars," Hillman replied, "I'm afraid the
bosses wouldn't stick to it anyway. At least my people have
a better chance to really get one dollar. Besides, that gives
me a chance to fight for another real dollar next time. When
the business will stand it, we shall fight for more and more."
Hillman ran counter to a deeply rooted, traditional, re-
strictive trade union policy when he urged his own organi-
zation to share with the employers the responsibility for in-
creasing and improving production, eliminating waste, and
reducing overhead costs.
"We help the employers," he said, speaking in 1923, "for
one excellent reason. The clothing workers must make their
living out of the clothing industry — just as their employers.
Until now labor has fought mainly from a sense of outrage
against exploitation. Henceforth it will fight more and more
from a sense of industrial and social responsibility."
The consequence of such a policy has often forced the
union to help maintain the competitive position of employ-
ers and to keep price levels in line with the purchasing
power of consumers. The Amalgamated has even come to
the rescue of union employers, making temporary loans to
keep its members in employment.
The Amalgamated again ran counter to a trade union tra-
dition in favoring unemployment insurance, a position
which the AF of L did not take until 1932. In 1923 the
Amalgamated inaugurated an unemployment insurance plan
in the Chicago market, where all its experiments started, and
five years later, this was extended to Rochester, New York
City and other centers.
From the shop and the industry, Hillman led the Amal-
gamated outward. The union operates two successful banks,
in Chicago and New York. It runs credit unions, and has
even managed a successful investment trust. Its cooperative
houses, especially in The Bronx, accommodating over 600
families, are models of what such undertakings should be.
The craft leaders have, of course, been right in ascribing
to Hillman an important share of responsibility with John
L. Lewis in launching the CIO in November 1935, and, a
few months later, with George L. Berry, in the formation
of Labor's Non-Partisan League. And when neither govern-
ment alliance nor active cooperation of organized labor was
available, Hillman continued to support organization drives
in the basic industries as if they were directly under his
union's jurisdiction. Thus, eighteen years ago, during the
great 1919 steel strike, his union contributed $100,000 to the
strike committee, as it is now raising a $500,000 fund for
the CIO activities. Moreover, his union maintains a mobile
army of experienced organizers who are dispatched where
conditions demand — into automobiles, oil, steel, textiles,
without regard to jurisdictional boundaries.
However, it is the new textile drive which he heads that
Hillman regards as the most significant effort of the CIO —
indeed, of American labor history. For textiles are a basic in-
dustry, the largest in point of numbers employed, the most
far-flung, competitive, underpaid and overworked. Hillman
does not enter this field a stranger. He actively participated
in the efforts to organize textiles immediately following the
World War, and has since maintained close contacts with
the industry. The drive he is leading today is one of the
most successful and, to date, peaceable organization moves
that American industry has ever witnessed. And while an
Drawn for Survey Graphic by Horace H. Knight
observer may ascribe the success to the plan and method,
Hillman feels that the will to be organized and its grudg-
ing admission by a growing number of employers is in a
large measure due to the new role of government in the
economic life of the country.
No bold or novel departure can be undertaken without a
guiding idea. Hillman had that idea. Yet he has a fierce
and almost exultant disregard of dogmas.
But in rebelling against fixed and binding schemes, he
also departs sharply from opportunism. True, the social
workers, who influenced him so profoundly, furnished him
with the opportunistic tool which stemmed directly from
John Dewey's philosophy of instrumentalism. But while he
has improvised with ideas like a pragmatist, the job of lead-
ing an aggressive labor union inevitably turned him away
from the social workers, whose preoccupation is with indi-
vidual cases, and even from the social action group at Hull-
House. To Hillman the constant and effective use of practical
intelligence by organized labor in an effort to lift living
standards is a truly revolutionary departure. The team of
organized power and intelligence is so basic with him that
he ascribes many of labor's troubles to their divorce. That is
why Hillman's interest in economic planning, and with it
economic science, increases with the expanding range of
power that labor exercises.
Hillman cites the consequences of increasing labor organi-
zation. Of most far reaching importance, he holds, is the
transition from unionism as a wage fixing device, to labor
as a collective bargaining agency, with a steadily increasing
voice in running industry.
And that is why Hillman links the organization cam-
paign with a program that rests neither on tradition nor on
inner Utopia. That is why he believes that conventional
educators promise more than they can give when they talk
of educating workers for the new social order. To Hillman
labor education that matters consists in trade union policies.
The nation-wide organization drive of the textile workers
is his greatest effort in helping to lift labor to a sense of
greater power and responsibility.
JUNE 1937
339
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
We Tearful Crocodiles
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
CURIOUSLY INCONSISTENT AND ILLOGICAL WE ARE, ALL OF
us, in our choice of things to weep about. For example, as
I write the world quivers with horror over the tragic
destruction of the storm-defying wonderful German zep-
pelin Hindenburg at the moment of seemingly safe ar-
rival, in the twinkling of an eye, with loss of nearly half
a hundred lives and incalculable injury to the cause of
sky-navigation. Some of the victims were children; one
hears rather special lamentation about that detail of it.
A dramatic catastrophe; a human interest story of high
magnitude. Horrible enough in all conscience — let no one
interpret me as making light of it. I have seen the heart-
wrenching pictures which caught the frightful business
in all those lifetime-seconds of horror. Like everybody else
I am fancying myself in the midst of it. In the place, for
instance, of those parents who were there to meet their
twenty-four-year-old son; who witnessed that incredible
explosion at the heart of which must be their own be-
loved flesh-and-blood; who turned away in stunned
despair and . . . heard the familiar whistle of his boy-
hood as, having jumped to safety out of that holocaust,
he found and joined them.
Yet it was all foreseeable. From the beginning it has
been a gamble with death: that vast reservoir of highly-
inflammable hydrogen gas, cheek-by-jowl with an intri-
cate interlacing network of electric-sparking apparatus;
bearing passengers under sleepless scrutiny for matches,
cigarette-lighters or other possible sources of fire; manned
by a crew rubber-shod and deprived even of metal but-
tons. It always has been virtually certain that someday,
somehow, there would be a lawless spark, and . . . pf!
Those at Lakehurst "in the know" acknowledge that
always they have feared, and breathed freer when the
Hindenburg went away.
All this time all the world has known that there was
helium, a non-inflammable gas, with which that great
reservoir and others like it might be filled. Our own dis-
asters, ending for the time being at least our American
experiments with lighter-than-air dirigibles, were not due
to hydrogen explosions. Had she been filled with helium
gas, the Hindenburg would still be floating through the
skies across the oceans, storm-defying. It appears inci-
dentally that helium, while immensely safer, is not quite
so buoyant as hydrogen; that therefore the profitable load
must be somewhat less; there was the balance-sheet,
counter-weighing among the factors of safety. Neverthe-
less, there were designs for new zeppelins, to be filled
with helium, but they were abandoned because the helium
was not available. The supply of it is virtually monopolized
by the United States government, even though we are
using relatively little of it, and as one American au-
. thority says, "it was our duty to conserve our supply."
So part of the story of this disaster might be an apology,
an alibi; though you will not find it in President Roose-
velt's message of condolence to the German chancellor.
It could be explained, though it would not be quite
polite or diplomatic, that one of the reasons why the
American government naturally would hesitate to release
helium for the German dirigibles is that it can be used for
other than passenger service. There is a grim appositeness
in the fact that Captain Ernst August Lehmann, advisory
officer of the Hindenburg who was among the victims
of the disaster, is said to have led the first zeppelin raid
over England in the World War, when bombs were
dumped out upon the women and children of London.
Of course King George VI makes no allusion to that in
his message of sympathy to the German chancellor.
No IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, HAVING NOTHING TO DO WITH
war; a horrible one, not the less so because preventable in
a sane world which alas just now is in eclipse. We are
justified in being appalled by it, in sending our messages
of condolence.
But just across the page is the tiresome daily ho-hum
story of the continued bombardment of Madrid and of
other cities, open towns and even roadside villages of
Spain; daily slaughter of men, women and children, non-
combatants, as they go about the public streets upon what-
ever may be left of their lawful occasions. Not by tens
up to half a hundred, but by scores and hundreds and
thousands. This is no accident, but deliberate, organized,
and of deadly malice.
Before me as I write is the text of the indictment pre-
sented by King Haile Selassie of Abyssinia to the League
of Nations, setting forth in all the shocking detail the ruth-
less, systematic massacres perpetrated by the Italian in-
vaders in and about Addis Ababa last February following
the attempt upon the life of Marshal Graziani. The fact
that upward of 6000 Ethiopians, indiscriminatingly as to
age or sex, were butchered on that and following days,
is amply supported by dispatches to The London Times
and other English newspapers. I have seen no hint of
denial or condonation of these unspeakable atrocities
from any Italian source whatsoever. No president or king
or chancellor of any country, so far as I have heard, has
expressed any sympathy for the Ethiopians, though com-
pared with their tragedy that of the Hindenburg is a baga-
telle. Oh, yes, Signor Mussolini has sent a message of
sympathy to the German chancellor!
The perpetrators of these outrages have yet to become
aware of any eruption of decent indignation in a world
still numb with twenty years' surfeit of horrors. Never-
theless there are signs of its stirring. Along with reports
of the Italian celebration of the "first year of empire"
comes a formidable protest by seventy-six of our own best
leaders of spirit, against the wanton destruction of the
ancient Basque "Holy City" of Guernica, with attendant
slaughter of 800 non-combatants, by systematic bombing
and machine gun fire from the air. And there is the
ringing denunciation by Senator Borah, who declares that
fascism "has hung upon the walls of civilization a paint-
ing that will never come down, never fade out of the
memories of men." ... As evidence of the fulfillment
of its creed, it points to the subjugation of
the wholly weak and disarmed Ethiopia, and now doubtless
will take pride in the successful slaughter of women and
340
SURVEY GRAPHIC
children throughout Spain. . . . This is the logic of the
system founded upon force. This is not courage but cowardice;
not government but brute savagery; not war but butchery.
British and French warships are escorting and protect-
ing the evacuation from Bilbao of several thousand ref-
ugees, aged people and children— especially children. Gen-
eral Franco, commander-in-chief of the insurgent move-
ment, is reported to have demurred to this evacuation,
on the ground that the presence of women and children
in Bilbao, or any other place under siege, makes it easier
to conquer. We are familiar with that psychology, stock-
in-trade of the kidnapper, well aware that the safety of
the children is his key to the surrender of the stoutest-
hearted resistance. Indeed it is an "unfriendly act" to
remove to relative safety these pathetic hostages.
RELATIVE SAFETY. WHAT OF THE FUTURE LIVES OF THESE
waifs of war, most of whom never again will see home or
parents? Homesick, frightened, hungry, they are landed in
a strange country, of whose language they know hardly
a syllable. And what of the waifs of war who do not
escape from Spain? I have a letter from a Spanish friend,
dwelling upon the problem, already appalling, of caring
for the scattered children, orphans and others, whom this
unconscionable uproar in Spain has dislodged from all
normal connection with life.
Too little do we realize that the pattern for the world's
life during the next century is being set now by the ex-
periences of the children not merely in Spain, Italy, Ger-
many, Russia, but everywhere. In the days to come, for
those of us who are relatively young and have still nu-
merous years before us; still more for our children for
whose future we are providing as best we may with our
fingers crossed, hoping for the best and hardly knowing
what that best may be — it makes all the difference what
^f^^^mjj^^
Courtesy of The Christian Science Monitor.
is happening to the children now. I am looking this mo-
ment at a letter from the Moscow correspondent of the
Manchester Guardian, which says that, "Soviet prepared-
ness for civilians was recently extended to include 'pre-
conscription training' for boys and girls from eight years
up. . . . Moscow and Leningrad have each had, since
last year, an infantry regiment in which the maximum
age is sixteen." This is only a sample of the atmosphere
which the children are breathing.
During several months this past winter, living in Florida
amid a numerous colony of mostly well-to-do refugees
from the northern winter climate my ears have wearied
with the din of lamentation about taxes, public expendi-
tures in nation and states; particularly those for work
relief projects and other efforts to counteract unemploy-
ment. The symphony of protest and objurgation has run
the gamut from intelligent discussion and constructive
criticism to mouth-foaming hydrophobic hymns of hate.
Yet in all this clamor about unparalleled expense, unbal-
anced budgets and all the rest of it, I do not recall a single
instance in which any of these excited persons raised the
smallest question about the fabulous expenditure for war
preparedness upon which we have entered. Or could be
induced to regard a billion dollars a year for armament
as anything to be excited about.
Nobody was interested in the fact that behind all the
clamor the normal work of the League of Nations goes
on as serenely as possible in the circumstances. Half a
dozen unromantic commissions are at work right now,
heading up international cooperation on such subjects as
slavery, the production and marketing of sugar, the illicit
traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs, the relation
of nutrition to general welfare, world statistics, finance
and the legal aspects of the suppression of terrorism, traffic
in women. Glance at that subject of nutrition, a recently
noted concern of the league. Stanley Bruce, Australian
High Commissioner in London, could not reconcile the
difficulty in selling Australian foodstuffs with the ex-
istence of millions "in a dreary state of sub-health" for
lack of exactly those things. At his instance a Mixed
Committee on Nutrition was set up by the league, whose
studies already have disclosed important unrealized fac-
tors in the problem. Obviously, wages and the ability to
purchase, and tariffs, blocking access to the materials, are
major parts of it; but there is also a vast ignorance on
the subject of nutrition. And there is national self-inter-
est ... try to convince the French that wine has no
nutritive value!
These matters are not exciting. You cannot make a
thrilling moving picture of the report to the Permanent
Mandates Commission of the gratifying changes made by
the New Zealand Labor government in western Samoa,
to develop the resources of the island for the benefit of
the native people. No crowds will go to the movie the-
aters to see any reel about the abolition of "capitulations"
in Egypt — those ancient "extra-territoriality" provisions
giving foreigners exemption from the Egyptian legal
processes. Probably nothing could go further to allay the
anti-foreigner feeling in Egypt. Even as regards India,
Great Britain is showing a disposition to mollify the op-
position to the new Constitution.
But who cares about these things? Give us wars and
rumors of war, things that can be seen and thrilled over,
and shouted about. For we crocodiles are "choosy" about
the subjects for our tears.
JUNE 1937
341
LIFE AND LETTERS
Escape from Dilemmas
by LEON WHIPPLE
COLLECTIVISM, A FALSE UTOPIA, by William Henry Chamberlin. Mac-
millan. 265 pp. Price $2.
ANARCHY OR HIERARCHY, by S. de Madariaga. Macmillan. 244 pp.
Price $2.50.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE WORLD SEEMS TO HAVE DILEMMA-TROUBLE. Too MUCH
of our thinking wears the strait jacket — either ... or ...
We are commanded to choose between fascism and com-
munism, labor and capital, liberty and security, plan and
laissez-faire. Well, why? The intellect may find a kind of
satisfaction in reducing life to iron alternatives, but life itself
is rarely so simple. The dilemma is a device of logic, not of
Nature. That comforting book, the dictionary, says: "It is an
argument that presents an antagonist with two or more al-
ternatives (or 'horns') but is equally conclusive against him
whichever alternative he chooses." It is wisdom, then, to
refuse to be impaled on either horn, but to cultivate the
eclecticism that enables Nature to progress by a teetering
equilibrium. Otherwise we may find we are gambling in that
ancient game — "Heads I win, tails you lose."
We are told, for example, that democracy is done for and
we must choose between fascism or communism. That is not
true. The evidence is piling up that the democracies are the
going concerns in world policy, and, however imperfect, are
able to assure for their peoples more of the good ends for
which governments exist than are the rival systems. The
principal one is liberty. Their constituents are, moreover,
realizing as they study the rival systems over considerable
periods, that democracy must be preserved. The peoples
do not seem moved to choose either horn of the dilemma.
But the danger to democracy is as grave as ever. First,
the world crisis that threatens to explode from the rival sys-
tems may overthrow democracy from without. Second, the
democracies may fail to reform themselves within to meet the
needs of modern civilization. That such new needs exist is
proven by the rise of the dictatorships themselves. They were
not entirely the fortuitous creations of post-War ills and
upflung demagogues. They reveal forces and problems that
democracy, too, has to meet. It would be supreme folly not
to study them. We need never condone their evils.
Let us abandon the dilemma choices, and look behind
them. For what ends do we set up governments? What mod-
ern forces must they channel? Wherein have our democratic
forms failed? What changes are needed? For such a mood
of inquiry here are two useful books. Mr. Chamberlin rejects
the communism-fascism dilemma by revealing what he be-
lieves to be the failure of both as alternatives of democracy.
Senor Madariaga attacks the difficult constructive job of
showing wherein the axioms and practices of traditional
democracy have failed, and offers us a blue-print for a new
state-form that he defines as "unanimous organic democracy."
We shall do well to discount the personal equation in each,
and to enter reservations as to both evidence and conclusions.
They are essays, experimental in mood, not final. But essays
by men of information and experience. Chamberlin was for
twelve years the Russian correspondent of The Christian
Science Monitor, and has written valuable studies of the
Soviet State and its iron age. Madariaga's contributions to-
the philosophy of society and experience in actual statecraft
both in his native Spain and in the League of Nations are
familiar. Both have proven courage. Their views deserve the
most thoughtful consideration.
It is profoundly encouraging to know that both make
liberty the prime end of the state. Chamberlin begins with
the story of the revolt against liberty and the rise of the
dictatorships in Russia, Italy, Germany. These he considers
together because he believes that whatever differences exist
in theory, their practices end in restrictions that vary only in
degree and technique. It will warn the liberal of what dangers
he must beware to study once more the chapter on The
New Technique of Tyranny. Foremost is the denial of free-
dom of speech and of the press and the erection of a state
monopoly of propaganda that harnesses the most modern
devices of publicity to present only the official version of what
is happening. To preserve these freedoms is the first duty of
democracy for with them the other dangers can be fought.
BUT THESE REGIMES MUST "COERCE AS WELL AS CAJOLE" AND SO
we have terrorism — the secret killings, universal espionage, the
brutality of the concentration areas. Propaganda and terror
break all opposition. There is the mass enthusiasm of ignor-
ance with individual fear. With these iron clamps, Mr.
Chamberlin believes these regimes are "safe against any
domestic outbreak of discontent." We need not anticipate
their downfall unless from a world war. These are ominous
words.
Then the single party and the ruthless power of the
leader are the characteristics of the political domination that
must crush all opposition including the heretics within the
regime. So the intellectual must be subdued or exiled for he
demands freedom of inquiry and criticism. Religion is abol-
ished or controlled. The scapegoat is created, kulaks in
Russia, Jews in Germany. And finally the treatment of rela-
tives as hostages spreads new terror.
So runs the terrible index. The challenge to democracy
is clear: we must preserve the liberties of the Bill of Rights
and social freedom. That is paramount. Mr. Chamberlin
admits one dilemma: how dare we guarantee freedom to
advocates of these regimes within our own nation? He points
out elsewhere that they need to win but one election, for once
in power they destroy all the bulwarks. The answer he
doubtless implies is that within the free state we must create
the conditions that meet just demands and forestall the
dangerous discontents from which dictators draw their power.
That is the lesson for the die-hards who oppose new modes
in democracy.
Mr. Chamberlin admits the shortcomings and weaknesses
of democracy — one being our failure to provide security or
to make the trade unions an integral and stabilizing element
in an industrial age. But he goes on to a comparison of the
goods that have been won by the vast sacrifices of liberty
and life in these regimes with the standards of democracy
and concludes that by the tests of real wages, food, housing
and production neither communism nor fascism has provided
the economic satisfactions they promised, or that are the com-
mon level in free states. Their Utopias are false. Even in
Russia bureaucracy, careerism and class privileges are spread-
ing. Such comparisons require evidence that is hard to get,
and discounts for differences of natural resources and circum-
stances. They do not make a defense for the failure of
democracies to solve their own economic maladjustments.
The blunt conclusion is: "On every count the collectivist
state fails conspicuously to provide the common man with
a more abundant life. . . . Not a single problem, unsolved in
democratic countries has been genuinely and satisfactorily
solved under collectivism." For him, there is no dilemma.
342
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Sefior Madariaga's offering must be approached with cau-
don, despite the fact that he drives with desperate sincerity
at the nub question: What is wrong with liberal democracy
and what remedy is needed? This kind of thinking is what
we must have, but it would be foolhardy to discount its
dangers. He is convincing when he declares: "The state has
no finality. . . . The supreme end is the individual. . . .
Values and the state are creations of man." The duty of the
state is to preserve and transmit a culture in which men
shall have liberty so that they may have the most experience
— not happiness — even the experience of breaking the law.
But when he declares it is not clear that liberty is a primary
necessity of all human beings, or that all men want or re-
quire it, we begin to wonder. What grades of liberty are
covered by his concepts of order and hierarchy?
The axioms of democracy have been corrupted in prac-
tice, he declares, so the equality that was a denial of special
privilege has become a levelling that denies special gifts, even
natural ones, and the valuable irrational elements in life
itself. The society of enlightened and educated citizens ready
to sacrifice their present interest for the community has not
been produced. Capitalism that was to create new wealth
through private initiative has become a money economy with
absentee owners collecting on their tokens of debt. Labor
comes to be defined as manual labor only and lines up in a
class struggle, rooted in envy. So the very axioms of democ-
racy help toward its disintegration. Likewise do its practices
that include the failure of leadership, the transfer of control
of living to experts who remain in office, but are without
responsibility, the turning over of the press to the vagaries of
a profit-seeking private ownership. Our essential political in-
stitutions degenerate. These not unfamiliar charges contain,
as we all know, much truth. But we are working, with some
success, to remedy the evils. Somehow Sefior Madariaga does
not seem to sense, as an Englishman or American does, that
in a hugger-mugger, slow, and costly way, democracy does
work, in part.
His final proposal of the organic unanimous democracy
with its order and hierarchy of services and special gifts and
its blue-print of institutions is a kind of ideal transubstantia-
tion of the totalitarian state. But it is to be attained by
evolution of wisdom through liberty, and not through au-
thority and force. We enter here a realm of private meta-
physical doctrines on the "natural state" with the three
classes, "the people with an instinct for primordial and es-
sential things . . . the middle class with executive and tech-
nical and cultural functions . . . the aristocrat with the gift
of creative intuition who is to be recognized by his disin-
terested vocation for the highest service of statecraft." How
we are to produce them in America where Madariaga says
we have none, or even a good base of people, remains un-
clear. So when he talks of the people's function as chorus-
like, and the statesman as the sculptor of peoples, we may
conclude he has been offering the old dilemma of democracy
or fascism, with fine ideals, but small recognition of our
present urgencies. We may want to make our own selection
of any good fascism offers. Meanwhile our task is to pre-
serve liberty, for with that the other blessings may be added
to us.
The Justices and Social Progress
THE ULTIMATE POWER, by Morris L. Ernst. Doubleday, Doran. 334
pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE WAY OUT OF OUR CONSTITUTIONAL IMPASSE, AS CHARTED
in this informative and stimulating book, lies in the adop-
tion of an amendment granting Congress the authority to
override, by a two thirds majority in each chamber, an ad-
verse decision of the Supreme Court. Mr. Ernst, who is
one of the country's leading defenders of progressive causes
in the courts and out, reasons that no amendment designed
JUNE 1937
to increase the powers of Congress through broadening the
definition of interstate commerce or otherwise granting Con-
gress the right to regulate the affairs of capital and labor and
agriculture on a national scale, would be adequate. For the
Supreme Justices, he reminds us, could, if it pleased their
economic philosophies to do so, restrict the meaning of such
an amendment to much less than the country intended just
as they limited the application of the income tax amendment,
notwithstanding the all-inclusiveness obviously intended by
the words "from whatever source derived."
And so Mr. Ernst finds it not necessary to extend the
powers of Congress but to protect the powers Congress has
from invasion by the Supreme Court through qualifying the
veto of the judiciary much as the young men, whom we are
wont to call the Founding Fathers, qualified the presidential
veto, 150 years ago this summer. It would be an "amend-
ment toward democracy," in Mr. Ernst's phrase, since it
proposes "that degree of pause and delay which permits the
coagulation of public opinion."
There is much more to The Ultimate Power than this
simple statement of the issue and the similarly simple attack
upon it. Outlining our constitutional history from the Phila-
delphia convention to recent decisions knocking out New
Deal laws, the author brings within the compass of a single
volume a wealth of information not only about the fram-
ing and judicial development of the Constitution but on the
continuously changing times against which the framing and
development have taken place.
At no point does Mr. Ernst attempt to hide his lack of
admiration for the Supreme Court. His lack of respect for
the bench extends to the bar as well. Describing his "basically
dishonest" profession as "the vanguard of the army resisting
change," he says that the legal mind will not allay the present
national bewilderment and confusion. The time is ripe, he
writes, "for the non-lawyers to reassert their earnest dis-
respect for what lawyers and judges have done to us all."
Published before the President brought out his bill to per-
mit enlargement of the Supreme Court, it contains a two-
page discussion of the possibility of increasing the number
of the Justices which concludes with the warning that "per-
versities of selection should give the proponents of this
approach considerable pause."
St. Louis, Mo. IRVING DILLIARD
Triple-A Plowed Through
THREE YEARS OF THE AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMIN-
ISTRATION, by Edwin G. Nourse, Joseph S. Davis and John D. Black.
Brookings Institution. 600 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
ONE OF THE SIGNIFICANT RESEARCH PROJECTS OF THE LAST FOUR
years has been contemporaneous appraisal of various New
Deal agencies by the Brookings Institution. It is an enter-
prise which has commanded as well the unstinting coopera-
tion of the agencies under critical review. Only in a democ-
racy could such a project have been carried through. This
volume follows a series of crop by crop studies, summarizes
them and discusses also the larger considerations, theories
and principles that governed the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration. It is a valuable record and the factual mate-
rials are presented with the care and skill that characterize
most of the Brookings studies.
Among the many significant conclusions are these: that
the AAA added upwards of two billion dollars to farm in-
come during its operation, that the southern sharecropper
did not receive his fair share of the government payments
and suffered a "not inconsiderable displacement" which,
however, was due in part to the availability of work relief;
that outside the South there was little if any difficulty in
landlord tenant relations; that "the acute tenancy situations
in the South have been due almost solely to causes other
than the AAA program"; that the act was unique in its
concern for the consumer's interest though the administration
343
was not wholly successful in carrying out the original inten-
tions; that the increase in farm income under the act was
of a "magnitude sufficient to be significant."
Interestingly enough one or more of the authors file dis-
sents here and there throughout the work and Davis and
Black each contribute "supplements" setting forth their views,
of which Black's closing words are particularly significant:
". . . Economists are increasingly coming to realize that
pure competition exists in few places outside of the markets
for agricultural staples. Monopoly powers of one kind or
another increasingly hold prices rigid. Labor is ever reach-
ing out for a stronger hold on wages — and likely to reach
effectively. Our agricultural cooperatives are now beginning to
push in the same direction. Where shall we be as a society,
how shall we function, when all these groups acquire the
powers they seek? The AAA procedure, especially in its
production adjustments, accords the support of government
to these monopoly arrangements; but on a basis of collabora-
tion that insures the protection of the public interest in a
way that now exists not at all in the monopoly controls being
exercised more and more by labor and capital. Does it not,
then, point the direction which we must follow"
Teachers College EDMUND onS. BRUNNER
What We Believe and What We Know
THE STORY_OF HUMAN ERROR, edited by Joseph Jastrow. Appleton-
Century. 445 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Suriiey Graphic.
THE SUCCESSES OF SCIENCE ARE THE PROUD BOAST OF OUR AGE.
It is useful to glance, as this volume does, at some of her
errors; to place alongside man the thinker, the picture of
man the blunderer. A symposium by more than a dozen col-
lege professors, each ranked as an authority in his field, the
book ranges from the physical sciences and biology through
anthropology and psychology to sociology and medicine.
Every chapter will have its appeal to those interested in its
particular topic, but for engaging charm of presentation
Professor Swann's contribution on physics is outstanding.
It is heartening or dismaying — depending upon one's view-
point— to be told that the scientist, pledged to an undeviat-
ing pursuit of truth, is yet pulled this way and that by the
force of authority, custom, public opinion; is continually
hampered in his thinking by his subjective personal and emo-
tional bias — even as you and I. We like to think of science
as pursuing her orderly course from observation to hypothesis
and verification. In reality, Professor Jastrow assures us in
his introduction — and with disarming candor his contributors
confirm him — all advance in human learning shows a cer-
tain parallelism to the trial and error method of the labora-
tory rat.
What are the obstacles that have delayed man's investiga-
tion of nature? Lack of adequate data makes entirely under-
standable the primitive's homocentric view of his world, but
why did no one before Copernicus in the sixteenth century
definitely repudiate the geocentric theory of the universe?
Faulty observation of facts, still more erroneous interpretation
of facts, may account for such recent fallacies as the belief that
ants and bees are intelligent, for the myth of an Aryan race,
or for the notion that man's mind and body are separate
entities. More than one writer blames philosophy and religion
for man's obsession with the idea of causation, his compul-
sive urge to explain everything, his impassioned search for a
single unifying principle which shall include both himself
and the universe. Others list as sources of error such subjec-
tive factors as complacency; the tendency to accept a known
truth as final; emotional attachments to tradition which delay
the acceptance of new truth; a desire for stability which for-
gets that the stable may so easily become the sterile; a pas-
sionate resistance to change which holds the future in bonds
to the past; lack of the skeptic's courage to say, "I doubt."
Can it be, we find ourselves asking uneasily, that the strong-
est force in human nature is inertia? The great advances we
owe unquestionably to minds of supreme energy and daring.
Yet the greater the man, the more disastrous to posterity are
his false assumptions. Aristotle's prestige was such that his
dictum that nature abhors a vacuum remained unchallenged
for two thousand years.
But all in all one gathers that the mistakes of science, how-
ever regrettable they seem, are, like those of human life itself,
inevitable — perhaps even necessary, since it is only through
error and its correction that man's knowledge has progressed
toward an approximation to truth.
New Yor^ MARGARET NORDFELDT, M.D.
The New Deal Seen Through a Periscope
THE NEW DEAL, by the editors of The Economist (London). Knopf. 149
pp. Price $1.50 postpaid of Surrey Graphic.
ACCORDING TO THE PUBLISHER'S ANNOUNCEMENT THIS BOOK is
"written from the vantage point of thirty-five hundred miles
and from the point of view of men who have absolutely no
axe to grind."
The authors do not understand what is going on in the
minds of the American people, or how they are reacting
to the conditions in which they live, because the authors are
not living an American life or thinking American thoughts.
They do not appraise wisely a political program for the
United States, because political science calls for adaptation
of government to conform to the practical possibilities — not
the idealities — of public service.
For example, you might learnedly determine that only
birth control would solve a problem of overpopulation on a
South Sea island. But, face to face with centuries of antag-
onistic tradition favoring unlimited propagation and social
responsibility for the results, you might decide that heavy
taxation for the support of a surplus incapable of self-support
would be the only practical way to relieve an emergency and
gradually to educate people to avoid and to discourage an
overproduction of consumers.
Americans who blithely criticize Russian, Italian and Ger-
man political experiments may learn humility by reading
the appraisal of an American experiment by English econ-
omists who similarly lack an adequate, intimate understand-
ing of American life and what is either desirable or practical
in the way of political control and direction of social and
economic trends. Here also is an exposure of a common
delusion that a remote observer has "no axe to grind."
Even if we acquit British financial writers of any desire,
conscious or unconscious, to see American policies shaped
to the advantage of British interests, we cannot acquit them
of a profound prejudice in favor of an economic and polit-
ical philosophy rooted in class or national interests which
are alien to those of a great majority of the American people.
Persistently this axe is on the grindstone throughout this
evaluation of the Roosevelt administration. Only a few mea-
sures obtain a somewhat grudging approval. Most of the
New Deal program is found faulty in concept and execution.
Thus in the end comes the shopworn conclusion of American
political opposition — that somehow recovery was achieved
without political aid and probably in spite of political inter-
vention: Drought did more for the farmers than agricultural
programs; monetary policies, so far as successful, have stored
up "financial dynamite for the future"; debtors have been
temporarily relieved, but at the expense of creditors (natu-
rally); the industrial program (under which recovery was
actually achieved) has been "a definite hindrance" to recovery.
The judgment last quoted is based on a review of the NRA
which reveals most unhappily the lack of accurate knowl-
edge or understanding of the subject matter of this book by
its authors.
Perhaps a most charitable comment on this book can be
offered in the language of Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland who
344
SURVEY GRAPHIC
wrote in the introduction to his book on The New America
an illuminating sentence: "It is not easy for people in
England to know what is happening in the United States,
still less to understand the reason and the meaning of those
happenings."
Washington, D. C. DONALD R. RICHBERC
Bigness in Business
BIG BUSINESS — ITS GROWTH AND PLACE, edited by Alfred L. Bernheim.
Prepared under the Auspices of the Corporation Survey Committee of
the Twentieth Century Fund. 102 pp. Price $1.35 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FUND HAS NOW PUBLISHED THE
first fruits of its study of the role of the giant corporation.
The volume summarizes the statistics showing the relation-
ship between the amount of business in the hands of large
corporations on the one hand and in those of small corpora-
tions, partnerships, individuals and government on the other.
Only about one fifth of the economic activity of the country
is controlled by corporations with assets of more than $50
million. Within the areas in which corporate organization
prevails, the large corporation is very important; one tenth
of one percent of the corporations in 1933 owned more than
half of all corporate assets. The large firm is, however, rela-
tively unimportant in some industries. Large firms, for in-
stance, account for practically all cigarette manufacturing but
very little of women's clothing manufacturing. The increas-
ing importance of corporations in the distribution of goods
is indicated by the statement that such firms were doing one
.fifth of all the business in fifteen important lines of retailing
in 1929 and had raised their share to one fourth by 1933. The
size of the area not controlled by corporations is due partly
to the fact that it includes 94 percent of agriculture and two
thirds of all constructional activity.
Before the committee interprets these statistics it is to pub-
lish further factual volumes on the profits and salaries paid by
big business. Interpretation of the statistics now offered will
not be easy. The committee acknowledges that the interlock-
ing of directorates and stockholding has not been measured.
But even more difficult is the question how far statistics of
assets and income measure the importance of big business.
A firm that is large in these terms may also exert considerable
influence over its rivals and possibly over those who sell to
it and those who buy from it. Agriculture is almost com-
pletely unincorporated but it is not uninfluenced by the exist-
ence of large corporations.
Columbia University ARTHUR ROBERT BURNS
Poetry for Moderns
BIOGRAPHY FOR TRAMAX. by Winfield Townley Sco't. Covici-Friede.
66 pp. Price $2.
TRAVELER OF EARTH, by Louise Burton Laidlaw. Dodd Mead. 93 pp.
Price $2.
COLLECTED POEMS, by Florence Converse. Dutton. 224 pp. Price $2.50.
8:20 A.M., by Ruth Evelyn Henderson. Bruce Humphries. 120 pp. Price $2.
SONNETS AND SESTINAS, by Wilmon Brewer. Cornhill. 2-45 pp. Price
$1.50.
All prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
OURS IS NOT A PARTICULARLY POETIC AGE. YET POETRY IS STILL
made, and competently, if these five new books are any evi-
dence. Most "modern" in its tone is the collection by young
Winfield Townley Scott, whom Stephen Benet calls "a very
promising member of the new poetic generation." Mr. Scott's
masculine vigor minces no words. He hits out hard, if some-
times blindly, at the common futilities of life.
Less incisive, more feminine, is the new volume of Louise
Burton Laidlaw's verse. Although it seems to me that she
has not completely mastered the form in the metaphysical or
sociological themes, her deep interest in man and his spiritual
and social struggle lifts her poetry to a challenging level.
Florence Converse's poetry walks with certain stride across
the world — and the centuries! In her collected poems she in-
cludes A Masque of Sibyls, a historical fantasy. She has long
been sensitive to sociological movements, as shown by her
poem The Radical (1918) and An American in Italy (1928)
which looks frankly at fascism:
If Ruth Evelyn Henderson's book is slender it is neverthe-
less compassionate, with a genuine religious undertone. She
brings Bible characters to life, along with pictures of the
underprivileged in the modern scene.
For sonnet lovers and scholars we recommend Wilmon
Brewer's painstaking book. Here is a journey down the
intricate paths of poetry, full of curious byways and many
examples of sonnet and sestina in translation. This is a book
which should restore luster to some of these forgotten forms.
HlLDEGARDE FlLLMORE
The Red Dilemma
THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED: WHAT is THE SOVIET UNION AND
WHERE is IT GOING? by Leon Trotzky. Translated by Max Eastman,
lay, Doran. 308 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
Doubleday
THE ADOPTION, ON DECEMBER 5, 1936, OF THE NEW SOVIET
constitution which, according to Stalin, introduces "socialist
democracy" in the U.S.S.R.; the subsequent promulgation
of reforms intended to democratize elections in the Com-
munist party, which under the 1936 constitution retains a
monopoly of political organization; and the Moscow trials,
in which Trotzky was accused, in absentia, of launching a
vast conspiracy with foreign powers for the overthrow of
the Soviet system — all these developments lend unusual in-
terest to the latest volume from the pen of the most bril-
liant writer produced by the Bolshevik revolution.
With a minimum of personal invective, Trotzky under-
takes to demolish Stalin's thesis that the U.S.S.R., having
achieved a socialist economy, is moving in the direction of
socialist democracy and a classless society. He contends that
the disappearance of former "exploiters" has paved the way
for new social stratifications based on marked differences in
income and material privileges; that these differences are
purposely emphasized by the government, which fosters
piecework and the speed-up system of production; that the
party and government bureaucracies constitute a new ruling
class, which enjoys a disproportionate share of "socialist"
property as compared with the masses of workers and
peasants; that the Soviets, in which the power of the labor-
ing masses was originally vested, have been deprived of
control over Soviet affairs, now administered by Stalin and
his associates, who are no longer subject to the curb of
opposition criticism within the Communist party; and that
exploitation by the state, sole employer of labor, has
been substituted for exploitation by capitalist elements. In
Trotzky 's opinion, socialization of the means of production
and introduction of planned economy have failed to produce
socialism in the Soviet Union, where a low level of industrial
production has perpetuated "bourgeois norms of distribu-
tion." True socialism, he argues, cannot be established in a
single, industrially backward country like Russia. It can be
achieved, as he has always insisted, only as a result of world
revolution in countries whose level of industrialization per-
mits distribution of goods not according to work — a concept
regarded by Trotzky as a capitalist atavism — but according
to need. He consequently calls for overthrow of the Soviet
bureaucracy by a new revolution, which would restore Soviet
democracy, revive the traditions of revolutionary interna-
tionalism, and assure the triumph of true Marxism through-
out the world.
Whatever may be one's views concerning the merits of the
Stalin-Trotzky controversy, the conclusion seems inescapable
that Trotzky writes as a brilliant theoretician who, to his
own profound regret, has been deprived of the opportunity
of subjecting his ideas to the test of reality; while Stalin,
who lacks Trotzky 's masterly style, speaks as a practical
politician who must make daily compromises with the facts
JUNE 1937
345
|
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OF REAL VALUE TO EVERYONE INTERESTED
IN SOCIAL SECURITY LEGISLATION
SOCIAL
SECURITY
By Maxwell S. Stewart
THIS BOOK tells the story of Social Security in the
United States, showing what the Federal Security
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what limited provisions with social insurance pro-
grams of other leading industrial countries.
Attention is given those issues which are likely to
occupy public attention in the next five years. And
an important concluding section demonstrates how
adequate social security legislation offers the long
sought key to economic stability. The author is
Associate Editor of The Nation and has studied
social insurance at first hand in various European
countries SH.OO
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Does the influence of Christian missions make
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fied to discuss this important topic.
Paper, 35 cents
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150 FIFTH AVENUE
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of Soviet life. Stalin's claims that the U.S.S.R. has achieved
"socialist democracy" cannot be dismissed as false or hypo-
critical merely because they do not correspond to western
concepts of democratic institutions or Trotzky's interpretation
of Marxist doctrine. History has yet to prove that socialism —
hitherto an ideal nowhere completely translated into terms
of reality — can be established or maintained without admin-
istrative bureaucracy and political dictatorship.
Foreign Policy Association VERA MICHELES DEAN
,red
(In answering advertisements
Textiles: A Self-Diagnosis
by LEIFUR MAGNUSSON
ONE ALWAYS DRAWS A QUICK BREATH ABOUT THE OUTCOME
of international conferences. Economic conditions in different
countries may change and turn to dust the planning of years.
Political conditions may shrivel up the seeds of optimism.
The World Textile Conference, which met in Washington in
April preliminary to the regular annual conference of the
International Labor Organization, was cognizant of the re-
port that the government in Japan is none too stable. Ger-
many, with only an observer present, could promise nothing
in the conference. The U.S.S.R. too had an observer only.
Yet the trend of the two weeks of talk on the problems of a
sick textile industry points definitely towards realization of a
shorter work week when the I.L.O. meets in Geneva in
June. Perhaps it will not be the forty-hour week, but it will
be one under forty-eight hours. Unless of course some pillar
of international society should break down before that meet-
ing occurs.
Germany and Italy, no longer members of the I.L.O.,
were the only important textile countries not participating.
Of the twenty-seven countries represented, the sixteen that
lead in the industry had full tripartite delegations — a govern-
ment delegate, an employer and a worker. Yet the delegates
were the smaller part of the conference, being almost lost in
the swarm of advisers — many of them textile employers — who
accompanied them. Altogether 198 delegates and advisers
were in attendance, with representatives from the governing
body of the I.L.O. and a staff of fifty from the Geneva of-
fice. The largest delegation, of fifty-three, was that of the
United States, its government group headed by John G.
Winant, who was made chairman of the conference.
The conference took as the center of its discussions the
report on the world textile industry prepared by Dr. Lewis
L. Lorwin and ]. W. Nixon, statistician, of the International
Labor Office. The industry involves fourteen million em-
ployed and accounts for 17 percent of the world's international
trade. The problem of reducing hours and promoting better
labor conditions is complex. Since the War new countries have
entered the world markets and intensified competition.
Japan virtually has the position held by Great Britain in the
early nineteenth century. But as Dr. Lorwin points out in
his brief summary of the conference and the report (World
Affairs Book No. 19):
"World attention has been largely focused on the acute
competitive relations which developed between Japan and
other countries. Such concentration is justified, perhaps, be-
cause of the spectacular penetration of Japanese textile goods
into most markets despite tariffs, quotas, and other restric-
tive measures. But such singling out of Japan simplifies
the picture too much, and gives an inadequate idea of the
real complexity of world competition in textile products."
Technology has overthrown the dominance of the older
raw materials; natural silk, for instance, has been largely dis-
placed by synthetic fibers, which have in turn either dis-
placed cotton and wool or are used in combination. This
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
346
change is strikingly shown in the price of raw silk: it was
$3.56 a pound in New York before the War, rose to $8.88
at the post-War peak in 1919, tumbled to $1.20 in 1934, and
is at present around $2 a pound.
The total picture portrayed by the report is one of excess
productive capacity; under-consumption from a social point
of view; unusually low wages; disproportionately large
amount of employment of women and young persons; much
part time or lack of work and loss of income; and stranded
areas, which mean unemployment and underpaid textile pop-
ulations.
The forty-hour week was never mentioned in precise terms
in the subsequent findings of the conference. This led a
Washington commentator to say that the proposal for a
shorter work week was shelved, showing that he had lost
the significance of the wide-flung discussion of the larger
ramifications of the textile industry. What made the con-
ference valuable as an instrument to create sympathy towards
a shorter week was this consideration of the issues that con-
dition the achieving of shorter hours.
The Committee of the Whole (the conference in closed
session) called attention to the need to find ways and means
of raising standards of living. "Improvement in labor effi-
ciency . . . where such improvement was possible, would go
a long way toward offsetting the price-raising effects of
higher labor standards," said their report. "No area of the
world can expect to reap advantages from low wage stand-
ards and excessive hours for very long. . . . The best way
to improve labor standards and to expand trade in textiles
is to establish some concrete and practical relation between the
liberation of trade and the improvement of working condi-
tions."
A movement toward some intermediate compromise on
hours was clearly indicated. The forty-hour standard should
be no religious doctrine. (Moreover, no one should be so
unrealistic as to imagine that hours of work can be short-
ened indefinitely.) The Committee of the Whole called at-
tention to one delegate's suggestion that "while the limit
of hours of work should, in principle, be the same for all
countries, it might be expedient to consider the possibility of
permitting (as in the eight-hour convention of 1919) special
transitional arrangements for certain countries," leaving it to
the Geneva conference to arrange the compromise.
As the textile report shows, the forty-hour week is the norm
of the industry in the United States, the U.S.S.R., France and
Italy; forty-eight hours prevail in Belgium, Canada, Cuba,
Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland
and Sweden; more than forty-eight hours in the Orient only
— China, India and Japan.
The textile conference strengthened the case for the shorter
work week by linking its realization with economic progress,
stating that "in the interest of enlarged trade as well as of
improved social conditions, governments should seek every
opportunity to reduce trade barriers."
When the conference ended it had reduced the basic tech-
nical study to three brief committee reports on which to work.
The statistical report recommended periodical investigation
of conditions in the industry: that data be collected to show
the number of wage earners, amount of wages and man hours
in textile employments; the relation of total wages paid to the
net value of production, standard of living (cost of living
studies); employment and unemployment; and membership
in employers' and trade union organizations — though this
may be information hard to obtain.
The major conclusion of the committee on economic con-
ditions in the industry was that the textile industry above all
other industries called for international action as the proper
solution for its difficulties. It even went so far as to use that
bogey phrase "industrial planning on an international scale."
The findings of the conference as voiced by its committee
on social problems were probably a revelation to the American
(In answering advertisements please
347
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CAMPING AND GUIDANCE
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Of practical value to all camp directors and counselors.
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The author is Associate Professor at Cleveland College of
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AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS — A
study of their role in the Child Welfare
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By HAROLD C. COFFMAN
Studies a billion dollars of recent American philanthropy
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LEADERSHIP IN GROUP WORK
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"A remarkable objective analysis of American organiza-
tional efforts to improve Negro-White relationships." Ed-
ward G. Olsen in Social Frontiers. 267 pages, cloth. $3.00
See these books at our booth or the Survey Booth
at the National Conference of Social Work.
From your Bookseller or
ASSOCIATION PRESS
347 Madison Avenue New York, N. Y
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
IMPORTANT NEW PUBLICATIONS
'The biggest book news"
SOCIAL WORK YEAR BOOK- 1937
Edited by RUSSELL H. KURTZ
The most widely used reference book in social work is
again available in a new edition including appraisals of
the early effects of the Social Security Act and its sup-
porting legislation in the States. Public Welfare News
calls this publication "the biggest book news" in this
field.
709 double-column pages. $4.00
'most practical outline"
HOW TO' INTERPRET
SOCIAL WORK I
By HELEN CODY BAKER
and MARY SWAIN ROUTZAHN
Published in late April, this large, profusely illustrated
manual for groups studying social work interpretation
has already created a great stir in its field. One early
user calls it "the most practical outline of social work
interpretation I have seen."
8'/2 x 11. 79 pages. $1.00
studies in professions
SOCIAL WORK AS A PROFESSION
PHYSICIANS AND MEDICAL CARE
NURSING AS A PROFESSION
THE PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER
A new series of studies in professions by Esther Lucile
Brown, the first of which has already established its
place among social workers. Packed with information,
economical in price. Additional titles preparing.
Each, 75 cents
relief policies and results
CASH RELIEF
By JOANNA C. COLCORD
"All social workers will welcome it as an aid in inter-
preting modern methods of public assistance, especially
to citizen committees." — Survey.
263 pages. $1.50
UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF IN
PERIODS OF DEPRESSION
By LEAH H. FEDER
"It should be read by everyone interested in knowing
the experience of the past as a guide to planning for the
future." — Family.
384 pages. $2.50
RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
130 East 22d Street New York
public. At the moment that the press was carrying Henry
Ford's statement that he would never under any circumstances
recognize or deal with a trade union, the committee, which
included employers, declared for recognition and support of
collective bargaining; that collective agreements should be
buttressed by legislation and ratification of international labor
treaties in order to give greater permanence and security to
social standards. It agreed that night work of women and
young persons should be prohibited; the problem of the
stretch-out should be adjusted by agreement between employ-
ers and workers; and that matters of industrial hygiene and
fatigue in the industry should be investigated and information
on that subject disseminated by the I.L.O. It declared that a
clear need for reduction of hours in the textile industry had
been shown, and that such reduction was both practical and
necessary.
Progress is being substantially aided and prompted by such
apparently indefinite yet aboundingly human international
conferences as this on world textiles. The Supreme Court
decisions on the National Labor Relations Act came as the
conference was drawing to a close and made Washington a
good place for this preliminary meeting. It is to be hoped that
its progressive state of mind will be reflected in the tone of
the larger treaty-making gathering to follow at Geneva.
(In answering advertisements
SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
II- At the National Archives
by HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM
FUTURE HISTORIANS MAY REGARD IT AS SYMBOLIC THAT THE
National Archives building in Washington is bounded by
both Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues.
The first connects the Capitol and the White House and
thus represents the traditional concepts of government by
President, Congress and the Supreme Court. Constitution
Avenue runs past the newer buildings which house many
of the far-reaching, social agencies of government that have
risen to prominence during the past generation.
Among these agencies which denote a rising social con-
sciousness in Americans and their government, the National
Archives represents a new step toward humanizing our his-
tory, making it a more important factor in the future. The
inscription over its massive entry reads: "This building
holds in trust the records of our national life anci symbolizes
our faith in the permanency of our national institutions."
Yellowed documents, no matter how sacred or significant
in the past, lack vital force. Students alone can recreate the
atmosphere in which they were written. So the National
Archives now seeks to give history a third dimension against
the traditional flat outline of dates, events and quotations
which so frequently dominates school textbooks. They are
going to do it with the motion picture film, with sound.
R. D. W. Connor, archivist of the United States, and John
G. Bradley, chief of the Division of Motion Pictures and
Sound Recordings, are working to give the past as nearly
as possible the same perspective as the present. Scholars will
view films in a small projection room. They can write of
the past as if they had lived through it. For example, future
generations will be able to understand Franklin D. Roosevelt
better than Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. There
are not even photographs of Washington. A record of the
Gettysburg speech as Lincoln actually gave it might change
our ideas about the origin of this masterpiece and certainly
would be a priceless relic. Photographs of Washington would
show us how he really looked and not as artists thought he
should be represented.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC^
348
"There was a time when history was not recorded," Brad-
ley says in describing this new dimension for history writers.
"Then knowledge was handed down orally, by story tellers
and the stories were retold as remembered, the lapses being
filled in according to the narrator's imagination or purpose.
Although the results were frequently beautiful, they generally
were inaccurate.
"Writing, in contrast, was a process of fixation which
gave the lie to the story tellers. Printing gave wings to words
and promoted widespread dissemination of knowledge. Pic-
tures, and especially motion pictures, added a second dimen-
sion and gave mobility to recorded knowledge. Recorded
sound added a third dimension wherein, in addition to read-
ing a man's thoughts in words and seeing his thoughts in
pictures, we could actually hear his thoughts and observe
his emotions as well."
With all this in mind, Congress provided in the National
Archives Act of 1934 that the new governmental agency
could "accept, store and preserve motion picture films and
sound recordings pertaining to and illustrative of historical
activities of the United States."
Archivist Connor asked Bradley, who had helped draft
the legislation, to head the new motion picture division.
A graduate student in science, a former drama and art critic
and a one-time teacher, he brought to his work the enthusi-
asm of a young reporter and the penetration of a scholar.
A few gray hairs betray his forty years, but his energy belies
them.
Bradley faced the problem of finding a film that would
last and then storing it under near-perfect conditions to ob-
tain maximum life combined with absolute safety. He knew
what he wanted and called upon technical experts for aid.
Manufacturers of film, producers and exchange agencies had
not been primarily concerned with preservation. One ex-
change representative remarked that if he could keep a film
profitably for ninety days he would be happy. Here was a
pioneer field to explore. The picture industry, other govern-
ment agencies and private individuals joined the National
Archives on an original research project, set up under the
auspices of the National Research Council and coordinated
with a study already under way at the National Bureau of
Standards under a Carnegie Foundation grant.
As a result of this investigation, experts believe that cel-
lulose acetate film, preserved under conditions set up at the
National Archives building, will last several centuries, at the
end of which time it can be copied and the record continued
indefinitely.
Although acetate film can last a long time — perhaps five
hundred years — it tends to shrink and stretch. Now the
search is for a pre-shrunk base that will have all the ad-
vantages of nitrate film. Meanwhile the highly unstable and
inflammable nitrate film in ordinary commercial use can be
kept for many years in specially constructed stainless steel
containers and then rephotographed. These containers, de-
signed under Bradley's direction, have dual vents; one to
carry off smoke and heat in case of fire, the other to carry
off oxides of nitrogen. These oxides, unless dissipated, turn
on the film and accentuate deterioration and even destroy the
film itself unless removed.
Three types of films will be stored in the National
Archives: documentary, interpretative and dramatic interpre-
tative.
The first group will include pictures made by government
agencies and those gift films of factual scenes such as in-
augurations, sessions of Congress, major floods, dust storms
and important parades. Already the division has pictures
of all presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to date, except
William Howard Taft, taken by the Department of Agricul-
ture. Pictures of the building of the Panama Canal made
by the Thomas A. Edison Company are being inspected for
possible inclusion in the collection. The work of sorting films
has just begun. Technical problems had to be solved first.
THEY SAY:*
* There is no~
more Child
Labor"
BUT A MILLION AND A HALF CHILDREN
FLING THE LIE BACK INTO THEIR TEETH
CHILD WORKERS
IN AMERICA
By KATHARINE D. LUMPKIN
Director of Research, Industrial Studies, Smith College
and DOROTHY W. DOUGLAS
Assistant Professor of Economics and Sociology, Smith College
* To whom do we refer? Consult your own local papers.
Senators, businessmen, educators, churchmen. Many of
them may be sincere, but they owe it to the public to
know the facts. In CHILD WORKERS IN AMERICA,
the first and only definitive volume on Child Labor, these
two distinguished women sociologists make the facts
plain enough for anyone. What Katharine Mayo did for
Mother India, Lumpkin and Douglas do for the juvenile
slums of America. For instance: —
No less than half a million children under fifteen labor
for wages as low as from 3 to 5 cents an hour as
long as ten hours a day!
No less than a million children under fifteen slave on
farms under the broiling sun (see above) for no
wages at all^-except the pitiful stipend their parents
receive for family labor!
Thousands more ("little merchants") engage in street
trades at ages as low as six years, wages as little as
$1.50 a week, hours as long as fourteen a day!
Uncounted thousands of adults are deprived of work at
decent wages because a great nation prefers to turn
its back on child labor ... on its own posterity!
Something must be done about the hundreds of thousands
of our "forgotten children," whose labor not only
irreparably damages them for productive work when
they reach stunted maturity, but is the basis of many of
our industrial and agricultural difficulties.
Here is what you can do. Read this authoritative, factual
book and become thoroughly informed. Then spread the
information to everyone you know. Once it is aroused,
a great democracy like ours will not tolerate the barbaric
practices this book exposes. Illustrated, $3.50
At all bookstores, or Dept. S.
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
116 East 16th Street New York
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
349
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Training for this new profession
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Constructive Lending
Primary aim of the "Doctor of
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by misfortune or improvidence. The
social value of his work depends on
his success in making loans that will
render borrowers a lasting benefit.
To attain this objective the
"Doctor" assists men and women
in reorganizing their finances on a
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their expenditures — shows them
how to stop money leaks and live
within their incomes — suggests
ways to build up reserves.
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makes frequent use of Household
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Research Director
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Home Economist
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and how to use them; published by The Public Affairs Committee.
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The titles of the series to date are listed below. The price of these booklets is two
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a Poultry, Eggs and Fish D Kitchen Utensils
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D Fruits and Vegetables, D Floor Coverings
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Enclosed find $ in stamps; please send booklets checked to:
NAME
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STATE _
(In answering advertisements
Interpretative films will include pictures of government
work made by outside organizations. For example, Bradley
cites the film, You Can't Get Away with It, showing De-
partment of Justice special agents at work, as a typical ex-
ample. Comparable films have been made by the Federal
Housing Administration, Social Security Board and Coast
Guard. They are a sort of editorial in pictures.
The dramatic interpretative group will include film dramas
dealing with historic incidents of America's past. Bradley
believes it is incorrect to call these films fiction since they
reproduce the typical experiences of the past. The Covered
Wagon might be entered in this class; none has as yet been
approved. All such films will be graded on their historical
accuracy. Costumes in a picture might be accurate but if a
modern slang phrase slipped in it would count against the
historical picture, and such errors will be noted for future
historians if the film eventually is preserved.
Although Bradley has been busy with technical problems,
he looks forward to the service that his division can do for
future writers.
Ellerbe Learns by Doing
by ROBERT LITTELL
WHEN A SMALL TOWN RECEIVES, IN ONE DAY, MORE VISITORS
than it has inhabitants, something is going on there. This
spring a thousand teachers invaded Ellerbe, N. C. (popu-
lation, 700) and their goal was an ordinary looking con-
solidated rural school.
North Carolina spends less on the education of each
public school pupil enrolled than any other state in the
union except Arkansas and Mississippi. But the Ellerbe
school would not be typical even in those states which
spend five times as much. It teaches boys printing with-
out a teacher, for instance; it earns its own pocket money;
it has solved the problem of discipline; it has erased great
stretches of the usual sharp boundary between school and
life. It is a rare example of how energy and imagination
can triumph over a meager budget.
There are 350 students in Ellerbe's highschool, and
about twice as many in the lower grades. Some of them
live in the little town, which has a few stores and a hosiery
mill, most of them on farms as far as seventeen miles from
the school. This is the sand hill region, where a granu-
lated soil eats fertilizer and turns up under the plow like
dirty sugar. It is a country of open pine woods, tobacco
barns, peach orchards, short staple cotton and long-eared
mules. The farmers come of old, sturdy Anglo-Saxon
stock, but not all of them can read, and their houses often
look as if they didn't intend to live there very long.
Years ago, under the direction of a teacher who believed
that the school should take an active part in the life of the
community, the students of Ellerbe started a nursery,
transplanting young trees and bushes they found in the
woods. They planted hedges about the school, in time
extending their landscape gardening to the town's
churches and to 250 homes in the community. Everyday
one can see, on the running board of a school bus (which
the students drive themselves) some shrubs destined to
mask in green the brick stilts that lift the farmhouses
above the naked sand.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
350
The children have complete charge of the cleanliness
of grounds and classrooms. One can see groups of small
figures scouring the hedges for rubbish, like squirrels
after nuts. With no teacher in sight, a small boy will run
ten yards to put the paper that wrapped his lunch into a
trash basket. In the highschool a very business-like inspec-
tion committee, two girls and a boy, visits all classrooms.
They peer under desks, run their fingers along moldings,
and meet outside the doors to compare samples of dust, if
any, and give the room a mark.
The students of Ellerbe have built their own tennis
court and a log cabin; they have calcimined their class-
room walls, mended their stairs, built bookcases, put in
drinking fountains. The state cannot afford to do it for
them, so they do it themselves, voluntarily. Every year
they give the school — their school — about 100,000 hours of
work.
When the teachers have been paid (the average salary is
$800), a North Carolina school budget has very little
money left for bare necessities. But the Ellerbe students
have a school store, which sells stationery and candy for a
profit of $35 a month, and a printshop which nets about
$60 a month. These and other activities have earned for
the school almost $7000 in the last nine years — an income
which has made it possible for the school to have a tele-
phone, to get new books and bind old ones, to frame its
pictures, to equip its spare but industrious workshop with
tools, to put uniforms on its basketball team, and do a hun-
dred other things which in most states are accepted items
in the cost of public education. Nine years ago the school
had 650 books. Now, entirely through its own efforts, it
has 13,000. The library is always crowded.
The printing press at Ellerbe was once given up for
junk; its type was mixed with decayed mattress stuffing.
The students put the press together and sorted out the 41
fonts of type which were all pied together. They learn
this craft from one another without a teacher. They do
the job-printing for the town of Ellerbe and, of course, all
the school printing. They filled a private order for a book
of poems. It is a first rate job of bookmaking.
The burden of discipline has somehow been passed
from the teachers to the children, and in the process it has
mysteriously disappeared. The buses load and unload
their young passengers without supervision; the teachers
all go home to lunch and leave the children to them-
selves. In the highschool, the student council is responsible
for all discipline and punishes all breaches of it. Yet this
young court's calendar is strangely blank. These children
behave because they are interested in their work. The
teacher is a teacher only and not a cop.
They learn by doing, at Ellerbe. The curriculum wan-
ders over into life, eats big chunks of it, and comes back
into the classroom permanently enriched. I saw a class
spending one of its periods giving blood tests to a neigh-
bor's chickens, and another which went outdoors to study
Caesar and fight battles with the Helvetians in North
Carolina's sand. I saw an arithmetic teacher's classroom,
in which the children were about to start a bank with
money printed by the school press.
Ellerbe's claim to distinction is that it has done so much
with so little. It has actually made capital of its financial
handicaps by transforming lacks into opportunities to
learn. Other schools might learn much from Ellerbe, from
its teachers, and from its imaginative and courageous prin-
cipal, Richard F. Little.
(In answering advertisements please
351
WHICH MAKES OF TRAILERS
AND WASHING MACHINES ARE
"BEST BUYS"
What makes of trailers show the best
engineering construction? Which are
rated as "Best Buys" on basis of quality
and price?. What effect does towing a
trailer have on the durability of the
towing car? On the gasoline mileage?
On the driving habits of the driver?
What are the advantages and disad-
vantages of trailers in terms of living
comfort?
What three models of wasting ma-
chines, out of 10 models tested by
engineers, were rated as "Best
Buys"? What three models as
"Not Acceptable"? Which model
had the greatest washing effective-
ness? Which one was dropped out
of a durability test after three gears
had failed?
What is the nature and what are the
causes of constipation? What are the
best means of avoiding and treating it?
Which laxatives are effective and which
are not? Which may be taken safely . . .
and which may not? What are the best
methods and materials to use in protect-
ing your clothes from moths? What
product advertised as a moth preven-
tive was described as ". . . worthless for
the control of moths" by the U. S. Food
and Drug Administration?
T|_|C" AMCVI/FRQ '" these and many similar ques-
• nt rtl^wwwtfmw tions are given in the current issue
of Consumers Union Reports, the monthly publication which goes to
members of Consumers Union of United States and which Crates
products by brand name, as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and
"Not Acceptable" on the basis of tests by unbiased experts. The
coupon below is your invitation to become a member of this unique
and rapidly growing organization. The membership fee is $3 a year
($1 for an abridged edition covering only the less expensive products).
It brings you twelve issues of the Reports, the yearly Buying Guide
and a vote in the control of the organization. Properly used, the
information contained in these reports can save
the average family 1100 or more a year. (Note:
Information is also given in the Reports, on the
labor conditions under which many of the prod-
ucts are made.)
Your membership can start with any of
the following issues. Simply indicate
on the coupon with which issue you
wish to begin. SEPT. — Shoes, Tires,
Whiskies; OCT. — Dentrifrices, Cor-
dials and Gina, Electric Razors; NOV. —
Radios, Wines, Children's Shoes; DEC.
— Vacuum Cleaners, Fountain Pens,
Nose Drops; JAN.-FEB. — Cold Reme-
dies, Shaving Creams, Men's Suits;
MAR. — 1937 Autos, Face Powders,
Sheets, Flour; APR. — Radio Sets, Cold
Creams, Gardening, Shirts; MAY —
Trailers, Washing Machines, Constipa-
tion, Moth Preventives.
WITH
YOUR
MEM-
BERSHIP—
A 240
PAGE
BUYING GUIDE
containing ratings of over
a thousand products, by
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NOW!
To CONSUMERS UNION OF UNITED STATES, Inc.
55 Vandam Street, New York, N. Y.
I hereby apply for membership In Consumers Union. I enclose:
D $3 for one year's membership, $2.50 of which Is for a year's subscription to
the complete edition of Consumers Union Reports.
O $1 'or one year's membership, SOc of which is for a year's subscription to
the limited edition of Consumers Union Reports. (NOTE: Reports on
higher-priced products are not in this edition.)
I agree to keep confidential all material sent to me which is so designated-
.Signature
Address
City and State
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
Occupation SG-6
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The Twenty-three National Parks
Do YOU KNOW YOUR NATIONAL PARKS? EIGHTEEN STATES ARE
the proud possessors of these reservations, California boast-
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1200 square miles, and the beautiful but smaller Sequoia.
Complete details as to the history, size, natural characteris-
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of accommodation available to visitors, with information as
to rules, regulations and park services, may be had in the
shape of booklets provided by the National Park Service,
Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C. Many of
these booklets are free; for others a modest charge is made.
In Search of America
THE ROAD, By Nathan Asch. Norton. A bus trip across America.
RAW UNCLE SAM, by Charles Moody. Meador. A thumbnail sketch of
each state in the union, for the tourist.
THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS, by Laura Thornborough. Crowell.
A guide to the newest of National Parks.
Motoring in Canada
FOR THE BENEFIT OF AMERICAN VACATIONISTS WHO ARE EX-
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Canada on touring and sightseeing trips this summer, the
Canadian Pacific Railway is distributing copies of the fifth
edition of its rotogravure booklet, Motor to Canada.
The twenty-page pamphlet, profusely illustrated and con-
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provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova
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CANADA CAVALCADE, by Robert H. Davis. Appleton-Centui-y.
CANADA, by Andre Siegfried. Harcourt.
MY WESTERN EXCURSION, by Stephen Leacock. Dodd. Economic and
social study of the East and West in Canada.
For the Trailer-Minded
TOURING WITH TENT AND TRAILER, by W. Kimball and M.
Decker. McGraw-Hill.
THE TRAILER HOME, by Blackburn Sims. Longmans.
THE CRUISE OF THE BOUNCING BETSY, by Jay N. Darling. Stokes.
A trailer travelogue with drawings by the author.
Mexico
LET'S DRIVE TO MEXICO, by Weston and Porter. Dodd Mead. Practi
cal information on motoring to Mexico.
MEXICO AROUND ME, by E. G. Jackson. Reynal & Hitchcock. First
hand experiences in Mexico.
GUIDE TO MEXICO, by Francis Toor. McBride.
Adventure and Foreign Travel
RIDE ON THE WIND, by F. C. Chichester. Harcourt. First hand account
of famous pilot's flight across Southern Seas.
ZEST FOR LIFE, by Johan Woller. Knopf. Travel reminiscences.
ROUGH PASSAGE, by R. D. Graham. Houghton. England to Newfound-
land, Labrador and Bermuda in a yacht.
BEAM ENDS, by Errol Flynn. Longmans. Film star's seven months' ad-
ventures in an old sailing yacht.
CRUISE OF THE CONRAD, by A. J. Villiers. Scribner.
A JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM, by St. John Greer Ervine. Macmillan.
OF THE MULTITUDE, by Ross N. Berkes. Graphic Press. A journey
around the world to study people.
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, by M. Leahy and M. Crain. Funk
& Wagnalls. Adventures in New Guinea. Royal Geographic award.
SOUTH TO SAMARKAND, by Ethel Edith Mannin. Dutton. Seven thou-
sand mile journey from Moscow thru Ukraine and Caucasus to Samarkand.
INVITATION TO TRAVEL, by Helen Dean Fish. Ives Washburn. How
to do it, with list of travel books.
I VISIT THE SOVIETS, by E. M. Delafield. Harper.
HOW TO TRAVEL WITHOUT BEING RICH, by William M. Strong.
Doubleday. Practical advice and suggestions on inexpensive foreign travel.
These books may be ordered from your Bookseller,
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(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
352
ON DISCOVERING AMERICA
(Continued from page 315)
bridges and buildings and the money is theirs when they have
earned it, my American spirit tells me. And America is still
the richest country in the world and likely to remain so.
Nor can I get excited over the differences between us.
Hatreds, yes — they are stupid and wrong. It is senseless to
hate a man because he is different, and the fault is in our
education which has not made us enough above the beast
to see this. For though men hate each other when they come
here, they should be taught as the basis for American citizen-
ship that here we may differ each from the other, and that
diversity is our strength and our nature, and each man is to
believe what he feels true, and our one common belief is this.
Practically speaking, of course, our life is carried on upon
this basis. The reason why we exist together at all in peace,
as we do, is simply because there are so many factions among
us that once any of us started to fight there'd be no end
to the people to be fought. We could not divide into two
nice clean divisions, and have a simple war, for instance,
between Fascists and Communists. The Republicans and
Democrats would refuse to be anything else completely, and
so would the Episcopalians and Presbyterians and the Prim-
itive Baptists and the Townsendites and the Daughters of
the American Revolution and the Bostonians and all the
people who live in many regions in Virginia and Georgia
and Mississippi and all the menagerie of Lions and Elks and
Moose and what not. None of these would be willing to be a
Fascist or a Communist, because he considers being one of
these other thousand things is the only important thing to
be, and in so behaving he is being something far greater
than a Fascist or Communist. He is being an American.
Yes, in our diversity is our safety. It is not wise to prophesy,
but I believe ours is the only safe country in the world today,
because we cannot be organized and regimented into any
simple opposing forces. There are capitalists among laborers
and there are Socialists and Communists among millionaires
and their sons, and our president may be an aristocrat by
birth or a foundling, depending on what he is and how we
like him. It is true I hear rumors of a dictator to come, four
or eight years from now, but I hear, too, the familiar growl
and rumble of stubborn protest which makes me feel a dicta-
tor would find it very hard going in America. We will
never have a vast bloody revolution as Russia and Germany
have had because we wouldn't tolerate any one group having
so much power as to make such fools of the rest of us. We
may persist in our own kind of lawlessness — in racketeering
and private murders, but these won't get out of hand and
become national or international, because we will never be
able to agree together on anything on such a scale. We are
not at all a moral people nor even at all religious except in
small sectarian ways. But we give people a better chance
than any other country does because we believe in having a
good chance ourselves. We do not really love freedom so
much as we pretend — plenty of people would be glad to have
all who disagree with them done away with, except it would
then be too lonely to live at all. Besides, they know somebody
feels that way about them, so it's better to keep still and go
on about one's own business. And the result of all this is
peace. And another result is opportunity — opportunity for
some of us to work, for some of us to strike, for some of us
to succeed, for some of us to fail and go on relief.
I believe, then, in exactly the sort of America we have now,
except I wish we could see that what we have is good and
inevitable, and so cease to hate each other. Our country is
based upon diversity of race and upon freedom of belief,
and this is our chief claim to being unique and great.
(Continued on page 355)
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112 West 86th Street New York City
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ON DISCOVERING AMERICA
(Continued from page 353)
I believe, too, in keeping clear and wide the source of our
national strength, immigration. This is not at all to say that
we are to allow anybody to come into America. We who
are here do have the right to say who shall come into our
nation. At the same time I believe we have not yet learned
how to secure these values of immigration to our nation,
because we have not yet the rational basis for quota immigra-
tion. It is not racial or national, it is not what proportion
of Anglo-Saxons should we maintain. What rational man
says, "I will allow so many Germans, so many Czechs, so
many Italians, so many English, and no Orientals to enter
my house?" Only a stupid and prejudiced mind could be so
irrational. The wise man will open his doors wide to the
intelligent and to the good, whatever their race and nation,
and he will close his doors to the criminal and the feeble-
minded. I believe the only tests which should be applied to
those wanting to become Americans are a test for intelligence
and a test for inherent character. Brains and a sense of right
and wrong should be the passport to America. I am glad
for every restless eager heart and ambitious mind that looks
Americaward. I have no patience with those who would
crouch like greedy beasts, holding fast to more than they
eat, lest others more needy get it. The future of America
depends on immigration — it must, or we who are here will
grow stagnant with too little life of our own.
For we are isolated in a fashion which no other nation
knows. Other nations are subject to a constant interchange
of language, thought and people between their close boun-
daries, but we are not. The two great oceans hem us in
with silence, and north and south we have neighbors, good,
but not enough beyond us for sufficient stimulation. We
need new life for centuries to come, perhaps forever. I should
like, as an American, to think of America as forever the land
to which the restless and the bold, the brilliant and the good,
out of every people, could come and make their home. I am
not fearful of such people starving or starving others by their
presence, for they create jobs.
I REALIZE THAT IN THIS THINKING ABOUT AMERICA I HAVE
maintained to an exasperating degree the long view to which
my Chinese-trained eyes are accustomed. But I still believe
it is the only view for rational life, and when we try to settle
national problems for the day, we are robbing the nation
which is to be, and which is just as much America as the
America we have now. It is as absurd as refusing to see
the man in the child, and shaping his education not on what
he should be as a man, but upon his evanescent childish
needs. It is our weakness as Americans that we cannot see
ourselves in the largeness of time. Perhaps it is a thing the
immigrants can teach us, who come from old countries. At
least let them know, these immigrants, what our fault is.
When they meet with hostile looks and surly voices of
unwelcome upon these shores of their home, when their
children hear ugly names and taunts in schools, let them
know that this is not America speaking — that America is
more than these, more than any of us who are alive at this
little moment. We all have a right here, for America from
the very first has had her beginning in all peoples, and her
strength is drawn from all peoples and her future depends
on us all. We must teach our children, native-born and for-
eign-born alike, that there is no final America yet — that they
are making America, too, by what they themselves are —
regardless of what others are. We must teach the foreign-
born to laugh when silly children cry, "You're wops —
you're heinies — you're sheenies; we're Americans." The
truth is, Americans are all something else, too, and are going
to be for a long, long time, and the truest American knows it.
(In answering advertisements
/e/fr/mio is
" I ' ' I
bringing 11(3 mother
Peppino tells her how to dress. He wants his
mother to look American.
He tells her the flat should be neater. But there
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tries — but she can't quite turn the trick.
When you're helping Peppino have a better
home, remember that Fels-Naptha Soap can often
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For Fels-Naptha makes it easier to accomplish
more washing and cleaning. It does this because
it holds richer, golden soap and lots of naptha.
It speeds out the grimiest dirt — even in cool water.
For a sample bar, write Fels & Co., Philadelphia,
Pa., mentioning Survey Graphic.
ta
The golden bar with the clean naptha odor
rENJOY SUMMER
IN THE CITY
\
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SUMMER QUARTER, 1937
First term, June 16 • July 21
Second term, July 22-August 27
Academic Year 1937-38
Begins October 1
Announcements on Request
THE SOCIAL SERVICE REVIEW
Edited by GRACE ABBOTT
A Professional Quarterly for Social Workers
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to tbi
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from a
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalog*! and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
SUMMER SESSION
1937
JUNE 21 - AUGUST 14
The following are among the Courses offered:
Dramatics and Personality Development
Recreational Therapy
Family Case Work
Psychiatry for Social Workers
Publicity for Social Work
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
Chicago Avenue Chicago, 111.
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
CURRICULUM FOR 1937-38
Professional training combining courses and field
work, in both public and private agencies, is
offered in the following fields :
Public Welfare
Group Work
Administration
Social Research
Community Organization
Psychiatric Social Work
Medical Social Work
Family Case Work
Probation and Parole
Child Welfare
The School year is divided into four quarters and
application may be made for any quarter. The
summer curriculum is planned especially for pro-
fessional social workers.
A catalogue will be sent upon request.
122 EAST 22ND STREET
New York N. Y.
TULANE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL of SOCIAL WORK
Basic first year preparation. Second year
course leading to the degree of Master of
Social Work.
Summer Session
June 12 — July 24, 1937
Fall Semester
September 22, 1937 — February 5, 1938
Spring Semester
February 7, 1938 — June 8, 1938
Announcement on request
The Director of the School, New Orleans, La.
(In answering advertisements please mention SL'RVKY GRAPHIC,)
356
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
FOR JEWISH SOCIAL WORK
offers graduate professional curricula for
the acquisition of the necessary knowledge
and skills for social work, leading to the
Master's and Doctor's degrees.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SOCIAL
WORK AGENCIES
increasingly require such knowledge and
skill from candidates for positions.
For information about require-
ments for admission, scholar-
ships and fellowships, write to
DR. M. J. KARPF, Director
The
Graduate
School
For
Jewish
Social Work
71 West 47 Street, New York City
SIMMONS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
Professional Education in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Social Research
Leading to the degrees of B.S. and M.S.
A catalog will be sent on request
18 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
GOING
PLACES?
\Ve recommend for your consideration the an-
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issue of Survey Graphic.
Write them direct telling of your plans and they
will gladly offer suggestions and information.
The
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
The Regular School offers two years of graduate
professional training upon the completion of
which the degree, Master of Social Work, is
conferred by the University of Pennsylvania.
The curriculum includes courses in
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
The Advanced Curriculum offers training beyond
the two year course to graduates of accredited
schools of social work who have had successful
professional experience. This curriculum includes
advanced technical courses in
Supervision and teaching of social case work
Psychological treatment of children
Social work administration
Applications for the 1937-1938 session should be filed
by May 15. A bulletin will be sent upon request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
The School offers courses of instruction leading to the de-
gree of Master of Social Science, a post-graduate course of
training in the supervision and teaching of case work, a
summer session of instruction for those already engaged in
case work, and three two-week seminars on selected topics.
Registration for the first two types of courses for the 1987
session is now closed but a few places may still be open in
the seminars and in the summer session. During July and
August, 1987, the following seminars are being offered:
1. Application of Mental Hygiene to Present-day Problems
in Case Work with Families. Miss Grace Marcus and Dr.
Evelyn Alpern. July 12-24.
2. Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case Work.
Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss Beatrice H. Wajdyk.
July 26-August 7.
3 The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn Jackson
and Miss Mary Whitehead. August 9-21.
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for June, 1937
The Home Situations of the Children in a Pre-primary
School: a Study for Visiting Teachers. . . Virginia Wallis
Bowers.
Factors Influencing the Amenability of Mothers and Chil-
dren to Treatment in a Child Guidance Clinic. . . Pearl
Kotzen Lodgen
The Work of a Family Agency with Clients Receiving Pub-
lic Relief. . . Lois Shattuck Parsons
Published Quarterly 75 cents a copy; $2.00 a year
For further information writt to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
PRINTED BY
BLANCHARD PRESS
NEW YORK
e name of humanity . . . please
In an appeal circulated by Bishop
Francis J. McConnell, chairman
of the North American Committee
to Aid Spanish Democracy and
leader of the Methodist Church,
7* U. S. leaders gave support to
Bishop McConnell In denouncing
the monstrous crime against the
Basque nation.
"The ancient Basque city of
Guernica has been razed to the
it round by Fascist Insurgent alr-
R lanes. Unfortified and unarmed,
••» house*, churches and defense-
less inhabitants — -10,000 men, wo-
men and children were bombed
and machine-gunned."
"We refuse to condone such
atrocities by our silence."
"Will the prayers of Guernica's
dead and dying go unanswered?"
"We denounce the monstrous
crime of Guernica In the name
of justice and humanity.*'
Some of those who have answered
this stirring appeal are:
Governor H. Lehman. Sen. Rob-
ert Wagner, Bishop Manning,
Governor Benson, Dr. Albert
Einstein, Clarence Darrow, Sen.
Elmer Thomas. Alfred M. Landon,
William Green, Henry L. Stimson,
Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Blahop
Ernest Stlres, The Rev. Dr. Harry
Emerson Fosdlck. Senator Gerald
P. Nye and many others.
NEW YORK TIMES. MAY 10th
A BASQUE MOTHER CRIES
In the evacuation of Malaga, the horrible bombard-
ment of Madrid, and today in the terror-stricken
Basque country, non-combatants, mothers and their
children are the victims. They go ragged and hungry,
fleeing from the Fascist planes that shower death
upon them.
' SAVE THE CHILD VICTIMS
of FASCISM
Basque President Jose Antonio de Aguirre says: "Save our
women and children, for our men we ask nothing." A Basque
mother pleads: "Despite our hunger we do not appeal for our-
selves, we appeal to you today for our loved ones, our children.
The new generation, driven from town to town are footsore and
weary. They are undernourished. Unfed, they are easy victims
of disease. They literally die on our hands. We appeal to all
humanitarian Americans: You cannot refuse us in this, our
hour of great need. For us nothing— but for our children milk
and food. Don't let them die!"
We re terribly hungry—
PLEASE tend my BABY
.Walce rnecfai payable to:
Helen W. Gilford. Treasurer
North American Committrr
to Aid Spanish Democracy —
381 Fourth Ave., New York.
.My contribution off
is to be applied to the pur-
pose* checked.
(Name). .
I Addretw
What Your Contribution Will Do:
(1.000 will f«-r<). clothe and ,-mrr for 10 children for a
whole year
(550 will feed, <-ic»l he and < «rr for 10 children for 6 month*
M5O will feed, clothe and care for IO children for t month*
One COM of aworted food* (2SO Ib».) (25.0O
One bag of flour (196 ll>- 7.50
One cane of baby food 6.5O
One caae of tinned meal . . . 6.00
One bag of lunar (100 Ib*. I 3.5O
One eaoe of condensed milk 3.25
One cane of canned vegetable* 3.2O
Fifty ixMiiid- of bean* 3.25
Twenty-6ve poundu of •ugar 1.00
1OO poundf* of t-.M'oii 1 .00
NOW
IS THE
TIME TO
HELP!
NORTH AMERICAN COMMITTEE TO AID SPANISH DEMOCRACY
Bishop Francit J. McConnell, Chairman
Rev. Herman F. Reitsig, Executive Secretory
SURVEY
JULY 1937
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
GROWTH OF THE NATION
ANNUAL AVERAGE PER CAPITA EXPENDITURES
OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
1 789- I860
1861-1916
EACH COIN REPRESENTS 4 DOLLARS
1917- 1936
PICTORIAL STATISTICS, IRC.
The Constitution at 150
WALTER LINCOLN WHITTLESEY
Packaged Houses
C. THEODORE LARSON
The Soul of Spain
HAVELOCK ELLIS
p. R:
WILLIAM JAY SCHIEFFELIN
That Glorious Empire by S. K. Ratcliffe . . . Labor, Management and the Public by Stanley Mathewson
How Healthy Are We? First findings of the National Health Inventory, interpreted by Mary Ross
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358
The Gist of It
ON THE 150TH BIRTHDAY OF THE CONSTITU-
tion we find ourselves facing a modern ver- JULY 1937 CONTENTS VOL. xxvi No. 7
sion of the problems that distinguished the
early days of the Republic when our national .
charter inevitably followed the Articles of Growth of the Nation .COVER DESIGN
Confederation. No "ore fitting season than ; Benjamin N. Cardozo .FRONTISPIECE
Independence Day (and for that matter the
anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg) could The Constitution at 150 WALTER LINCOLN WHITTLESEY 361
be selected for bringing the long view to the
thorny discussion which today makes consti- The Soul of Spain HAVELOCK ELLIS 364
tutional conversationalists of us all. And no
more appropriate historian than Walter Lin- Artist-Commentator PAINTINGS BY WILLIAM CROPPER 366
coin Whittlesey could be found to relate the
past to the present. In the leading article, That Glorious Empire s. K. RATCLIFFE 368
page 361, Professor Whittlesey writes a sequel
to his article, Back to the Confederation, in How Healthy Are We? MARY ROSS 371
Survey Graphic just two years ago. Now, as
then, he distils his experience as editor and Office Hours for Mrs. Herrick BEULAH AMIDON 375
journalist, and his authority as a historian, _
into language for laymen. . Packaged Houses c. THEODORE LARSON 377
A FOOTNOTE TO THE GRIM HEADLINES FROM RR' 3nd NeW Yorkers WILLIAM JAY SCHIEFFELIN 383
Spain, the essay by Havelock Ellis (page The w Water and ^ Grazin Laws FRANCESCA M. BLACKMER 387
364) was written as part of the introduction
to a new edition of his great book. The Soul Labor Management and the Public ..STANLEY B. MATHEWSON 388
of Spam, which Houghton Mimm has an-
nounced for fall publication. The world over, Through Neighbors' Doorways
Havelock Ellis is known for his wise critical Leaks Around the Bulkheads . JOHN PALMER GAVIT 392
writings on life and art, for his pioneering
studies of sex. and for his rediscovery of Old Life and Letters: In Defense of Both Sides . .LEON WHIPPLE 394
Spain.
Laboratory Tests for Marriage A. FREDERICK MIGNONE 400
THE UNITED STATES is NOT THE ONLY
country that has a constitutional crisis, as the American Notes: Transient ALFRED FRIENDLY 402
British can tell you. On the heels of the ab-
dication, the Irish framed a new constitution Postscripts
without reference to London, then the Indians & Suryey Associatcs> Inc
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secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors;
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EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
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H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPER, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
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tising manager.
balked at the constitution which London
created for them. What these events portend
for the empire is told by S. K. Ratcliffe (page
368), an informed interpreter of the foreign
affairs that necessarily surround Great Bri-
tain's domestic doings. Mr. Ratcliffe is now
planning his annual visit to the United States
to lecture in the autumn.
A FIRST ARTICLE FOR THE LAITY ON FACTS
emerging from the vast National Health In-
ventory brings the story of chronic sickness
in one American city (page 371) by Mary
Ross, who has followed public health in
these pages since she joined the staff in 1922.
For a technical report of these preliminary
data, see the article by George St. J. Perrott
and Dorothy F. Holland in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, May 29.
BEULAH AMIDON, WHO GIVES A CLOSE-UP OF
a regional director of the National Labor
Relations Board (page 375) is no stranger
to her subject. Industrial editor of Survey
Graphic, Miss Amidon has edited and con-
tributed to a notable series of articles on
labor developments from the time of the
late 7-a of the National Industrial Recovery
Act to the historic Supreme Court hearings
on the Wagner Labor Act in February.
SOCIAL THEORISTS, AS WELL AS HOUSEHOLD-
ers, wonder what prefabricated dwellings
will mean to the future. On page 377 C. Theo-
dore Larson tells just how near we are to
getting packaged houses off the assembly
line, and why the process has at last really
got under way. He is technical news editor
of The Architectural Record.
LAST FALL IN NEW YORK, DETERMINED
citizens borrowed a leaf from Cincinnati's
book and joined all their forces in a cam-
paign for a new charter and for proportional
representation in the election of council mem-
bers. They won, only to have P.R. — as every
one calls proportional representation — fought
in the courts by the intrenched political ma-
chine. Now that the state's highest court has
sustained P.R., William Jay Schieffelin, one
of New York's best known citizens, who has
thrown his weight on the side of civic reform
for more than a generation, tells how the
victory was finally won and what it means to
the country's biggest city. (Page 383)
FRANCESCA M. BLACKMER, WHO DEPLORES
the effect of the new grazing laws in the
West (page 387) speaks for herself and her
neighbors. She and her husband own and
operate a ranch in Nevada.
AS THE CIO INVADES THE CIVIL SERVICE,
and Little Steel defies the CIO, Stanley B.
Mathewson looks back at the Wagner Act
decision of April 12, and ahead to its impli-
cations when public welfare, as well as inter-
state commerce, is affected by labor disputes.
Director of the Cincinnati Employment Cen-
(Continued on page 404)
359
Pirie MacDonald
JUSTICE BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO
. . . Nor is the concept of the general welfare static. Needs
that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven
in our day with the well-being of the nation. What is critical
or urgent changes with the times. The purge of nation-wide
calamity that began in 1929 has taught us many lessons. Not
the least is the solidarity of interests that may once have seemed
to be divided Spreading from state to state, unemployment
is an ill not particular but general, which may be checked, if
Congress so determines, by the resources of the nation. ... But
the ill is all one or at least not greatly different whether men
are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do,
or because the disability of age makes them incapable of doing
it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause."— From
the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court, de-
livered by Justice Cardoio, on the old age provisions of the
Social Security Act.
JULY 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 7
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Constitution at 150
by WALTER LINCOLN WHITTLESEY
Celebrating the Fourth of July and the sesquicentennial of the Constitution,
Professor Whittlesey discusses — with historical fireworks — our basic law, not
as toast and talisman, but as charter and as oracle.
WE APPROACH THE 150tH BIRTHDAY OF THE GREATEST POLITI-
cal document so far devised by modern men. The Framers
were colonial Englishmen newly separated from the
Mother Country. They were public men, steeped in the
letter and spirit of that slow process by which the British
power-state became a system of strong government ruled
largely under law. We are Americans, practical, business-
like, usually aware first of private points of view, instinc-
tively blind to any but our own native brand of politics,
and quite impatient of the West-European time-rootage
out of which our politics and Constitution grew. Theirs
was theirs; ours is ours. To urge that ours can only be
understood by considering theirs, is unfortunately tedious
but it is inescapably true.
What was that "British Constitution" as argued and
appealed to by our ancestors during George Washington's
lifetime? It was not any written framing of powers and
rights and government, as on a set date, but the abstract
operating totality of government as practiced during suc-
cessive centuries. After 1066, thanks to William the Con-
queror, Englishmen were governed whether they liked it
or not, mostly the latter. They thus had to fight it out as
to who was to rule, and how, and how much. "The bless-
ings of the British Constitution in its original purity," the
condition in which about 1762 Samuel Adams said he
desired it, refers to all the established modes by which
England was in fact governed, after main issues had been
fought out.
Our Constitution aims, primarily and even today, to
settle such issues without fighting. Save when our lead-
ership fails, as in the Civil War era, this experiment has
succeeded and does succeed beyond the dreams of those
who dared our national destiny in 1787. Our Constitution
built then a federal state; the British Constitution was
then and is now the being of a somewhat unified state
of world-wide extension and through a thousand years.
Their state began as army and grew to be landholding by
the king and the great feudal chiefs who swore fealty to
him, though the king acted directly on his own domain
alone. William the Conqueror enlarged that group-state
by the oath which "all the landholding men of property
there were over all England, whosesoever men they were"
took to him in the great plain of Sarum on the Lammas-
tide of 1086. England was thenceforth the king's land and
all were the king's subjects. This new state, of which the
great landowners were but creatures, came to control the
courts, the law, the church, taxation and finance, in a
national system uniquely combining central with local
power, official with popular feeling. Compared with Eng-
land the monarchies of Europe, as shown at Crecy and
Poitiers and Agincourt, were shadow states.
The abiding British constitutional issue boils down to
one question : What element in the state wields the power
of the Crown? The answer made in 1895 by their great
constitutional scholar, Frederick William Maitland, and
he speaks of Henry the Eighth's time, is: "There was
nothing that could not be done by the authority of Par-
liament." The issue had been fought out, and Maitland
adds: "Just now and then in the last of the Middle Ages
and thence onwards into the eighteenth century, we hear
the judges claiming some vague right of disregarding
statutes which are directly at variance with the common
law, or the law of God, or the royal prerogative. In the
troublous days of Richard the Second a chief justice got
himself hanged as a traitor for advising the king that a
statute curtailing the royal power was void. The theory is
but a speculative dogma." What price judicial review! The
issue, still clearer since Cromwell, is: What elements wield
the power of Parliament?
BUT IN ENGLAND WHERE THEY HOLD BY THE COMMON LAW,
"one of the toughest things ever made," the village group of
farmers was not a creature of the state. This was even
more emphatically true when such villagers moved over
to our side of the Atlantic where our groups of settlers
largely made their own land settlements, laws and gov-
ernments, and finally split off around 1776 from that
upper-class British Crown-in-Parliament state. Where's the
power in our system?
Thirty-odd years ago, Simeon E. Baldwin, Associate
361
Justice of the Supreme Court of Errors in Connecticut,
and professor of constitutional law at Yale, answered : "No
government can live and flourish without having as part
of its system of administration of civil affairs some perma-
nent human force, invested with acknowledged and su-
preme authority, and always in a position to exercise it
promptly and efficiently, in case of need, on any proper
call. The judiciary holds this position in the United States."
CERTAINLY THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF DOES NOT SPEAK OUT
so robustly either in defining "the judicial power" or in
that famous "linch pin" paragraph which sets forth "the
supreme law of the land." Certainly also, if the above doc-
trine had been novel Judge Baldwin would not have
asserted it. This now-so-active power of judicial review is
defined by our leading authority, E. S. Corwin of Prince-
ton, as "the power of a court to pass on the validity of
the acts of a legislature in relation to a 'higher law' which
is regarded as binding on both." Back in the first Queen
Elizabeth's day one Bishop Hoadley referred to this and
noted its outcome as to power: "Whoever hath an abso-
lute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, he it
is who is truly the law-giver to all intents and purposes,
and not the person who first wrote them." Perhaps the
Bishop thus made Judge Baldwin's pronouncement possi-
ble; certainly the view both expressed is that which our
Supreme Court has acted upon with increasing momen-
tum since about 1890, and most conspicuously and often
since 1933. The latest statement of it is that made by Chief
Justice Charles Evans Hughes on May 6, when he told
the American Law Institute that petitions for certiorari
are granted to insure "the hearing of cases that are im-
portant in the interest of the law. That is, where review by
the Court of last resort is needed to secure harmony in the
lower courts of appeal and the appropriate settlement of
questions of general importance, so that the system of
federal justice may be appropriately administered." We
can all see that while "questions of general importance"
are constitutionally entrusted to the legislative and execu-
tive not to the judicial power, nevertheless, under the doc-
trine of May 6, five or more justices decide what is "appro-
priate" and may do so in accordance with their own views
only. It is in the light of that increasing development of
their own authority by the Supreme Court Justices them-
selves, that we see our Constitution today.
Mr. Justice Brandeis, in his dissenting opinion in the
Burns Baking Company case, characterized our Supreme
Court as a "super-legislature." And Mr. Corwin sums up
to the same effect: "Judicial review has come to vest the
Court with an almost undefined power of inhibitory guid-
ance of state legislative policy."
Now, oddly enough, the fact is that among the founding
and framing Fathers of these United States the practice
was rather the reverse. Judge Baldwin himself points out
that in our colonial times, "The assemblies (the people's
lower house legislative bodies) were themselves courts.
They sat as a court of review, to grant new trials or re-
view judgments." The judge adds that, to our colonial
statesmen, this higher authority or body able to annul
or set aside either a transgressing colonial statute or judg-
ment, "might be judicial or political, or one which shared
both judicial and political functions." And that is putting
it mildly. The idea that the highest Court, only, could set
aside a statute was not heard of in New Jersey until
around 1780. It is clear that things have changed since
the Fathers' day, and that our judiciary wields, self-willed,
a decisive constitutional force the Fathers knew not of,
and that this happened chiefly because of the work of the
United States Supreme Court. Why?
The answer may well lie in the historic nature of our
law as locally and sporadically brought over from Eng-
land, developed in the thirteen colonies separately and
divergently, save for appeals to London, and then split off
as an independent series of juristic independencies after
1776. Even more abruptly a superstructure of federal
courts was added after 1787 and before such federal law
had been established. Precedent and habit were thence-
forth appealed to, and the new Court, to live at all, had to
have (make) power, its own power in the law.
WE CAN WATCH THIS CHANGE THROUGH THE EYES OF THOMAS
Jefferson who helped win our independence, establish our
governments and our nation, and who saw that nation
grow for forty years.
He begins in 1776, "The judges should not be dependent
upon any man or body of men." Only six years later
doubts intruded: "It is better to toss up, 'cross and
pile,' in a cause, than to refer it to a judge whose mind is
warped by any motive whatever, in that particular case."
When the new Constitution was under discussion, he
approved of the presidential veto and even suggested hav-
ing the judiciary "associated for that purpose, or invested
separately with a similar power." He was in Paris at the
time. The suggestion was repeated over a year later, and
prior doubt also reemphasized : "We all know that perma-
nent judges acquire an esprit tie corps; that they are mis-
led by favor, by relationship, by a spirit of party, by a
devotion to the executive or legislative power."
Yet in 1792 he urged that, "When a case has been ad-
judged according to the rules and forms of the country,
its justice ought to be presumed. Even error in the highest
is one of those imperfections to which every society must
submit." He had earlier reminded the rampant ambas-
sador from revolutionary France that, "The courts
of justice exercise the sovereignty of this country in judi-
ciary matters, are supreme in these, and liable neither to
control nor opposition from any other branch of the gov-
ernment."
We should note that this strong language does not in
the least contradict what he had said nearly twenty years
earlier as to the law-making power itself: "From the na-
ture of things, every society must, at all times, possess with-
in itself the sovereign powers of legislation, provide against
dangers which, perhaps, threaten immediate ruin." One
recalls that in 1914 the present Chief Justice, speaking for
the Supreme Court in the Shreveport case, said: "Within
its sphere as recognized by the Constitution, the nation is
supreme ... a principle obviously essential to our national
integrity, yet continually calling for new applications."
Certainly this view of 1774 and of 1914 was sustained in
1935 in the Minnesota Moratorium cases.
But in 1801, Jefferson found that his political opponents,
the Federalists, "have multiplied useless judges merely to
strengthen their phalanx." He had seen, despite his pro-
fessional bias as a lawyer, that judges are persons con-
cerned with public life and therefore inevitably involved
in politics. Yet written constitutions endure and fix for
the people the principles of their political creed. That rock
is unshaken. And whatever of the enumerated objects in
the Constitution is to be done by means of a judicial sen-
362
SURVEY GRAPHIC
tence, the judges pass the sentence. May they also pass the
limits of principle he here has in mind?
The danger that they might do so was obvious by 1803.
"Our peculiar security is in the written Constitution. Let
us not make it a blank paper by construction. When an
instrument admits two constructions, the one safe, the
other dangerous, the one precise, the other indefinite, I
prefer that which is safe and precise." Yet we have to
remember that justice must be with an even hand, and
by rule. Precedent prevails, and "the leading principle of
our Constitution is the independence of the legislative,
executive and judiciary of one another." Here is the col-
lision, as our then President saw and said it, of the con-
struing judiciary with the established Constitution. What
can be done if the judges seem to go wrong?
We must not sacrifice ends to means; the principal
object of the law must be furthered not defeated, that we
"may save to the public the benefit of the law." And if
that is not, in fact, done? Well, where they have to act in
their respective lines, finally and without appeal, under
any law, there both judiciary and executive, he holds,
"may give to it different and opposite constructions." No
one of the three great branches of our federal government,
he tells us, can control another branch in such cases. The
question had arisen over Marbury vs. Madison and Jef-
ferson denied that the judicial decision therein was law
for the executive. The judiciary, he thinks, cannot defy
the spirit and will of the nation as proved by their "re-
forming every other branch of government." Thomas Jef-
ferson, who began as a staunch upholder of judicial power,
was thus discussing rather sadly that central constitu-
tional problem which vexes us today. And the whole mat-
ter was raised again by the President's message to Con-
gress on the judiciary, February 5, and the response to it.
All this noise and fury, the rabble-rousing and President-
baiting, will pass and the problem will be solved. It has
been said of the American people: "The governmental
control which they deem just and necessary they will
have. Sooner or later construction of the Constitution will
be found to vest the power where it will be exercised — in
the national government." That was said on December
12, 1906, by Elihu Root.
THE CONSTITUTION REMAINS. ITS IMPREGNABLE STRENGTH
as our country's charter is currently much neglected. The
national supremacy it sought was uncertain for more than
seventy years but no one doubts it today. The federal finan-
cial power which Hamilton strained all the resources of
his genius to establish in small beginnings, is now the driv-
ing force of our whole economic life. The only question is
whether we can organize wisdom sufficient to employ it
without periodic disaster. There are only faint and futile
mutterings of discontent against a federal taxing power
greater than ever was wielded by any absolute monarch.
Uncle Sam's taxpayers growl but they heed their Consti-
tution and pay, they do not rebel. Instead of organizing
nullification, the states canvass actively for financial assist-
ance in Washington. We think and talk of this as the de-
cay of the states. It would be a truer view if we saw it as
the growth of the nation under our Constitution.
Such a Constitution must keep pace with such a people
not so much by letter as by interpretation, not as charter
but as oracle. As charter the document must be literally
obeyed or literally amended. As oracle, and thus it is vast-
ly more important, the Constitution can speak only
through the Justices of the Supreme Court. No matter
from what source suggested statute law must be drafted
and voted by Congress, approved and enforced by the
President. Such law must square with the Constitution as
written and as interpreted. Whether it does or not can be
determined only by the Court. In that relation it is "their"
law, not the law of legislative and executive. All that is
indeed elementary and the necessity of cooperation, of
likemindedness, is also elementary.
That there may not be this all important meeting of
minds, as among the three great branches of our national
government, is the inescapable and perpetual risk of our
federalism. Just as Great Britain bets everything on the
vision and patriotism of the House of Commons majority,
so the United States risks everything upon teamwork
amongst legislative, executive and judicial. If that fails,
our law fails and, to the extent of such failure, we are
without government. The problem is of the nation's need,
the risk arises from an all too human contest for power
between institutions composed, in fact, only of men.
Across five hundred years an unknown poet of early
English democracy speaks to Uncle Sam, the king of our
U. S. A.:
To keep that crowne, take good tent.
In wode, in feld, in dale and downe,
The leste lyge-man with body and rent,
He is a parcel of the crowne.
By universal suffrage every least liegeman of our United
States is truly part of its power, the power crowned by the
Constitution. Who is to say his law? And so we return
to the deathless problem that daily links 1787 with 1937.
THE DIFFICULTY WE ARGUE THIS YEAR WAS PROCLAIMED IN OUR
national infancy. On Friday, June 6, 1788, John Marshall
told the Virginia convention which was debating ratifica-
tion of the new federal Constitution: "If they were to
make a law not warranted by any of the powers enumer-
ated, it would be considered by the judges as an infringe-
ment of the Constitution which they are to guard. They
would not consider such a law as coming under their jur-
isdiction. They would declare it void." As Chief Justice
from 1801 to 1835 John Marshall made good those words.
Power in office goes along with responsibility and no
one can be responsible unless he is free to choose. How-
ever we twist and turn to escape it, our Constitution wrote
down a structure of national power and entrusted the
whole vast undertaking to the judgment and devotion of
men. Their task includes choice. Our system aims to safe-
guard the people, whose government it is, by not making
any one of the three great constitutional departments dom-
inant over either or both the others. The basic but implicit
requirement of our Constitution itself, as seen and ob-
served by President Washington, is that all three pull to-
gether in matters which concern their joint thought and
action, and do so in due relation to the sovereign will of
the electorate. When that cooperation fails our Union is,
to that extent of time and function, at a standstill. Men
are governed by men. The possibilities of humari nature
which enable us to secure for our common life the ines-
timable benefits of free government, contain also both the
limits of that government and the threat of its failure. The
fact measures alike the wisdom of the Framers and the
courage with which they faced our future, and the spirit
in which we must meet the problems of our own day.
JULY 1937
363
The Soul of Spain
by HAVELOCK ELLIS
IT WA.S IN THE SPRING OF 1891 THAT I FIRST ENTERED SPAIN,
accompanied by Arthur Symons; it was I who had or-
ganized the expedition, moved by I know not what new
expectation of a strange land. We had first explored
Provence, enjoying ancient Aries and the marvels of Avig-
non where we had spent a delightful afternoon with
Roumanille, the pioneer of renascent Provencal literature.
A few days later we were standing at the little frontier
station of Port Bou awaiting the train for Barcelona.
Above towered mighty mountains and the wind-swept
down. I caught floating at the back of my mind the music
of Hugo's familiar lines:
Le vent qui vient a travers les montagnes
Me rendra fou.
It was the foretaste of a nostalgia which since those days
has never ceased to possess me.
That first impression of a journey through Spain (we
364
emerged at San Sebastian) was rendered keen by the de-
lightful realization that here was a land that, in spite of a
taste for various modern devices, had yet in fundamentals
escaped modernity and preserved a medieval aspect. The
ravages of the capitalistic industrial system were scarcely
visible, which meant that here we were free from the
vulgarization of modern life.
In my book, The Soul of Spain, I have set forth a su-
preme experience of this freedom in the chapter describ-
ing my first visit to Monserrat. There was a second visit,
a few years after the book was published, and I then real-
ized that I had perhaps been the last person to know and
describe a virginal Monserrat. The atmosphere of heav-
enly serenity was now at any moment jarred by the hoot-
ing of cars below; advertisements were painted large on
the face of the rocks; and a pavilion was being noisily
erected on this little plateau in front of the church, for
the International Cotton Congress was shortly coming to
SURVEY GRAPHIC
an official picnic. I departed before that lamentable event,
but I had sufficient evidence that, however sound Spain
might be at heart, the veneer of vulgarization was inevi-
table.
IT IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND A FAILURE TO FALL INTO SYMPATHY
with Spain and the Spaniard. The tourist is sometimes
worried because here more than in most lands he has to
rely on himself; he cannot understand the language; the
toocl is unfamiliar; the sanitary arrangements are primi-
tive; the climate is liable to be extreme; all sorts of condi-
tions may prove disturbing. But there are others on whom
Spain exerts a singular fascination, and these others have
more often been English than of any other nation. The
attraction dates from far back, almost to the days of an-
cient rivalry and hostility. Don Quixote was widely known
and appreciated at an early date, in England, where in-
deed the first critical edition of it appeared; an English-
man, moreover, inspired the first biography of Cervantes
and an Englishman wrote the first biography of Velas-
quez. Early in the nineteenth century there was indeed a
sudden and general movement of sympathy with Spain.
A foreign dictator (as some have supposed is again hap-
pening today) planned to bring Spain under his control.
To assert his mastery Napoleon set up his brother Joseph
as King. A wave of indignation swept over England. The
government — less cautious than under similar circum-
stances today — instantly sent over men and money to the
aid of Spain and volunteers flocked to the cause. The
popular enthusiasm for the heroes of Spain was voiced by
the chief poets of the day, by Wordsworth and Coleridge
and Southey. One of the most distinguished went further.
Landor was in many respects a typical Englishman, per-
haps especially so on those sides which are akin to the
Spanish temperament. His indignation knew no bounds;
he prepared to equip a large body of volunteers at his own
cost and as soon as possible set off with them for Spain.
His military career was not indeed glorious. He was never
in a battle, though once nearly taken prisoner, and his
force gradually melted away. But at all events his generous
gesture evoked gratitude. He received the official thanks
of the Supreme Junta for his services together with the
commission of honorary colonel in the Spanish army.
A popular movement of that kind is no index to the
exact appreciation of the nation whose trials evoked it.
Moreover the Spanish temperament is not of a nature that
is easily grasped; it holds oppositions that are yet firmly
welded, and on one side or another it lends itself to falla-
cious generalizations. That is why an attempt such as
I here make to penetrate towards the Spanish core may be
specially helpful in furnishing clues at a time like this
when the Spanish situation comes conspicuously before
the world.
WHEN I COMPARE IN THEIR MORE OBVIOUS SOCIAL ASPECTS
the general population of the two continental countries
with which I have grown most familiar, France and
Spain, there is a contrast I have frequently noted. The
French man or woman I casually meet, however polite,
seems to be viewing me as a possible enemy. The Spanish
man or woman, on the other hand, even if less formally
polite, seems to be viewing me as a possible friend. This
instinctive and disinterested human attitude, free from af-
fectation, and found in all classes however poor, marks a
high level of manners which, as those who know Spain
believe, goes deeper than the surface. Yet, real as it is, it is
not the whole of the Spanish character. There is stoicism
and hardness, a cruelty to self and sometimes to others,
and independence and individualism sometimes becoming
a relentless spiritual passion, which may well baffle those
with simple formulas of national character. We see the
foundation on which the innumerable political parties of
Spain spring up and of the fierce hostility which moves
them. We see how it is that the spirit of anarchist phil-
osophy— by no means necessarily in the conventional form
of a narrow creed of violence — has always prevailed more
in Spain than elsewhere. And we see how it is that while
there is no country in greater need of mutual tolerance
for its well-being, there is none where it is more difficult
of achievement.
A STEP TOWARDS IT SEEMED TO HAVE BEEN MADE WHEN THE
Revolution of 1931 was so peacefully carried through. Its
program was reasonable and moderate; it received the
active support of the most progressive and enlightened
Spanish spirits, of Unamuno and Ortega and Maranon,
while the general population seemed content even when
not enthusiastic. But it was not for long. Violent oscilla-
tions to Right and to Left began to occur, and the rival-
ries of ever new party groupings culminated in the tragic
situation we have since, witnessed, and a fierce conflict
between two groups of parties, both very mixed. Our sym-
pathies have been mainly with the government parties not
merely as representing the more democratic attitude but
in protest against an illegitimate appeal to violence in
national affairs. To the support of that side fine and prom-
ising young Englishmen have gone forth to fight and too
often perished. Yet there may well be good men on both
sides.
On the government side we find both the Basques,
so often devout Catholics, and the Catalans, so often
ardent anarchists. On the insurgent side the groups- seem
equally mixed. It is significant that Unamuno, the Span-
iard who to many seems the most eminent and distin-
guished of recent times, was at the outset, to the general
surprise, in sympathy with the insurgents. It seemed to
him that the rebellion might be for the national benefit.
But as time went on he realized that his friends and dis-
ciples were on the other side and that the rising he sup-
posed to be national was seeking the support of Moors
and Nazis. His real attitude became clear to the insurgents.
They deprived him of the rectorship of the University of
Salamanca with which he had so long been associated. A
few weeks later he was dead.
THE ULTIMATE OUTCOME OF THE CONFLICT IS, AS I WRITE, IM-
possible to predict. But we are justified in holding the
faith that Spain will remain Spanish. It is common to see
the statement that the end will be a victory either of com-
munism or of fascism. That can scarcely be. Communism
and fascism alike are both outside the predominant tradi-
tions of the country. We are more likely to see a central
government with a greater latitude for the establishment
of a limited autonomy — such as the Catalans have long
struggled for and more or less won, and the Basques
would gladly accept — in those regions which desired it.
But, whatever happens, the genius of Spain is so highly in-
dividualized and has made so deep a mark on the world,
alike in life and in art, that it can never die. There is an
Eternal Spain.
JULY 1937
365
BOMBARDMENT
Courtesy A. C. A. Gallery, New York
CASUALTY
William Cropper _ Artist Commentator
Cropper is not so widely known as he should be for he has chosen
to make his powerful cartoons only for the Communist Daily
Worker and other radical publications. A year ago his first
exhibition of paintings was the event of the art season in New
York. He became a man to reckon with not only as a significant
artist of the left-wing school but as a painter with great creative
potentialities. His recent exhibition showed growth and astound-
ing productivity. "Dedicated to the defenders of Spanish
democracy," many of the new paintings testified to his passionate
concern in the cause of the loyalists in the Spanish civil war.
William Cropper has been awarded a Guggen-
heim fellowship. He is still experimenting with
different techniques, and his work sometimes
suggests Goya, Daumier and other masters of
the past. But his cartoonist's training in con-
densation, his confident use of color, his
vigorous painting is personal. The emotion he
expresses is out of his own time and beliefs.
SENATORS
VIGILANTES
SWEATSHOP
That Glorious Empire
by S. K. RATCLIFFE
The strength and the weakness of the British system, especially as drama-
tized by recent events in Ireland and in India. This is the second of
two articles by Mr. Ratcliffe.
A LONDON EDITOR WHO HAD A GOOD PLACE FOR THE CORONA-
tion pageant noticed in an adjacent seat an English school-
boy who was wrought up to an almost unbearable pitch
of excitement when the imperial troops, the Indian princes,
and the African chiefs rode past. He turned to his parents
with an eager cry, "Haven't we got an empire!"
True indeed: it is an empire; and nothing is more cer-
tain than this, that only on the greatest show days are the
English people enabled to form any notion of its mar-
vellous extent and character. I say specifically the English,
for the Scots who so largely run the world-wide system,
in business and government alike, never as a community
get a glimpse of the splendor! Almost one fourth of the
earth's surface, and one fourth of its inhabitants — say 495
millions. (Incidentally, it may be remarked that the pop-
ulation figure would sound quite modest, not much more
than that for the United States, if the 350 millions of
India were subtracted.) And the countries under the Brit-
ish flag contain peoples on every level of civilization, and
living under forms of government that cover the entire
scale from simple paternal rule to democracies no less
advanced than those of Scandinavia.
Britain alone among the powers is able to make a grand
imperial display. "The nations not so blest as Thee" can
hardly ever call the world's attention to their overseas
possessions, and with one exception, the word Glory seems
never to be uttered in connection with any one of them.
The exception of course is France. But this one great
power apart, where should we look for any show of em-
pire? Not, certainly, to the large Portuguese colonies.
They are remembered only when some question arises
as to a possible purchase, on the lines of Louisiana in
1803. To the Belgian on the Congo? There was a story.
The empire of Holland? It has provided a pleasant subject
of conversation, particularly since the immense growth of
cruising in the Orient. The dominion of New Rome? The
genesis, so recent and provocative, has been followed by
disappointment and by earnest warnings from the master
architect. The United States — shedding its burdens in the
Pacific and the Caribbean? And Germany? Ah, there's
the rub! Britain, as we see, stands alone as the spectacular
imperial power.
The imperial conference, which meets usually every
three years, is being held in London as this article is writ-
ten/ It has problems to discuss which are more nearly
crucial than any which have been before the home authori-
ties and the dominion premiers since the War.
The British empire, like the British throne, is news.
Both of them are continually, unfailingly, news^-espe-
cially in America, where the monarchy acts as a perpetual
stimulant or titilant, while the empire is always under
fire. Why should attention and criticism among the peo-
368
pies of other countries be reserved for the British system
and for that alone? The British empire is vast and we may
agree that it overflows with social, political and other
kinds of interest. But does anybody imagine that French
colonial government in Algeria or Indo-China, Dutch co-
lonial government or social policy in Java, can be so de-
void of attraction for Americans as the silence of the press
might lead us to suppose? Of course not; but all the same
we may be sure there will be no more discussion in the
future than in the past of any empire save that of Britain.
It has changed and developed enormously during the
past thirty years; and since the adoption six years ago of
the famous statute of Westminster it has been acknowl-
edged as affording a striking contrast to the heritage which
Victoria passed on to her son in the first year of our cen-
tury. Look, first, at its most conspicuous, its unique, fea-
ture— the great free dominions. No such daughter or sister
states as these could be thought of in relation to any other
imperial system. The simple and (to an Englishman)
heartening truth is that the free dominion is an invention
of the British people; it is their special contribution to the
craft of government and the practical philosophy of
sovereignty.
IF WE LEAVE IRELAND OUT OF ACCOUNT, ALONG WITH INDIA,
there are four British dominions — Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa, with a total white population
of about 21 millions. There should be five dominions, the
fifth being Newfoundland, which is the oldest English
colony. But that island has been unfortunate. A few years
ago — whether justifiably or not, I cannot stay to inquire —
Newfoundland, which has endured harsh suffering from
the economic blizzard, dropped back to colonial status.
Look, then, at the big four. Canada is a confederation,
bound by the British North America Act, which makes
her constitutional situation one of great difficulty. (The
well-informed American is entitled to smile at any person
who assumes that the United States is the only great coun-
try that is hampered by a written constitution and a Su-
preme Court.) Australia is a federal commonwealth with
a constitution (1900) so drawn that vital amendment is
left to the people themselves. New Zealand is a simple unit
— the most English of Britain's daughters. South Africa is
a grouping of states with a unitary legislature: the achieve-
ment of British and Dutch, under the Boer leadership of
General Smuts and his colleagues; an ambitious attempt
to accomplish two purposes — the harmonizing of old and
stiff racial antagonisms, and the creation of a large do-
minion without the special difficulties belonging to a fed-
eral structure. And here incidentally is a fact which cer-
tainly carries a moral. The prime minister of South Africa
is General Hertzog, who has held his office since 1924.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Fifteen years ago it would have been excusable for the
world to look upon Hertzog as the De Valera of South
Africa. Thirteen years of responsibility, however, and of
governing experience in the British system have made him
over into a most orthodox dominion statesman. In the
exchange of loyal sentiments round the empire last May,
no dominion representative spoke in accents more irre-
proachable than those of the Dutch premier.
AT THE CORONATION FEAST IN LONDON THERE WAS ONE VA-
cant chair — that of the Irish Free State. Mr. De Valera is a
ruler of the newest type; he has reduced the trappings to
the barest and he has no interest in any ceremonies of rul-
ing or reigning. There are some modern democracies
which agree with this point of view, but they do not in-
clude the British. Ireland always stands by itself; and it so
happens that the Free State was full of its own affairs
when England was plunged into its dramatic Edwardian
crisis. The new Free State constitution had just then
reached its last stage, and although Mr. De Valera's quick
action at the end of the year was interpreted as yet another
example of applying the old Fenian maxim, England's dif-
ficulty is Ireland's opportunity, the circumstances are easily
explicable without the aid of that theory. De Valera is for
the Irish republic, and he has dreamed of it as independ-
ent. But the geographic position of the island is the gov-
erning condition, and moreover, it is as plain as anything
can be that until the Free State and Ulster find the basis
for a united Ireland, there can be no end to the age long
dispute.
Mr. De Valera was confirmed in power by the election
of 1933 and he went ahead. The Free State was already
free of England, and the President took the characteristic
step of reducing to naught the lord-lieutenant, the King's
representative, by installing a retired shopkeeper in the
post. He then marked the Senate for destruction. When
the abdication occurred, Mr. De Valera contented himself
with a formal acknowledgment of the new King, and
moved towards the completion of the new constitution.
He saw no reason for delay. The job was finished just as
the empire was ready for the crowning of George the
Sixth; and the absorption of the whole English-speaking
world in the greatest of spectacles permitted this notewor-
thy political event to pass with little notice and almost no
discussion. Ten years hence or sooner it may have the look
of a significant landmark.
I note here the conspicuous features. De Valera has
followed the American lead in one respect: he has united
the executive and the political leadership. The President
is elected for seven years; and he is both chief executive
and prime minister. He appoints the Cabinet and the
judges; he is commander-in-chief of the defense forces.
The two-chamber form of legislature is preserved. The
Senate is a small body of sixty members, two thirds being
elected on the soviet vocational principle, so as to give
representation to the major interests of the nation. The
President has the sole prerogative of pardon. A limited
freedom of speech is guaranteed. The privileged position
of the Catholic Church is recognized; divorce is forbidden
and divorces obtained in other countries are to be treated
as of no validity. The King's representative is abolished;
Crown and Parliament have no part in the Free State.
The constitution must be approved by the Dail and rati-
fied by national plebiscite.
Was there any necessity for the deep disharmony be-
tween England and Ireland to issue in so drastic a separa-
tion as this? One could answer that no simple solution
was ever possible. The unity of the island was broken.
That disaster, manifestly, ought to have been avoided, but
England could not have brought Dublin and Belfast to-
gether. There was, I submit, just one big chance: to have
disarmed the diehard separatists by the lightest possible
treatment of the oath of allegiance. But what is the use of
assuming that habits and memories which go down to the
roots of two antagonistic peoples can be passed over?
Turn now to India, which also at this time is involved
in a constitution crisis without parallel. At the time of
writing there is no sign that the constitution which
emerged from the round table conferences can be launched
according to plan, since the leaders of the National Con-
gress party maintain their refusal to take office in the
half dozen provinces where they hold a majority. The
deadlock is a calamity, for there can be only one immedi-
ate consequence of the failure to start Indian self-govern-
ment, and that is a further attempt at authoritarian rule
which, in British hands, would not succeed. Many years
ago, when I was first leaving England for India, Bernard
Shaw said to me, "Of course home rule for India must
come." Such a statement at that time sounded like a re-
mote prediction. Today, there would be few to dispute the
assertion that if home rule is not initiated, India must pre-
pare for a transitional stage which no one among us would
care to contemplate.
I HAVE NO MEANS OH KNOWING HOW FAR THE AUTHORS OF
the new constitution believed in its practicability; but in
India it did not command the support of any important
body of opinion and the hostility was formidable. The
scheme was hammered out in London by the method of
parliamentary committee with the assistance of eminent
Indians. There are some things in this terribly difficult
business that seem to me incontestable. India cannot make
the necessary steps to responsible government through an
imposed constitution. Indian parties and leaders must
work out their own plan. That would of necessity be a
long and most difficult process, but I see no other way.
Some of us were saying, after the War, that a wise British
Cabinet would have thrown out a challenge of this kind:
The time has come for Indians to be fully responsible for
the affairs of India — that means a form of government to
replace the old imperial rule which England has no will
to uphold — tell us what home rule is necessary or desired —
frame your own constitution — when you are agreed, we
will cooperate in giving effect to it.
These, however, are counsels of perfection. The imme-
diate necessity in India is the discovery of a way out of a
crisis that is full of peril. The logic of the recent elections
is that, having gone into the campaign and gained majori-
ties, the Congress party leaders should take office and put
the new system to the test. They decided against this after
demanding in the six provinces a pledge which, under the
act, the British governors could not give. It is argued on
the Congress side that responsible home rule has no place
in the scheme, and therefore Indian ministers could not gov-
ern under it. That may be so; but if political leaders, having
fought and won an election, decline to take the next step,
iheir followers (according to the political logic familiar
in the West) would seem to be led into a baffling dilemma.
And the fact remains that no great country in the world
is more disastrously unfitted to face a period of revolu-
JULY 1937
369
tionary chaos than India. It the new legislatures and min-
isteries could once be set going, the results would be re-
vealing and both sides could move into a more realistic
atmosphere.
India, in any case, as I need not add, is a distressing,
a menacing problem. It is dramatized for the world in
the personalities of two leaders, both extraordinary men
who are unlike all others. Mr. Gandhi (he now repudi-
ates the title Mahatma) has been prominent in the pres-
ent dispute, but he is no longer to be counted as a party
leader — his chosen work lies in the social field. Jawahar-
lal Nehru is essentially a revolutionary force. He is ex-
tremely able, a man of noble character and fine powers
of expression and is utterly devoted to his cause. He gave
his country last year its first experience of a whirlwind
electoral campaign. He ought, clearly, to be invested
with the responsibility of government. It is tragedy that
a man should for nearly twenty years have been in the
bitter wilderness of agitation against a great system that
to him is alien and condemned.
I TURN IN CONCLUSION TO A BRIEF SUMMARY OF CERTAIN
problems which are now filling the minds of all states-
men in the free dominions. The status of their four coun-
tries is legally defined as that of equal partnership in
the greater British commonwealth; no differences of rank
are submitted. There seems to be some little confusion
here, judging by language used here and there during
the coronation rejoicings. The statute of Westminster
did not make any difference in the actual standing of
the dominions. They were entirely free before 1931 as
they are today; any suggestion to the contrary, in the
sermon of an archbishop for instance, or elsewhere,
would be sharply resented, and rightly so. The domin-
ions have long been nations in the full sense; their loyalty
to the commonwealth — one of the most impressive politi-
cal facts of the world— is inherent in this freedom. But it
is manifest that in the conditions of our contemporary
world their position and obligations have undergone some
important changes.
What, for example, of foreign and imperial policy?
There was a time and not long ago, when Britain's posi-
tion on the sea relieved all British peoples from anxiety.
The blue water school of defense had no opponents. But
the concomitants of sea power have been altered, and at
the same time the collective system centered in Geneva
stands revealed as without authority among the great pow-
ers. For reasons which everybody can understand the peo-
ples of the British commonwealth took membership of the
League of Nations seriously: it touched their vital interests.
THE COLLECTIVE SYSTEMS HAVING BROKEN, WHAT, WE ARE
now asked is to be the position of Australia or South
Africa? The formal reply is that the dominions provide
for their own defense. But how far is that an answer for
tomorrow? And what of the policy and action of the do-
minions in the event of another world war? Whenever
this question is put, one answer is made, and rightly made,
emphatically and without hesitation. The unity of the
greater British commonwealth has never before been what
it is today; the spiritual tie could not be stronger. But if
we look ahead for ten or twenty years and try to state the
query in terms that would be recognized in Canada, what
then?
Some points of the answer are plain. The greater
British Commonwealth is not to be imagined without the
splendid senior division. But Canada is a western nation.
Her life is bound up with the life of the North American
continent. Her purpose is to maintain her own standards
and economy. This applies especially to Canadians of
Anglo-Saxon stock, and it implies the building up of a
strong people, especially over the Great West — a commu-
nity which must resist all influences that would increase
the danger of exhaustion through war. Not otherwise
goes the line of reasoning and feeling in Australia and
New Zealand, whose people live and work under the
straining floodgates of the Orient. And the practical con-
clusions with respect to world policy would appear to be
mainly two.
First, for Great Britain and the larger common-
wealth there can be no controversy worth the attention
of any serious citizen concerning a collective system for
keeping the peace — that is to say, the existing League of
Nations or else a substitute built of materials which would
hold. Britain might be able to defend herself against a
hostile European alliance — although many public men
have repeated Stanley Baldwin's plain declaration of the
truth that against air bombardment there is no effectual
defense. With the British navy which, at this writing,
makes an unsurpassable demonstration in the English
Channel, is a force which we can no longer estimate in
the old values. In other words, world peace is as never
before the primary interest of Britain. And secondly,
there has come to the daughter nations of Britain an im-
perative demand to think out afresh the relations in in-
ternational policy between the mother country and the
widely scattered dominions. England must be a member
of the European system. Geography determines that. With
Europe reestablished upon a foundation of peace and
mutual exchange, there need be no fears for Canada,
South Africa, Australia. But if Europe should be destined
to a further long period of perilous balancing, what then?
England is a European power. Her people have no choice;
they cannot contract out. But could this, under any condi-
tions that we can foresee, mean that the greater common-
wealth of equal partners, as described in the Westminster
Formula devised by Lord Balfour, must be conceived of
and dealt with as a European great power?
I FINISH WITH A WORD UPON THE COMBINED SPECTACLE AND
problem of which, in prodigious shapes, every thoughtful
Englishman is at present conscious. "The too vast orb
of her fate," we used to quote from an admired Victorian
poet, in reference to the burden of empire. Too vast — in
1850 or 1800? In the retrospect it seems easily manageable.
In 1937, however, how does the reasonable imperialist
(who never thinks of pinning that label on to his coat)
look forward ? He sees not the smallest reason for anxiety
concerning a Hertzog. He is confident that, for an in-
definite period, the Commonwealth of Free Nations
should continue to function, with immeasurable benefit
to the world. He cannot believe that communities of
colored people in any part of Africa would willingly ex-
change the flag of King George for the fasces or the
swastika. And then, brought squarely against the chal-
lenge and tragedy of India, he might feel driven to say:
No problem of empire has ever borne any resemblance
in that. Let us hope and try tor a Cabinet and a Viceroy
capable of reading the signs and taking the road oi can-
dor and equality, of justice and generosity.
370
SURVEY GRAPHIC
How Healthy Are We?
by MARY ROSS
One out of five in a northern American city has a chronic disease
or permanent impairment. First findings of the vast National
Health Inventory undertaken by the federal government.
ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO THE UNITED STATES LEARNED
with a start that large numbers of its young men were
not physically fit to go to war. This year, as a by-product
of another kind of warfare — the campaign against hard
times— the nation will be for the first time in a position
to see clearly how large a share of its people are handi-
capped or wholly incapacitated for the pursuits of peace.
For more than a year, minds and machines have been
at work classifying and adding up the facts on cards that
record a year's health history of some 865,000 families.
Those cards, in turn, represent months of field work,
which at its peak took 5000 persons. These enumerators
trudged from door to door in 92 cities in 19 states, and
in 23 rural counties. In the middle-sized and smaller
places — cities and towns of 100,000 and less — the instruc-
tions were to visit every family. In the larger, a given
fraction of arbitrary units of census enumeration districts
was taken by rote, every third or fourth or ninth on the
list, or whatever proportion was required to give a mini-
mum sample of 5000 families; within each unit every
family was visited. The counties and towns and cities-
themselves had been carefully picked as representative
of different parts of the country, so that the whole would
give a true sample of modern life in the United States.
The families surveyed entered into the spirit of the un-
dertaking; less than one percent refused to answer the
questions on the schedule.
The vast National Health Inventory of which this
study is a part has been financed from emergency relief
funds. It is sponsored and supervised by the United States
Public Health Service, under the direction of George
St. J. Perrott, principal statistician. Much credit for the
successful outcome of the project is due to Josephine
Roche, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of
the Public Health Service, who recognized the value of
the undertaking from the beginning and gave it her
wholehearted interest and support.
Both in the field work and in the later coding and tabu-
lating, 90 percent of the personnel have been taken from
the relief rolls. When able "white-collar" people were in
desperate need of work, it was possible to gather a staff
of a calibre that could not have been had for this work in
ordinary times; in some places, a majority of the field
workers were college graduates. If there is a silver lining
to depression, one of its brightest spots is in stories such
as this, in which the investment of public funds, badly
needed by self-respecting men and women, has brought
in return a wealth of badly needed information. Even dis-
regarding the fact that those who did practically all of the
work would have had to have help in some way in any
case, the $3,450,000 allotted for the inventory promises to
be a gilt-edged investment.
JULY 19?7
The eye of a first class researcher will glisten merely at
the thought of knowing accurately something which has
not been known before. When the tabulations and analyses
are completed, the various parts of the Health Inventory
will give facts about a substantial slice of the American
people that have not been analyzed comprehensively in
their interrelationships; facts as to income, housing, em-
ployment, occupation and relief, and the bearing of these
upon birth and death, health and sickness. It is beside the
mark, however, to conclude that an adventure such as this
is an excursion into statistics for sweet statistics' sake. The
rows of figures which are beginning to emerge from the
tabulating machines will be a delight to the technician
who rejoices in seeing important work well done, but
they also present a ledger of direct interest to the man on
the street. They will show, in broad outline, ways in which
sickness drains the public purse, and in consequence, the
pocket of the private taxpayer — not to mention the pock-
ets of those who themselves are sick. They will indicate
points at which something can be done to stop the waste.
i
THE NATIONAL HEALTH INVENTORY is DIVIDED INTO HOUR
major parts: surveys of chronic sickness, of communicable
disease, of occupational sickness and deaths, and of health
facilities, this last including hospitals and their outpatient
departments and public and private health agencies. Each
of the four parts includes a range of analysis that has not
previously been attempted on this scale. In addition to alle-
viation for the taxpayers, the facts will strengthen the
arms of physicians, health officers, city administrators, so-
cial workers, and other well-disposed citizens. It is to be
hoped that the record here disclosed for the first time on
so comprehensive a scale, may prove a kind of high water
mark below which can be measured future success in con-
trolling disease and disability and their aftermath, poverty
and premature death.
Possibly in no field will there be demonstrated greater
rewards for effort than in those shown in the most com-
prehensive part of the inventory — the held of chronic sick-
ness. The relative amount of chronic sickness in this coun-
try is, curiously enough, a mark of the progress in public
health and medical science of recent decades. In the Mas-
sachusetts of 1880 and 1900, for example, a group of major
chronic diseases was responsible for about one death in
three; in 1930, these same diseases accounted for two
deaths in three in that state.
The explanation is not that Americans are becoming
feebler, but that many of the acute, quickly-killing ill-
nesses have been brought under control or almost wholly
abolished, important among them diseases of infancy and
childhood. A far larger share of each generation's crop of
babies and youngsters live to pass through childhood and
371
youth and to reach the years when bodies wear out and
break down slowly, sometimes by the inevitable processes
of aging, but often by reason of causes which might have
been avoided or postponed. Chronic impairment becomes
common in middle life and after. In a series of surveys
made in 1929-1931 by the Massachusetts State Department
of Health, it was found that 29 percent of all persons aged
forty and more were suffering from chronic disease. With
the rapid drop in recent decades in both birthrates and
deathrates, an increasing share of the population has
moved into the area of age in which chronic illness or
impairment becomes a major risk to health and earning.
It will be some months before findings have been com-
piled for all the 865,000 families in the Health Inventory's
study of chronic sickness so as to permit general conclu-
sions on this evidence. The Public Health Service, how-
ever, has recently released findings for one unnamed city,
a first report in the series which will outline, section by
section, the findings for the various parts of the inventory.
This report gives the story of chronic sickness in a north-
ern industrial city which had a population of some 150,000
at the time of the 1930 census. (For the report in detail,
see Chronic Diseases and Gross Impairments in a North-
ern Industrial Community, by George St. J. Perrott and
Dorothy F. Holland, Journal of the American Medical As-
sociation, May 29, 1937.) While the facts must be mar-
shalled for all the ninety-odd cities before one can say
safely what is "typical," perhaps this first city to be re-
MEDICAL CARE FOR ACUTE AND CHRONIC ILLNESS
ACUTE
HOSPITAL
CASES
PHYSICIANS
SERVICES
DISABILITIES
ILLNESSES
DAYS DISABLED
DEATHS
CHRONIC
(KKIQOOCKKKI
FATAL ILLNESSES
EACH FIGURE REPRESENTS TEN PERCENT OF GROUP SHOWN
EACH SYMBOL REPRESENTS 10 PERCENT OF TOTAL DAYS OR SERVICES
Chronic patients, relatively small in number, absorb a large volume of medical care
ported may be looked on for the time being as a kind of
medical Middletown.
Between November 1935, and February 1936, the enum-
erators visited approximately one in nine of the families in
that city, talked with a responsible member, and hlled out
the schedule for all in the household, getting in all a year's
health history for some 18,000 persons. By occupation,
most of the workers were skilled or semi-skilled. On the
day of the canvass, 71 percent of the family heads were
employed; 14 percent were unemployed or were receiving
work relief; 11 percent were housewives, and 4 percent
were retired. At some time during the survey year, 15
percent of the families had been on relief. Nearly half (45
percent) of the families reported an annual income ot
$1000 or less; only 5 percent had an income over $3000.
FOR THE PURPOSES OF THE SURVEY, DISEASE OR IMPAIRMENT
was defined as chronic when its symptoms had been rec-
ognized for at least three months; the condition might or
might not be disabling. In the surveyed 18,000 as a whole-
old and young, poor, comfortable, and well-to-do — more
than one person in five was reported to have a chronic
disease, a permanent physical impairment, or a serious de-
fect of sight or hearing. In other words, in this segment of
a middle-sized northern city, more than one in five, old
and young, was hampered in work, play, or schooling by
some gross physical impairment or long standing malfunc-
tioning of his physical organism. A condition was consid-
ered disabling when it kept a
person from going about his or
her usual activities, as a pupil,
housewife or worker. On the day
(jf the canvass about two persons
out of a hundred were disabled
by chronic sickness or impair-
ment. One out of 100 of the
whole group had been so dis-
abled continuously throughout
the previous year.
For a city or a country, it is
important to know not only how
much chronic sickness there is,
but whose it is. This preliminary
report shows two ways of tracing
it in the surveyed city.
The more cheerful approach
is to look at it in terms of age.
Unfortunately chronic physical
handicaps exist even among chil-
dren and young people, but the
greatest frequency is in old age,
when heaviest responsibilities are
— or should be — past. While of
the whole group, 22 percent were
found to have a chronic disease
or gross impairment, the figure
for successive age groups rose
like a ladder : under fifteen years,
8 percent; ages fifteen to twenty-
four, 10 percent; twenty-five to
forty-four, 24 percent; forty-five
to sixty-four, 36 percent; sixty-
five and over, 58 percent. Disabil-
ity from chronic sickness fol-
lowed a similar course. Among
372
SURVEY GRAPHIC
youngsters of .fifteen to twenty-four, for example, the
annual rate of disabling chronic sickness was 19 per
1000 persons. In the active middle years, twenty-five
to forty-four, the rate rose to 39; by ages forty-five to
sixty-four, to 64; and among persons sixty-five and over,
it rose to 146. When those figures are translated into graphs
showing ages more clearly, one can see a sharp upturn in
the fifties and after, both in cases of chronic sickness and
in disability from chronic causes. Even in the younger
ages, however — in what is hopefully called the prime of
life — a substantial share of the surveyed persons in this
city knew the burden of chronic physical handicap.
Like the aged, the poor also suffered an undue burden
of chronic sickness. The rate of chronic disabling sickness
among relief families was 70 percent higher than that of
the whole group of families. When certain major chronic
diseases were considered, the disadvantage of these poor
was even more marked. Their rate of disabling illness
from these serious causes was nearly twice that found
among non-relief families with incomes under SlOOO, and
more than twice that of families who had $1000 or more.
Thus, while the relief families suffered more disability
from all forms of chronic illness, their disadvantage was
greatest in the more severe and prolonged kinds. About
one in ten of the heads of families who were out of work
on the day their households were canvassed was unem-
ployed because of disability.
Among these 18,000 persons, during the survey year
chronic sickness was responsible for two thirds of all the
days of sicknesses disabling for seven days or more, for
four fifths of all the days of hospital care, and nearly
three fifths of all the deaths. Chronic cases absorbed half
of all the services of physicians, and almost three fourths
of the time spent in bedside nursing. Chronic sickness,
especially in its severe forms, was more prevalent among
the persons least able to lose wages or support care. Among
unemployed men aged twenty-five to sixty-four, the rate
of chronic disabling illness was five times that reported for
employed men of the same ages.
THE PARTNERSHIP OF SICKNESS AND POVERTY HAS BEEN CLEAR
in several earlier surveys. In a notable series of studies on
Health and Depression, the United States Public Health
Service and the Milbank Memorial Fund had shown
earlier the disproportionate extent to which disabling sick-
ness weighed down families with low incomes and fam-
ilies on relief, especially those who had dropped from
relative comfort to poverty during the depression. An ear-
lier study made by Jessamine Whitney, statistician of the
National Tuberculosis Association, had shown a relation-
ship between death and economic status. Analyzing all
the death certificates filed in ten states in 1930 for gain-
fully occupied boys and men aged fifteen to sixty-five, that
study found that the deathrate among unskilled laborers
was nearly 90 percent higher than that of the most for-
tunate social and economic group, professional men. The
marked difference between the various occupational classes
in the chance for life was true at all ages, even for the
boys of fifteen to twenty-four. It was true for nearly all of
the important causes of death, including those, such as
heart disease, tuberculosis and nephritis, in which death
usually is preceded by a long period of more or less in-
capacitating illness.
In commenting on this study Rollo H. Britten, senior
statistician of the United States Public Health Service,
CHRONIC ILLNESS AND UNEMPLOYMENT
EMPLOYED
CHRONIC ILLNESS
UNEMPLOYED
CHRONIC ILLNESS
rrrrn
EACH SYMBOL REPRESENTS ONE CASE PER ONE-HUNOREO PERSONS
DISABLING FOR SEVEN CONSECUTIVE DAYS OR LONGER IN THE SURVEY YEAR
Chronic illness, concentrated among the unemployed, is a factor
in dependency
pointed out another disturbing fact: that the spread be-
tween the deathrates of the most fortunate and the least
fortunate occupational groups was 40 percent greater in
this country than that shown by similar figures in Eng-
land. Differences in this country in race and nationality
did not serve, in Mr. Britten's opinion, to explain the de-
gree of difference between the American record and the
British; factors such as economic status, occupations, and
standards of living in this country, he suggested, must be
of great importance.
In the light of those figures and of the studies of sick-
ness among the families who suffered the most severe
financial reverses during the depression, it seems reason-
able to infer that the imbalances and shifts of fortune in
the United States have exacted a heavy toll among those
who bear the brunt of financial uncertainty and meager-
ness and change. It makes little difference in effect either
to such families themselves or to their communities
whether poverty causes sickness or vice versa: the end
result is the same, misery and dependency. From the
story that is beginning to develop out of the Health In-
ventory, a comprehensive chapter will be written on what
statisticians call noncommitally the association between
sickness and insecurity.
The question of that linkage is especially pertinent in
1937. Together, the federal government and the states
have shouldered the task of offsetting some of the risks
which overhang many or all of the people in childhood,
in old age, and in unemployment. In the costs of that
social security program, as in the costs of relief and of
medical and hospital care, are twined inextricably the
JULY 1937
373
financial burden of sicknesses which have taken savings
and prevented earnings. The study of the northern city
suggests that among the millions who are without jobs
at this time, there are many who can get about to look
for work but will not be able to find jobs or to hold them
because chronic sickness robs them of their full capacity;
that among the dependent aged and dependent children
are many whose dependency is the aftermath of their
own or their families' disabilities.
IN TWO ASPECTS OF CHRONIC SICKNESS THE UNITED STATES
has, in general, a considerable and honorable history.
These are tuberculosis and mental illness. It is notewor-
thy that in this surveyed city, cases of chronic sickness
of these types were found to be severely disabling but
relatively few in number. Even with chance for care, dur-
ing the survey year the average case of tuberculosis
caused more than eight months' disability; nervous dis-
eases caused an average of more than six months' during
that year. It is not hard to understand why, in practice, it
has been widely accepted that organized effort, public
and private, is needed in these fields both for care and
prevention. For residents of this particular city both clin-
ics and hospitals were at hand for the care of tuberculosis
and mental illness, provided almost wholly by state or
local government. Those ailments, however, are only two
out of many causes of chronic disablement.
Among the other serious diseases which the survey
disclosed were heart and kidney diseases, cancer, dia-
betes, gastric ulcer, chronic diseases of the gall bladder
and rheumatism. A study like the present, made initially
by a house-to-house canvass, is not likely to show the part
played by syphilis in chronic sickness. That "great imi-
tator" undoubtedly appeared in this list in terms of its
results, as heart disease, for example, or nervous ailments.
Fortunately syphilis is coming to be recognized as a
field in which public safety demands community action.
In some bright spots on the national map, public and
private programs have been undertaken to prevent or
alleviate or cure one or another of the other causes of
disability on this formidable list. Acute rheumatic fever,
like syphilis, is linked with needless heart disease; here
some communities are carrying further the job of prevent-
ing heart disease already attacked by health departments
generally in their programs to control communicable
diseases of childhood. Programs for the care of crippled
children, now promoted widely under the social security
act, are working in other instances to offset the ravages of
disease and accident.
In general, however, the slowly killing chronic ail-
ments, aside from tuberculosis and mental illness, have
not been accepted as an integral part of city or even state
public health programs. The first recognition of public
health came in terms of ailments which obviously men-
aced the health and safety of others. Now with the up-
ward shift in age and the relatively greater part played
by chronic ailments, communities may recognize as pub-
lic enemies not only the bacilli which cause typhoid and
tuberculosis, but also the wider range of "germs" which
spread poverty.
Like cities and states throughout the country, the sur-
veyed city had no coordinated program of chronic disease
control to combat the whole series of ailments that were
so costly to the community and to individual families. An
unusually effective clinic for medical relief had been or-
ganized during the depression. Probably the poor had
more adequate medical care in that emergency period
than would prevail under a system of welfare adminis-
tration in ordinary times. Even so, the average case of
chronic sickness among relief families had less care by a
physician than was received by cases in families who
were not on relief. To some extent that disparity was
offset — at public expense — by the greater amount of hos-
pital care received by the poor. In fact, the amount of
hospital care they received in chronic illness suggested
the need of central supervision to ensure that only cases
which require hospital care be sent to hospitals and to
arrange for others home care which could be given as
effectively and at less expense.
Fundamentally, however, control of chronic sickness
implies community action which cannot limit itself to
unrelated efforts to provide care for persons once they
are sick. Care is only part of a whole and toward that
whole cities generally have exhibited chiefly inertia,
doubtless because they have not recognized either its
nature, importance or magnitude. The authors of the
report, Mr. Perrott, supervisor of the Health Inventory,
and Dorothy F. Holland, associate statistician, sketch in
outline what a program to control chronic disease might
be: in the field of medicine, continued research as to the
causes of chronic diseases and the methods of treatment;
in the field of public health, prevention of the acute dis-
eases which predispose to chronic ailments, community
education to promote early diagnosis, and provision of
adequate facilities for the care of chronic sickness in
low income groups.
FROM SUCH A PROCRAM THE SURVEYED CITY, AND DOUBTLESS
other cities throughout the length and breadth of the land,
stands to gain ground against the forms of illness and im-
pairment which, as a group, were found to account for the
majority of deaths, for the greater part of the time lost
from disability, and the major share of medical and hos-
pital services. By reason of the vicious circle linking
chronic sickness and poverty, progress in preventing or
alleviating or curing such illness stands to save not only
individual suffering and frustration but also large costs
necessarily paid by the public for medical care of the
poor and for relief of families whose breadwinners lack
the health needed to keep their footing in the labor mar-
ket. Until further facts are brought to light, one must
guess to what extent the "unemployed" are actually the
chronic sick. The evidence of this study strongly suggests,
however, that here may lie a potent explanation of the
plight of many who have not regained a place in paid
work even in a time of rising business activity.
Some states, notably Massachusetts, and some cities,
among them New York, already have made a start. The
outcome of the Health Inventory should turn public and
professional attention to this hitherto unmapped province
of ill health. It is not a remote country, but one which is
actually or potentially related to the life of every family.
Considered in the past almost wholly in terms of personal
misfortune, chronic sickness now has a clear claim on
professional leadership and public policy. To quote the
report: "Its social consequences masked in the larger
problems of unemployment and dependency among
young and old, chronic disease presses upon the scene to-
day as an essential although undeveloped aspect of the
broader program of social security."
374
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Office Hours for Mrs. Herrick
INTRODUCING A REGIONAL DIRECTOR
by BEULAH AMIDON
HER TITLE IS REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL LABOR
Relations Hoard. She is responsible for the enforcement
of the National Labor Relations Act in an area that in-
cludes eastern New York, northern New Jersey, most of
Connecticut. Perhaps these heavy words suggest a stuffy
person doing a dull official job. At first glance her office
might confirm that impression, for it is a prosaic enough
room, except for the outlook from the windows over the
seaward tip of Manhattan and the ever changing water-
front. But if you should sit down and watch Elinore M.
Herrick at her desk, or, even better, at the conference
table or in the hearing room, you would see that here is
no routine worker, and that her job is made up of the
color and conflict, the problems and possibilities of a new
frontier in American life.
The decision of the Supreme Court last April uphold-
ing the National Labor Relations Act has made a great
difference in Mrs. Herrick's job. She is one of the twenty-
one regional directors appointed by the board in indus-
trial centers throughout the country and this sketch of
one of them in the midst of her work serves to introduce
a new public office in action.
Sometimes her office is blue with smoke and tense
with feeling, as employers and employes argue, demand,
protest, retort in the stormy processes of "peaceful settle-
ment" and "voluntary compliance." Sometimes a half
dozen such conferences are going on simultaneously in
the small rooms across the hall, with or without the help
of the regional director or other members of her staff.
Her days are crowded with personal interviews. She has
heard over the telephone the voice of a hitherto hard
boiled employer saying sheepishly, "Look here, Mrs. Her-
rick, I want to talk things over with the union boys after
all — but won't you invite them to come in this after-
noon?" She has seen another arrive with his lawyer angry
and prepared for a long legal wrangle and presently
found him agreeing: "I guess you're right — we can work
this out informally." Tact and good humor are equally
essential in talking with the factory owner who holds
that, "Law or no law, I'll run my own business in my
own way," and with the labor leader who intends to
"stand pat on that till hell freezes over."
For Mrs. Herrick believes in a "common sense" en-
forcement of the law. And she believes, too, that the
larger the proportion of cases settled without benefit of
litigation, strike or publicity the nearer the goal of civi-
lized industrial relations.
Unlike Pittsburgh or Detroit, the New York region is
not dominated by one or two large scale industries, nor is
Mrs. Herrick dealing for the most part with the great
corporate employer. Though the notable Associated Press
case arose in her jurisdiction [See Survey Graphic, March
1937], most of the workers who appeal to her are
complaining of the labor practices of a small employer in
an area where the pressure of competition is intensified
by difficult racial and religious factors. Complaints to be
JULY 1937
heard by the Labor
Hoard or by any of
the regional direct-
must involve
ors
Pictures. Inc.
"unfair labor prac-
tice" as defined by
the Wagner Act —
interference with
the right of workers
to organize, or to
choose their own representatives, refusal on the part of the
employer to bargain with the union, discrimination against
a worker because of his union membership.
Perhaps the most noticeable result of the Wagner de-
cision is the increase in the volume of work. On June 2
there were 216 active cases on her calendar as compared
with a total of 218 cases over the eighteen months before
the setting up of the Wagner Act machinery and the
Supreme Court decision.
IN HANDLING CASES, THE LABOR BOARD AND ITS REGIONAL
directors do not have authority to mediate or to arbitrate.
The regional director must operate within rigid limits in
attempting to secure voluntary compliance with the Wag-
ner Act — there can be no compromise with the law. "It's
harder to get a settlement from a 'no compromise' base,"
Mrs. Herrick admits, "but once you get it, it usually
sticks."
When she asks an employer and his workers to sit
down with her at the conference table, Mrs. Herrick con-
tributes the cooling influence of a non-participant, her
profound respect for human beings, her tolerance, patience
and humor. But beyond these useful conference mate-
rials, she shares the viewpoints of the worker, of man-
agement and of the informed civic leader, for she has
played all three roles herself.
Mrs. Herrick married at the end of her sophomore col-
lege year, and five years later she was thrown on her own
resources with two very young sons and no marketable
training or experience. Casting about for "something with
a future," she found a job in a factory, doing piecework at
28 cents an hour. She went from one job to another. "I
was a good pieceworker — I nearly always earned a bonus."
She helped make machine belting, paper boxes, shoe pol-
ish. Presently she was taken on as a worker in the new
and rapidly expanding rayon industry. Here she was trans-
ferred from one department to another and finally given
the opportunity to organize a training department, the
first in the industry. A little later she was made a produc-
tion manager in a new duPont rayon plant in Tennessee,
and when a second plant was opened, she set up produc-
tion methods for a three-shift textile process with 1200
to 1800 operatives. Then she found that she had reached
a dead end — no woman would be put in a position higher
than the one she held.
She gave up her job and returned to college to study
375
Wide World
Mrs. Herrick and a group of workers. "My job is to protect their rights under the law."
economics under William M. Leiserson, now on the Rail-
way Mediation Board, at that time an Antioch professor.
With her degree and a fresh insight into industrial prob-
lems, Mrs. Herrick became secretary of the Consumers'
League of New York. In directing that organization's
study of the canning, laundry and candy industries, in
helping lead the campaign for a state minimum wage law,
she learned how important are the interest and the re-
sponsibility of the public in industrial relations. The Na-
tional Recovery Administration drew her into public ser-
vice and she was appointed to her present position after
handling some 2000 labor disputes under the old Labor
Board. Out of this varied experience have come the poise
and the understanding that now enable her to work so
effectively with inarticulate men from shops and work
benches, with frightened small employers, with labor lead-
ers, lawyers, industrialists, civic groups, politicians, with
her superiors, her own staff, and with the press.
Even more remarkable than the increase in the number
of cases since the Wagner Act decision is the change in
attitude, particularly on the part of employers, toward the
law and the agencies set up to enforce it. "They used to
concentrate all they had on resisting the law," Mrs. Her-
rick recalls today. "When I called them in, following the
filing of a complaint, they brought their lawyers into what
were intended to be informal, and if possible, friendly
conferences. And then instead of discussing the workers'
charges they argued legal technicalities. But now all that
is behind us; I'm probably the first person to mention
constitutionality in this office in a month. Our conferences
can begin at the point we used to reach if at all, only after
hours of argument: 'Well, what is the trouble and what
can we do about it?' And it's my experience that that is
almost invariably a constructive starting place."
Since the decision there has also been a marked in-
crease in the number of elections to decide the issue of the
bargaining agency. When union leaders go to the em-
ployer saying, "We represent your workers, and we de-
mand . . ." the employer is now likely to suggest that
the union request the Labor
Board to conduct an election to
determine whether the em-
ployes desire to be represented
by this group in collective bar-
gaining. "Employers who a
year ago would have been ask-
ing injunctions to forestall such
a move," Mrs. Herrick finds,
"are now cooperating with the
board in holding an election."
The Wagner Act and its pro-
cedures have been criticized as
"one-sided" and "pro-labor."
Mrs. Herrick meets this criti-
cism with the cheerful admis-
sion, "Sure I'm for labor, and I
always let every employer know
it. Labor has had the thin end
for years. The purpose of the
Wagner Act, as I understand it,
is to give labor a chance. My job
is to protect the rights of labor
under the law. But it is my duty
to be objective in analysis, to
come to my decision not on the
basis of my sympathies but of the evidence."
She is impatient with those who claim that the work-
ers are always the heroes, employers the villains of the
Wagner Act picture. "You find good and bad actors in
every group — employers, employes, labor leaders. And
short sighted, unreasonable behavior, too." She cites the
recent case of an employer who told union representa-
tives in her presence that he would sign an agreement
for every market in which he operated. "Later, he put
that in writing." The union demanded that business
agents be given passes to all plants. Mrs. Herrick pointed
out that the law conferred no "right" to passes, that
this was a subject for collective bargaining. The union
would not bargain unless passes were granted. The re-
gional director steadily refused to issue a complaint
against the employer. "He has done his part— the union
is in the wrong," she said, "though if I were the em-
ployer, I'd give them a fistful of passes."
MRS. HERRICK FEELS THAT EMPLOYERS, UNIONS, AND THE
enforcement agencies have profited by their brief experi-
ence under the Wagner Act: "We've all learned together."
But it is equally clear to her that only a beginning has
been made. "You cannot create healthy industrial rela-
tions by legislation. A sound law, intelligently enforced,
will help. But the priceless ingredient is attitude. If two
people or two groups of people sit down at the confer-
ence table with a sincere intent to come to agreement,
they will find a meeting ground. But on the other
hand, if your conferees have irrevocably determined be-
forehand 'not to give an inch,' then, no matter how short
a distance divides them, they won't get together — not if
they sit there 'bargaining' till doomsday. The all impor-
tant matter of attitude can't be determined by law. We
can create helpful methods and procedures, we can define
terms and set standards, but we can't legislate the will
to agree into any man or organization. That comes main-
ly from within— and it is the fruit of the long, slow, un-
dramatic processes of education and experience."
376
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Packaged Houses
by C. THEODORE LARSON
With a promise of cheap dwellings off the assembly line, industry tackles
the house market — and, incidentally, the housing problem. The
progress to date foreshadows changes as far-reaching as those produced
by the automobile.
BESIDES KAN DANCERS, CHICAGO'S CENTURY OK PROGRESS
introduced "prefabricated" houses to millions of Ameri-
cans. In the exposition corner where the factory-built
houses stood on display, a world of new materials was
glimpsed, and some prophets foresaw an industry that
would soon make obsolete the piecemeal ways of build-
ing. Instead of a confusion of trades and crafts, there
would be a few large corporations from whom people
would buy homes by selecting a favorite design in a
catalog and ordering the entire structure delivered next
day.
Historically, the idea of industrially produced dwellings
is not new. Leonardo's notebook mentions the possibility
of fabricating a house in the shop and then transporting
it to the site. Edison concocted a scheme of pouring a
concrete house in one operation; it was not feasible for
large scale production, however. In 1907 Grosvenor At-
terbury, architect, tried to solve the problem with large
precast panels hoisted into place by crane. Fifteen years
later another pioneer, Robert C. LafTerty, in association
with submarine-inventor Simon Lake, began producing
large transportable room-cubes with thin concrete walls,
which could be juxtaposed to form dwellings two or
three stories high. Several such houses built in New York
City are still in use today. In 1928 Buckminster Fuller
began getting press notices on his model of a Dymaxion
House, an ingenious design consisting of an hexagonal
structure suspended by cables from a central utility mast.
The full sized product was calculated to be light enough
to permit its being transported complete from factory to
site by dirigible, but the initial plant investment was also
calculated to run into many millions of dollars, and the
house still remains an idea.
With the depression years have come a swarm of new
designs bearing the label of prefabrication. The term itself
is misleading. Technically speaking, any structural part,
even a nail or brick, is prefabricated if it is made in the
factory. Popularly, however, "prefabrication" has come to
mean buildings either completely factory built or quickly
assembled with large factory made units. This controversy
over definition is a very real one — which itself suffices to
show that a revolution is going on in the building field:
radical changes are affecting traditional production. To
date the building industry hardly deserves to be called an
industry. For the most part it is a loosely woven system
of local activities, with control vested in various feudalistic
trade and craft monopolies. Some 22,000 architects, over
34,000 materials dealers, and about 167,000 builders and
contractors top off a miscellaneous array of real estate,
mortgage money, manufacturing and handicraft inter-
ests. All are operating as individuals. Collectively, they
JULY 1937
produced last year approximately 150,000 new family
dwelling units in the form of houses and apartments. In
contrast, three companies — General Motors, Ford, Chrysler
—turned out 90 percent of the 3,676,063 passenger cars
produced in the same period.
So long as profits could be made at each step in build-
ing a home, no one worried much about the desirability of
centralized production control. But in recent years a new
perspective has been gained. The mechanized industries
have begun to regard housing as a new field for con-
quest, a sort of undeveloped Ethiopia that will take care
of surplus productive capacities. The steel industry in
particular sees the small house as a potential outlet for
the new continuous rolling mills. As Tom M. Girdler,
Republic Steel chairman, states, "The future demand for
strip steel, not only in the house structure itself but in
cabinets, cupboards and other accessories, will open a mar-
ket tomorrow that will rival the automobile market today."
THE MASS PRODUCTION MARKET, ALMOST EVERYONE AGREES,
is for modest homes costing between $2000 and $5000. To
sell in quantity these new houses must offer higher stand-
ards of comfort and use than do traditional dwellings.
If the problem were merely one of more space, it could
be solved quickly enough with conventional techniques.
The need is better housing, not merely more houses.
In scanning the field it becomes clear at the outset that
business is taking two approaches toward this goal of
"more for less" in housing. First there are the commercial
innovations, attempts to make selling easier by making
buying easier. Then there are the technical innovations,
attempts to produce a more economical architecture by
making houses more efficient. Together, these two trends
represent industrial "integration"; they are simply an ex-
tension of the "packaging" idea so popular in other lines.
In a way integration describes what the speculative
builders — who are selling "packaged" houses— have been
doing for a long time in the suburbs. Substantial econ-
omies are gained by standardization in design and by
quantity purchases of materials. Rarely is there any tech-
nical advance in their houses; the primary aim is con-
ventionality at the lowest cost.
The prefabricated house companies go beyond this
objective. Their field of operation is stepped up geo-
graphically, becoming regional and in some instances
even national. In general they are more noteworthy for
their commercial innovations than for their technical in-
novations, although many prefabricators have been willing
to sacrifice conventionality in design for the sake of pro-
duction economies. Historically they are the first evidence
of new industrial distribution systems in the building field.
377
7 A.M. Setting up a low cost prefabricated house
7:35 A.M. Rapid assembly with wall and floor units
10:50 A.M. Small rooms, few amenities; but cheap
12:45 P.M. Purdue University's experiment complete
378
For example, General Houses operating out of Chicago offers
a series of standard dwellings which are sold in various localities
by authorised dealers who assume full responsibility for deliver-
ing a complete product to the purchaser; this company uses a
system of factory-built panels assembled by local labor. National
Houses, another company, has been demonstrating its product
in department stores as part of a marketing program that calls
lor a hundred dealer agencies throughout the country.
In most instances the "prefabs" are backed financially by
manufacturers seeking an outlet for their own products. Amer-
ican Rolling Mill Company has two subsidiaries — the Steelox
House and the Insulated Steel House— both statistically impor-
tant for their volume of business. Some experiments in prefab-
rication— like the "glass house," the "copper house," the
''aluminum house," the "cotton house," the "plastics house," and
others that might be mentioned— are frankly advertising stunts;
a single material is used so exclusively that the house becomes
a tour de force. Idle factory space is also responsible for com-
panies going into housing; this is the case with Harnischfeger
Corporation, manufacturers of electric cranes and hoists, who
announced last year a program for the production of "pre-
engineered" houses in a market limited initially to Wisconsin.
Recently at the Peoria, 111., plant of R. G. LeTourneau, Inc.,
grading machinery manufacturers, a five-room-and-garage elec-
trically welded all-steel house, measuring 32 by 44 feet and weigh-
ing 41 tons has been built. Completely furnished and ready for
occupancy, it was towed down the highway to a demonstration
site where water, sewer and electric connections were made in a
few hours. Five similar cottages and thirty smaller models are
now under construction. When finished these houses together
with the first one are to be launched on the nearby Illinois River
and floated on their own bottoms to a colony site for LeTourneau
employes. The company contemplates entering the field com-
mercially.
MUCH WORK IN PREFABRICATION IS TECHNICALLY MERITORIOUS.
An example of this is the experimental house constructed at
Forest Products Laboratory maintained by the Department of
Agriculture in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin at
Madison. It is built with a system of "stressed coverings" adapted
from aircraft design; prefabricated plywood panels are glued
together instead of being nailed in such a way that the strength
and rigidity of construction are increased enormously. Wall and
floor panels of this sort were used in another experimental house
assembled in an Indianapolis slum last October in one day's time
by the Purdue housing research department, collaborating with
the Works Progress Administration and the Indiana State Plan-
ning Board, in an effort to show that slum properties can be
replaced with new construction if the cost is low enough to
permit its rental at a profit. (This two-family house cost $669
per family, thus meeting the $7 maximum monthly rental set for
relief cases. However while this "prefab" does provide reasonably
good construction and a fair amount of space, it hardly solves
the housing problem. The amenities are lacking, rooms are tiny,
there is no hot running water, no washbowl, and a stall shower
takes the place of a bathtub. The kitchen does double duty as
living room, and the cookstove also has to heat the dwelling.
Surely housing standards in the United States should be much
higher than this!)
Many architectural innovations have been taken over by the
prefabricators, particularly flat roof decks, continuous windows,
plain wall surfaces and other forms easily adapted to standard-
ized wall and floor panels. However, to a public trained to think
of home sweet home in terms of wisteria and antiques, such
designs are little short of radical in appearance notwithstanding
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the fact that their interiors look like ordinary dwellings.
Increased livability has been made a chief selling point,
emphasis being placed on mechanical services such as air
conditioning and electrification.
EVEN SO, THE EXISTENCE OF CONSUMER RESISTANCE IS EVIDENT
in attempts of recent arrivals in the field to conceal struc-
tural innovations with surface veneers to give the ap-
pearance of a traditional architecture. Gunnison's Magic
Homes in Louisville consist of quickly assembled plywood
panels, have pitched roofs and adornments which make
them indistinguishable from other small cottages. Arcy
Corporation, which has just completed five $15,000 houses
on a Rockefeller holding in Cleveland Heights using
U. S. Steel products wherever possible, intends to market
its system for houses costing under $5000; but the welded
steel framework can be concealed with Williamsburg
Colonial or any other "style" the buyer may desire.
American Houses, one of the first prefabricators to offer
a flat-roofed product, has recanted and announced its in-
tention of going conventional in its housing package.
At a rough estimate, some fifty companies are prefab-
ricating houses; together they produced probably less
than a thousand units last year. A single large operative
builder can turn out as many suburban homes in the
same time. Taken by and large, the prefabricators have
made slower progress than was indicated by the Chicago
World's Fair enthusiasm. Obsolete building codes have
been a restriction; trades and crafts threatened with dis-
placement have formed opposition; real estate and mort-
gage interests, fearful of obsolescence, have exercised a
boycott. Moreover the "prefabs" have cost too much; the
economies of mass production are not attainable in the
pioneering stage of development. The significance of the
prefabricators, however, has to be judged in the light of
potentialities rather than accomplishments. Much work
is as yet frankly experimental. Some like that of the Pierce
Foundation, an American Radiator offspring which has
been building "mystery" houses for several years, is being
carried on in secrecy. Behind the scenes there is increasing
activity, a tooling up for the anticipated industrialization
of housing.
In the meantime a new phenomenon, the trailer—
which can be carefully studied by the building industry
to advantage — has appeared on the American scene. Last
year as many trailers as ordinary dwellings were produced.
This year forecasts call for 375,000 new trailers and for
210,000 new houses and apartments. As Trailer Travel
editorializes: "While the building trades have been argu-
ing the pros and cons of prefabricated homes, the trailer
manufacturers, using automobile production methods,
have slipped up on them during 1936 with a real pre-
fabricated home on wheels — one that has the added ad-
vantage of mobility — at one fourth or less the cost of the
ones the others have been merely talking about, and the
solution of the housing problem is being taken right out
of their hands."
The trailer is significant as an entering wedge for the
auto industry into the housing field. As the average citizen
begins to realize that his own domicile can be mobile,
that shelter no longer has to be permanently fixed to the
land, the auto manufacturers begin to see that the pro-
duction of transport units can easily be extended to in-
clude shelter units. Eight automobile companies have-
begun producing trailers. Previously others have invaded
JULY 1937
the building field in search of a market for their by-
products— General Motors for refrigerators, Chrysler for
air conditioners, Burgess for acoustical materials, Briggs
for kitchen and bathroom equipment, among others.
With these industrial producers come new techniques in
fabrication — automatic die-casters, giant stamping presses,
elaborate research and testing facilities — as well as new
techniques in merchandising. New possibilities in design
are opened up by the integration of shelter and transpor-
tation.
With the introduction of the assembly line principle
prefabrication takes on a new importance. The trailer in-
dustry abounds in technical innovations — new gadgets,
new tricks in multiple use of space, new materials and
methods that come largely out of advances made in auto
and airplane design. For instance, two-story "mobile houses,"
proposed by Corwin Willson, will offer the equivalent of
five rooms, bath, laundry and porch. Trailers look even
less like traditional dwellings than do prefabricated houses,
but there is no great sales resistance from a buying public
accustomed to rapid style changes in automobiles.
The Phelps-Dodge bathroom unit, Buckminster Fuller designer
An extra bathroom like this is easy to add and to move
379
However trailers are not a complete answer to the hous-
ing problem. Although they do give increased freedom
in a geographical sense, they are cramped in space. At-
tempts are being made to provide more capacious ac-
commodations. William B. Stout, designer of such famous
products as Ford metal airplanes and streamlined Scarab
cars, has been experimenting with a "mobile house";
essentially a trailer, its sides unbolt and unfold into addi-
tional cubage, comprising a living room, twin bedrooms,
a dressing room and a kitchen. Yet even with such in-
creased flexibility in design trailers are limited as to
maximum size. Highways are the determining factor, for
the mobile shelters must be able to cope with narrow
road widths and sharp turns.
ON THE OTHER HAND, WHEELS ARE NOT ABSOLUTELY
necessary for architectural mobility. The different func-
tional parts of a dwelling can be made as separate self-
contained units, easily transported by truck and assembled
wherever and whenever desired. By splitting up the vari-
ous household activities — as K. Lonberg-Holm, research
consultant, has pointed out — it becomes possible to design
the "best possible form" for each specific activity. In other
words, there could be a specially designed "container" for
sleeping, another for dining, another for playing and so
on, each separately fabricated and each self-sufficient.
Every family would then be able to "package" its own
dwelling by assembling as many of these different units as
needed. Additions and subtractions could be made ac-
cording to the varying size and interests of the family;
new and better room units could be substituted as they
became available commercially. Thus household arrange-
ments would be infinite in variety and continually
changing.
Industry has already made strides in this direction. An
"integrated bathroom" only five feet square in plan has
been developed in the Phelps Dodge research laboratories
by Buckminster Fuller, the Dymaxion inventor, as an
outlet for copper. The product is to be marketed under
the slogan, "a bathroom for every bedroom." Completely
prefabricated and self-contained, it has its own ventilating
and its own lighting systems. The copper fixtures are an
integral part of the copper floor and walls of the lower
third or "splash sector." Upper walls and ceiling are
aluminum. The bathing chamber and lavatory-and-toilet
compartment, identical in shape, are so designed that the
units can be carried through ordinary doorways, assembled
and quickly connected to the plumbing system. They
can be just as quickly removed elsewhere and fitted into
any dwelling, old or new. In short, the bathroom becomes
a piece of furniture that the family takes along on moving
day.
An "integrated kitchen" which frames into the wall
construction to become an integral part of the house has
also been developed by Accessories Company, an Amer-
ican Radiator division. Both General Electric and West-
inghouse have been selling planned kitchens made up of
interchangeable standard units that can be "packaged"
in any manner desired for any type of house. This year
Westinghouse has announced a planned laundry along
similar lines.
Industrial integration of this sort is a process of growth
that cannot easily be stopped, once started. Take General
Electric's adventure in kitchen planning as an illustration.
Begun five years ago as a design service to help dealers
sell equipment, the task immediately became overwhelm-
ing. To simplify the work cabinets and equipment were
first standardized. Then it was decided to produce a
"unit kitchen," one complete product comprising all com-
ponent parts of the kitchen; eighteen separate trades
and manufacturers were "unified" in the process. To get
most favorable results for this kitchen, a control had to
be exercised over the design of surrounding rooms in the
house, so in 1935 about four hundred "New American"
homes were erected throughout the country as examples
of good residential planning. Meanwhile the kitchen
planners have become the Home Bureau, equipped to lay
out not only kitchens but also air conditioning, lighting,
radial wiring and laundry facilities for the home, work-
ing generally with local architects.
It is not surprising that the kitchen, laundry and bath-
room should be the first parts of the home to be integrated
industrially. Here is no confusion as to functions. In
supplying the "best possible form" for each specific activ-
ity, business obviously is interested in promoting the sale
of certain products, but the new designs are technically
desirable because they make household operations simpler
and more pleasant. The high standards presage a similar
integration for other parts of the home. The "integrated
house" goes along with the "prefabricated house" — one is
Though the framework of the Arcy Corp. house is all steel, it can be "packaged" for conservative taste in familiar styles
380 SURVEY GRAPHIC
Prefabrication and mass production — a trailer, the Stout mobile
house. When stationary it unfolds into three rooms (upper right)
which look (lower right) livable, modern and fairly spacious
evolution from inside out, the other from outside in.
The "packaged" dwellings are just the beginnings of a
new architecture that is coming out of American indus-
try. In not so many years probably they will be considered
as amusing as "horseless carriages" and "flying machines"
are to a generation no longer excited over streamlined
cars and stratosphere planes. One fact is quite certain:
the new structural forms will be wholly unlike anything
we have ever known before. The box-like geometry of our
traditional architecture is the best that could be achieved
with natural materials and handicraft methods of produc-
tion; but with industrialism bringing new synthetic ma-
terials and new mechanical processes, the old limitations
are removed and there is a corresponding increase in free-
dom of design. Radically new designs, forms that have
never been dreamed of, are necessary to get fullest ad-
vantage of the new potentialities.
THE FOCUS OF THE NEW ARCHITECTURE is MAN HIMSELF.
New means of environmental control for the benefit of
human life are continually being provided — new illumina-
tion, air-conditioning, electro-acoustics, labor-saving de-
vices, and the like. Materials can be produced for almost
any specific purpose; already more than 8000 different
commercial alloys have been developed. Thrilling ex-
periments are going on in the laboratories. Invisible radi-
ation is used to excite specially treated surfaces into
fluorescence. Wall panels are made to give off or absorb
radiant heat in equilibrium with the human body. Ultra-
violet floodlights form invisible "partitions" that obstruct
the passage of air-borne germs.
With increasing environmental control, restrictions in
time and space are annihilated. "Neighborhoods" are no
longer limited to walking or horseback distances. Radio,
telephones, communication and transportation systems of
all kinds have made the nation, almost the entire world,
a neighborhood. Each new productive activity, like tele-
type and television, involves a new production network
that brings a closer social unity. "Town planning" as
understood today becomes an obsolete term when city
and country merge into networks that cut across the coun-
try in sublime contempt of state boundaries and natural
obstructions. The term "shelter" likewise is obsolete, if
the dynamic factors of society are considered, for a house
is no longer just a four-walled defense against men and
the elements. The rewards of industrialism are mobility
(increasing freedom in space) and leisure (increasing
freedom in time) ; these objectives it becomes the func-
tion of the home to promote as an instrument of a pro-
ductive society. But before there can be much further
progress, a solution must be found for the many pressing
social and economic problems left in the wake of each in-
dustrial advance. Here are retarding forces that cannot
be ignored.
Suppose, for instance, that the third of our population
which experts describe as ill-housed is brought up to par.
The housing problem will still remain, for the deficiency
yardstick represents only an average of existing accom-
modations. In light of what is technically possible and
desirable such a standard is insufficient. Technically or
culturally, our present houses have little to boast of.
Their care demands much drudgery. Besides, as the 38,500
accidental deaths which occurred in the home in 1936
(35 percent of all accidental deaths for the year) would
indicate, they are extremely hazardous. On a qualitative
basis almost all houses are obsolete and the shortage
becomes greater as standards advance. The housing prob-
lem becomes thus one of replacement. If we build new and
better structures, what is going to happen to the old ones?
Housing, like other industrial production, will have to
be considered as a characteristic cycle of events consisting
of research, design, fabrication, distribution, utilization
and final elimination. This sequence is fully recognized
JULY 1937
381
by the auto industry with its many services. Already
fifteen million cars have been officially "destined" for the
junk pile within the next five years to make way for
an expected twenty million new vehicles. In the planned
economy of the Ford Motor Company a thing is obsolete,
no matter how good it is, the moment something better
appears; the last eight years have seen 46 percent of the
entire plant scrapped in this way involving equipment
worth $175 million, mostly in excellent condition (com-
pared to ordinary standards) but unfortunately obsolete.
At THE PRESENT RATE OF TURNOVER, AS FRANK WATSON,
head of Purdue University housing research, recently has
pointed out, the American home will remain in use for
142 years. Compare this with the average life of a motor
car, a little under eight years. With industrialization, build-
ings will obviously have much shorter life spans. But as
this occurs what is going to happen to the many billions
invested in mortgages based on the present long life ex-
pectancy for buildings?
Industrialization is precipitating a clash of economic
forces that penetrates through all lines of activity. Busi-
ness itself is split apart — there are those who make profits
by producing things, while others make profits by merely
owning them. One side favors rapid obsolescence, the
other fears it. One wants change, the other status quo.
Many big manufacturers hesitate to undertake any new
activities which may antagonize their present relationships
with local dealers and builders; so far as possible they are
proceeding cautiously, encouraging both the traditional
and industrial techniques. The non-mechanizable busi-
nesses obviously must oppose technical advances if they
are themselves to exist. This they are doing to an in-
creasing extent by whipping up a ballyhoo for the virtues
of handicraft production.
Likewise craft unions in the building field are op-
posed to technical and commercial innovations — an
obstacle likely to disappear with the growth of industrial
unionism, however. It will not be surprising if eventually
the Green and Lewis factions bring their fight to a finish
in the housing arena.
Like other labor, the white collars are also facing a
drastic economic realignment. As the function of design
becomes more important marketwise, the architects and
engineers shift from general practice as professional free-
lances to specialized work as employes of large corpora-
tions. A phenomenon of the depression years has been
the rapid growth of the Federation of Architects, En-
gineers, Chemists and Technicians, which recently became
the first white collar union to join the CIO.
The changing building market is already having reper-
cussions in the publishing field, always sensitive to upsets
in the status quo. The women's magazines arc more
home-conscious than ever, even to the extent of supplying
readers with blueprints of "model" houses. Hearst, with
large real estate holdings at stake, has bought up Amer-
ican Architect and Architecture, and combined them into
a single archaeologically-inclined journal. The tycoons of
Time, Inc., long excited over prefabrication, have re-
vamped their acquisition, Architectural Forum, into a
magazine intended to "surround the building dollar"; its
circulation now embraces builders, real estate and mort-
gage money men, as well as architects. F. W. Dodge
Corporation, an organization originally set up to sell re-
ports of scattered local building projects to market-seeking
manufacturers, is taking a vertical rather than a horizontal
approach toward integration by focusing its publications,
Architectural Record and Real Estate Record, on the spe-
cialized functions of building design and building man-
agement, respectively. New publications — Building Re-
porter (also owned by Time, Inc.) and Building Product
News (owned by Thomas Publishing Company) — have
recently been started along industrial lines. Here as else-
where the implied outcome is a vast integrated system of
highly specialized information services, probably centrally
controlled, which will take the place of the present
random assortment of trade papers.
Directly or indirectly, almost everyone is affected by
this industrialization. Insecurity and unemployment —
the negative aspects of increasing mobility and increasing
leisure — are problems that become intensified with the
industrial production of housing. For example, the claim
so often advanced for mobile houses that "it is easier to get
a job if you are able to move from place to place," is
true only up to a certain point. Too many mobile un-
employed moving in on a work center would mean a
surplus labor supply and correspondingly lower pay scales
which would be reflected in reduced purchasing power for
the rest of the community. Then what?
After all, what is the ultimate purpose of this increasing
freedom in space and time that comes with industrializa-
tion? A new social integration is implied but as one may
well ask, is there any progress if advances along the tech-
nical front are followed by breakdowns along the eco-
nomic front?
TECHNICALLY, WITH ALL OUR INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES THE
housing problem should be easy to solve. Economically,
however, the difficulties appear increasingly more complex.
And as industrialization proceeds the housing problem
moves steadily out of the technical sphere into the eco-
nomic. There it is swallowed up by the larger problem of
planning a society that can utilize all its productive re-
sources for the benefit of mankind.
Carrot Gatherers from Old Mexico by FRANCES ALEXANDER
What beaded prayers
And warrior flares
Have willed somehow
You gather now
The carrot yield
In Texas field:
What artistry
Or soul decree
Has clothed you there,
A festive fair
In calico —
An indigo
Or purple blob
Or yellow throb
Against the fine
Horizon line?
The field is new
Abloom with you,
A childlike race
With happy grace
That lifts its songs
From ancient wrongs
From minuets
Of castanets
And vibrant hum
Of Indian drum.
You work at play
In idle way:
The baskets fill
By artless skill;
The carrots burn
Within their fern
While love is sung
And loads are flung
Along the aisles
Of loamy miles,
The miles that flow
Toward Mexico.
382
SURVEY GRAPHIC
P. R. and New Yorkers
by WILLIAM JAY SCHIEFFELIN
A citizen tells why proportional representation won in
New York, and what the victory means for better
municipal government.
ON JUNE 2 THE LAST FRANTIC EFFORT OF TAMMANY HALL
and its allies to keep their unfair advantage in New York
City's elections came to naught. On that date the highest
court in the state held that proportional representation is con-
stitutional. The overwhelming popular verdict recorded for
"P.R." last November was thus upheld. The largest city in
the country is now preparing to elect its first city council
under the new charter that was adopted at the same election,
by the election method which has already freed Cincinnati,
Toledo and smaller cities from their political machines.
No longer will it be possible for a party with 65 percent of
the votes to elect 95 percent of the city legislators, as has been
the case in the election of the present discredited Board of
Aldermen. No longer will it be possible for less than half of
the majority party's voters to determine who shall represent
the party in the city legislature, as has happened regularly in
the primaries. No longer will it be possible for the Borough
of Manhattan, with only half again as many votes as the
Bronx or Queens, to elect four times as many aldermen.
With P.R. primaries are unnecessary and all votes count
on equal terms. Each borough will elect one councilman for
every 75,000 votes cast. Every voter will have almost complete
assurance that he will help to elect at least one of the can-
didates he wants.
On the day when news of the court's decision confirming
New York's proportional representation law came over the
wire from Albany, I sat in my office at the headquarters of the
Citizens Union, looking out across City Hall Park, thinking
of the last fifty years in New York. During that time the
ebb and flow of good and bad government have alternated
Converse Studios
William Jay Schieffelin
Chairman of the New York Citizens Union
like the tides of the sea. I reflected how after all these years
there had come to New York a new hope. So long as the
rules remained unchanged history was bound to repeat itself.
A majority of the people have always wanted good govern-
ment, but the rules of elections were such that they had to
agree on the same candidates in order to get it. With all the
differences that good citizens have — differences of national
party, of economic philosophy, of personal background — that
was too much to expect. Those who made a business of
politics submerged their differences for a share in the loot.
The divided groups of good citizens were separately outnum-
bered. At intervals good citizens have become sufficiently
exasperated to sink their differences in the election of a mayor;
but never since 1913 has any except the Tammany organiza-
tion (with its allies) controlled the Board of Aldermen.
The Background of Charter Reform
IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXHIBIT IN THE COMING NEW
York World's Fair to show a panorama of the long struggle
"P. R." Is Constitutional
"We must always be careful in approaching a constitutional
question dealing with principles of government, not to be in-
fluenced by old and familiar habits, or permit custom to warp
our judgment. We must not shudder every time a change is
proposed. Many times those who are strongest for efficiency in
business are loudest in their protest against efficiency in govern-
ment. At least this Hare System of Proportional Voting is an
attempt to make representative government a reality. It is
common knowledge that many of our districts are so divided
that equality of representation does not exist. ... If the people
of the City of New York want to try the system, make the
experiment, and have voted to do so, we as a court should be
very slow in determining that the act is unconstitutional, until
we can put our finger upon the very provisions of the Con-
stitution which prohibit it. It has been our repeated admonition
that legislation should not be declared unconstitutional unless
it clearly appears to be so; all doubts should be resolved in
favor of the constitutionality of an act. . . .
"The Hare System of Proportional Voting has been used in
Cincinnati, Toledo, Wheeling, Hamilton (Ohio), Boulder
(Colo.), Winnipeg, Calgary, for the Provincial Legislatures of
Manitoba and Alberta; in all elections in the Irish Free State;
in the election of nine university members of the British House
of Commons; in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and
Denmark. . . . We cannot say, therefore, that it is a mere
dream or speculation. It has been used and found to work.
Can the people of the City of New York under our Constitu-
tion try it? That is the sole question." — From the majority
opinion of the New York Court of Appeals delivered by Chief
Justice Crane, June 2, 1937.
JULY 1937
383
DISTRICT MIS - REPRESENTATION
This district elects one
Democ rat
This elects one Democrat
This elects one Democrat
This elects one Republican
This elects one Democrat
This elects one Democrat
This elects one Republican
This elects one Democrat
^ This elects one Democrat
300,000 Democrats elect 7 representatives
225,000 Republicans elect 2 representatives
150,000 Socialists elect 0 representatives
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS ELECTION?
MOST OF THE REPUBLICAN VOTES AND ALL THE SOCIALIST
VOTES WENT INTO THE WASTE BASKET
Drawings from the lively campaign primer circulated by the
Women's City Club of New York
for better government in New York. Beginning with the
evil days of Boss Tweed, it would continue through the
notorious era of commercialized vice which was ended by the
religious valor of Dr. Parkhurst and the bulldog tenacity of
William Travers Jerome. It would highlight the uprising
led by the Committee of Seventy in 1894 — I think I was the
youngest member, and was on the executive committee —
when the leaders of the Chamber of Commerce joined in a
campaign denouncing bribery and corruption, and won by
electing Mayor William L. Strong as head of a non-partisan
city government. It would feature the reform administra-
tions of Seth Low and John Purroy Mitchel; the Baldwin
charter commission of 1922, which recommended proportional
representation for the Board of Aldermen at the urgent re-
quest of such distinguished citizens as Samuel Seabury,
Fiorello La Guardia and Mrs. Henry Moskowitz, wise coun-
sellor to former Governor Smith; the Committee of One
Thousand, the epochal Seabury Investigation, the election of
Mayor La Guardia and, as a fitting climax, the charter revi-
sion and P.R. victory of 1936.
In the course of the campaign the City Club exhibited an
ancient horse drawn bus, followed by a modern streamlined
motor bus. The cavalcade had historical precision, for the
advances we have made in vehicular traffic have been
paralleled by our efforts for civic progress. Last summer when
I saw this horse-drawn bus I recalled one of my early adven-
tures in the practical application of good government princi-
ples to the budding rise of civil service reform. Mayor Strong
had appointed me a civil service commissioner and one of my
first duties was to hold examinations for ambulance drivers.
Naturally, the ambulances were then drawn by horses, and I
think the testing of drivers was referred to me because I was
driving a four-in-hand at the time. I borrowed an ambulance
Irom Bellevue Hospital and notified the candidates to report
outside a large vacant lot surrounded by a high board fence
in the immediate neighborhood of a chemical laboratory,
owned by my firm in the Bronx. Twenty-eight candidates
had applied for the positions, but when they heard it was to
be a practical test only twelve ventured to take it. I purposely
disarranged the harness by which the horse was hitched to
the ambulance by twisting the throat strap of the bridle and
of the girth and by making one trace longer than the other.
The men were admitted one at a time behind the fence.
Those who did not notice the things that were wrong with
the harness were eliminated. The remainder were given an
opportunity to drive the ambulance. I sat on the seat beside
each candidate. We drove at a trot, we galloped, and we
backed the ambulance to the sidewalk. Some of the drivers
being naturally inexperienced or foolhardy, the neighbor-
hood was in an uproar in no time as nearby residents thought
some frightful accident must have happened in the laboratory
to precipitate these frantic comings and goings of the ambu-
lance. However, four men qualified and were put on the list.
How the Campaign Was Fought
THE ANALOGY DRAWN BY THE ClTY CLUB'S PLACARDS ON THE
old and new buses, contrasting New York's antiquated city
charter with the proposed modern charter and P.R., was only
one of many expedients used to dramatize the 1936 campaign.
The story of how it was carried out may be interesting in
other cities where civic fights are yet to be won. Every angle
of publicity, even to the creation of car-
toons and comic strips, was carefully
thought out. The World-Telegram, the
Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the
Mirror and the Post gave editorial sup-
port to P.R.; New York radio stations
made generous contributions of time.
One of the most important features of
the campaign strategy was the creation and
training of a joint speakers' bureau by a
number of civic organizations which en-
rolled 192 speakers, over a fourth of them women. Every civic,
social and cultural group that could be dicovered was sys-
tematically approached and offered a competent speaker on
the charter and P.R. The members of the Charter Commis-
sion and Walter J. Millard, field secretary of the National
Municipal League, were kept busy with several meetings a
day.
Mr. Millard, a born teacher and a resident of Cincinnati,
did yeoman service in the New York schools. Talks in the
highschools presented information from which the students
could draw their own conclusions. The students naturally
talked things over with their parents, and inquiries rained in
on the campaign headquarters from all parts of the city.
To keep the headquarters constantly informed of the prog-
ress and direction of its campaign, speakers put down every
important fact bearing on audience reaction, an expedient that
helped headquarters to know what arguments needed most
to be emphasized, and where aggressive work was most
needed.
Another useful expedient took the form of a sampling poll,
which was progressively checked and analyzed. I was able to
384
SURVEY GRAPHIC
predict accurately just before the election that both the char-
ter and P.R. would carry all of the four large boroughs and
the city by large majorities. The day after the election, when
the usually reliable prophets of Tammany Hall who had pre-
dicted the defeat of P.R. were found mistaken, I was amused
to hear myself called a "magician."
OUR CAMPAIGN WAS ORGANIX.ED UNDER TWO SEPARATE COM-
mittees — the Citizens Charter Campaign Committee and the
Proportional Representation Committee. Originally there was
talk of a single committee, but there were some conservatives
who favored the new charter but distrusted P.R., and some
"borough autonomists" and labor people who favored P.R.
but distrusted the new charter. Furthermore, the Charter
Commission, while unanimous in submitting P.R., was
divided on its adoption. It is now known that a majority of
its members favored adoption, but in order to promote har-
monious teamwork for the charter wanted to avoid an open
stand on P.R.
Heading the Charter Campaign Committee as chairman
was Judge Morgan J. O'Brien, a former Grand Sachem of
Tammany Hall whose position is believed to have embold-
ened a large number of Democratic voters to disregard the
orders of their machine leaders. The P.R. Campaign Com-
mittee was fortunate in having George H. Hallett, Jr., an
outstanding authority on P.R., as its manager, and also in
having as its chairman the late Henry Moskowitz, whose
close association with labor leaders and with independent
Democrats was an invaluable aid to the campaign. As treas-
urer of the P.R. Committee and a member of the other com-
mittee, I was closely associated with both and know how
much was due not only to the leaders but to the zeal and
the hard work of hundreds of men and women who gave
their time and energies to the campaign. P.R. made patient
explanation to the voters necessary. My own favorite cam-
paign story to illustrate its simplicity and efficacy appears on
page 386. If not true in all details, it nevertheless is based on
historical record.
Back of the actual campaign committees, which operated
only during the fall, were the permanent civic organizations
which have been working quietly and effectively for P.R.
and charter revision for years. The Citizens Union, the
League of Women Voters, The Women's and Men's City
Clubs, the Merchants' Association, the City Affairs Commit-
tee, the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the Brook-
lyn Civic Council and other groups had been working closely
together through a Civic Conference of New York City, an
informal committee for the exchange of ideas and formula-
tion of policies on charter revision.
Behind the victory, too, there is the story of unremitting
civic effort begun years ago by citizens such as Richard S.
Childs, father of the city manager plan; Richard Welling,
head of the New York Civil Service Reform Association;
Henry de Forest Baldwin, C. C. Burlingham, and Judge
Thomas D. Thacher, chairman of the Charter Commission,
all of them schooled in the realities of political battle with
entrenched and unscrupulous opposition forces, and possessed
of great patience and an almost religious belief that something
could be done to give New York a better government.
A central figure in the whole fight for P.R. was Judge
Samuel Seabury, whose searching investigation into political
corruption in New York City for a committee of the state
legislature laid the foundation for the Fusion administration
and the whole movement for charter revision.
There were certain special factors which helped P.R. One
UNDER PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
there will be NO districts nithin a borough
IN THIS ELECTION
EVERY 75,000 VOTERS
ELECT ONE REPRESENTATIVE
EVERY VOTER'S VOTE
is as good as every other
voter's vote
Every Party elects
representatives in
proportion to its voting
strength
300,000 Democrats elect 4 representatives
225,000 Republicans elect 3 representatives
150,000 Socialists elect 2 representatives
THIS IS TRUE REPRESENTATION
was the fact that it provided an automatic solution for re-
apportionment — and voters in Queens, the Bronx and Brook-
lyn were acutely conscious of the special advantages thus far
enjoyed by Manhattan. Another was the development of a
new P.R. voting machine by the International Business Ma-
chines Corporation. A third was the presence of a three-
platoon system for firemen on the ballot, with many firemen
urging a yes vote on all questions to avoid confusion.
The P.R. Election Next Fall
As A RESULT OF THIS VICTORY AND THE CoURT OF APPEALS
decision the New York Board of Elections is preparing for
the largest election ever held under the best form of P.R. The
largest previous election under it was held in Ireland in
1925, when the entire Free State was polled as a single dis-
trict in the election of members of the Senate. The Free State
has used P.R. for all its important elections, national and
local, since it was founded in 1922.
In the New York election each borough will be a single
district. The present aldermanic districts will be abolished.
Nominations will be made by petition, 2000 separate signers
to each petition, and there will be no primaries.
The P.R. ballots will contain no party emblems. They will
contain the designations of parties or of independent groups,
but the candidates will be arranged alphabetically, with rota-
tion by election districts to equalize the advantage of first
place. To vote for council the voter will pick out his first
choice and vote 1 in front of it, pick out his second choice
and vote 2 in front of it and so on — 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.
JULY 1937
385
When the polls close the P.R. ballot boxes will be sealed
and sent for counting to a large central counting place for
each borough. There the count will be conducted in the pres-
ence of the candidates and their agents. Experience shows
that such central counts are not subject to the manipulations
which frequently occur when paper ballots are counted in
widely scattered districts. The members of the bi-partisan
counting forces will have to pass qualifying examinations
given by the municipal Civil Service Commission.
The rules for the count in New York are somewhat simpler
than those in Cincinnati, Toledo, Wheeling, Hamilton
(Ohio), Boulder (Colorado), Winnipeg, Calgary, Dublin or
Cork, all of which use similar systems of P.R. for their city
councils. They will give each borough one councilman for
every 75,000 valid votes cast within the borough, with an
additional councilman for a remainder as large as 50,000.
They will make each successful councilman the representa-
tive of approximately 75,000 separate voters within the bor-
ough who have marked their ballots for him. No voter will
help elect more than one. If a voter's first choice is elected
without needing his vote or hopelessly defeated in spite of it,
his vote is transferred to his second choice, or to the first
of his choices who can be helped to election by it. The details
are simpler than the rules of baseball, but need not be ex-
panded here.
With this new machinery of democracy we know that
minorities will get a larger share and be sufficiently repre-
sented to exercise a restraining influence on the majority.
Under P.R. that has never failed to happen. But we are work-
ing for more than that. We are hoping that really leading
citizens, men and women who would never consider run-
ning lor the Board of Aldermen, of a standing equal to the
members of the Charter Commission, will consent to be nomi-
nated for the council. A cmmc:l with such members would
keep New York permanently from the depths of misrule it
has known in the past.
ALREADY THERE ARE SIGNS THAT NEW YORK'S VICTORY is CON-
tagious. A bill making P.R. optional by petition and popular
vote for city and town councils and school committees, with
the single exception of the Boston City Council, has just
become law in Massachusetts. Governor Herbert H. Lehman
has just signed an enabling bill sponsored by Senator Thomas
C. Desmond which makes P.R. optional by petition and popu-
lar vote for county boards of supervisors in all New York
counties outside New York City.
Bills which would have made P.R. and the city manager
plan optional for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago
were also given serious consideration in this years legisla-
tures.
It was less than twenty-five years ago that C. G. Hoag, the
real father of P.R. in this country, and a railroad engineer,
William E. Boynton, persuaded the little Ohio lakeport of
Ashtabula to make the first public use of P.R. in the United
States.
Who knows? Perhaps in the next twenty-five years
we shall have broken the stranglehold of pork barrel politi-
cians throughout the nation and established in all our gov-
ernments the principle so well stated by Ernest Naville, the
Swiss publicist: "In a democratic government the right of
decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representa-
tion belongs to all."
OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE HEAD-
master of an English school, Thomas
Wright Hill, a man of progressive ideas,
felt that his students should be given a
measure of self-government.
"When you have nominated ten boys,
we will hold an election, in which you
may choose five of the ten boys," he
told them. "The five boys who receive
the most votes will become a committee
to manage certain school activities."
But of the hundred boys in the school,
sixty were in the junior form, and only
forty in the senior form.
If the committee was to be elected by
a majority, it would be possible for the
juniors to elect all the members of the
committee.
One of the seniors suggested that the
seniors lock up twenty-one of the juniors
so they could not go to the election.
This scheme, correct though it was in
theory, aroused such an uproar when put
into action that the headmaster quickly
perceived that his original plan had a
basic flaw.
"I understand," he said. "Instead of
holding the election in the schoolroom,
with ballots, we shall hold the election
in the playground. The ten candidates
will stand on stools, placed apart from
How P.R. Works: A Campaign Story
one another. You will gather around
whichever candidate you want to have
represent you on the committee. The
five boys who have the largest numbers
will be elected."
As THE CANDIDATES TOOK THEIR PLACES ON
the ten stools in the playground, and the
boys began gathering around their favo-
rite candidates, one of the students,
whose mental resourcefulness must have
led him to a brilliant career in later life,
took a hand in the proceedings. Observ-
ing the boys taking their places at the
stools of their favorite candidates, he saw
that one of the candidates, a popular boy,
had a large number of boys standing at
his stool.
The youngster pondered this problem:
"There are a hundred boys, all told. If
five are to be chosen, each candidate
needs only twenty votes including his
own. Yet there is that popular boy, with
twenty-nine boys standing around his
stool — nine of those votes are not needed
to elect him! In fact, those nine votes
are actually being wasted! Why, there-
fore," he asked himself, "shouldn't nine
of those boys change their vote over to
their second choice and possibly help
elect him?"
So this young Einstein explained this
to nine unneeded students at the stool
of the popular candidate. Each of them
moved off to his second choice.
Then this young political scientist ob-
served that there was a candidate at
whose stool there was only three boys.
"It's plain," he explained to them,
"that there is no chance of electing your
candidate. Why shouldn't you three
boys and your candidate as well move
to the stool of your second choice, and
possibly help elect him?"
The boys moved off to the stools of
their second choice candidates. Then
other small groups broke up in the same
way rather than waste their vote.
When the headmaster returned, he
found that all of the hundred boys were
gathered, in groups of twenty, electing
five of the candidates. The younger boys
with their sixty votes could evidently
have elected three of the five with three
groups of twenty each, but nothing they
could do could have kept the larger boys
from electing two. Actually some of
the senior candidates were heroes to the
juniors, so the seniors elected three and
the juniors two. Everybody was happy.
That, in its essentials, is the Hare
system of proportional representation.
386
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The West, Water and the Grazing Laws
by FRANCESCA M. BLACKMER
EVER SINCIi THE EARLIEST DAYS OF CATTLE AND SHEEP RAISING
in America, ownership of a western ranch has not entailed
ownership of the land grazed on. A ranch consists, pri-
marily, of water. The rancher owns sections of land which
contain springs or streams where stock can water, and flat
fields that can be irrigated, for hay. But the grass whereon
his stock grazes is generally on public domain, and his use
of that domain has been established by precedent. Any
rancher whose stock uses another man's water is a trespasser,
and the laws of the various states penalize him accordingly.
That is why fences are not much needed on the range lands.
Each rancher must see to it that his cattle stay within graz-
ing distance of the water he owns.
Thanks to the mountainous character of most of the cattle
grazing country, there are many ranchers who use range
land all the year round. In winter the lowlands are free from
snow and provide edible brush and in summer the highlands
provide a rich pasture. These ranchers cut very little hay —
only enough for weak stock, saddle horses and milk cows;
a little for fattening early beef and a reserve for emergencies,
such as an unexpected snowfall on the winter range.
Other ranches have large well watered hayfields and turn
their stock out on the public domain only in summer. Their
summer range, where they own springs, may be many miles
from the hay ranches, which are generally irrigated with
water bought from some federal or state water development,
rigidly controlled.
Of these two kinds of ranch, it may be said in general that
the former is generally owned by the small, independent
rancher, with little capital invested and small margin of
profits. The latter type is owned by the rich rancher, corpora-
tion or bank, which can afford a large initial investment in
the expensive hay lands, and a high overhead of taxes, labor
and equipment for haying. These last ranches cost more, earn
more — and risk more.
NOW COMES THE TAYLOR AcT. IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT
the whole range country has been overstocked and overgrazed
and that something must be done about it. The Taylor Act
aims to say just how many head of stock each rancher may
put on his section of public range to prevent overstocking.
The charge is not exorbitant — it is only supposed to be just
enough to cover the expense of administration. The admin-
istrators are local men, elected by regional boards of ranchers.
Certainly in northern Nevada, which is the only district I
know personally, they are conscientious men who know the
country, its details and problems, very thoroughly.
But the act is universally unpopular, and the only reason
there has not yet been a public demand for its repeal is that
ranchers can't, in the nature of things, leave their ranches and
get together in mass protest. They haven't the time. And
individual voices make no repercussions in a democracy.
Complaints against the Taylor Act are manifold, but they
boil down to two major objections. The first is that it has no
teeth in it. It is a vague affair, pretty unintelligible to a
college professor, and miles above the head of any rancher.
But the most careful perusal fails to detect in it any terms
of enforcement or penalties for violation. Inasmuch as it
overrules the existing state laws against trespass, at any rate
in Nevada, the result is pretty chaotic. A rancher may pay
for a hundred head under this bill and put two hundred on
the range, and nothing is done about it, because there is no
machinery for counting his stock or for penalizing the man
who has overstocked.
The second objection is this. The local administrators of the
act were informed from Washington that the basis on which
numbers of stock were to be allocated was the amount of
hay the rancher (not the specific ranch) cut. One ton of hay
in the stack means two horses or cows on the range. That
specification is not in the original bill but in the administra-
tive orders received from Washington. The result, in action,
would horrify any beholder.
THE LARGER RANCH OR CORPORATION, WITH HOLDINGS IN AN AREA
irrigated by federal project, may cut a thousand tons of hay
there. That entitles him to two thousand head of cattle on
the range. But he may have water on a summer range for
six months of the year which is adequate for only five hun-
dred head. But since the Taylor Act allows him four times
as many cattle as the range will carry, he overstocks it al-
most— but not quite — to the point of suicide, and sells his
surplus hay at a large profit in faraway markets. His cattle
are not fed that hay. They eat the feed on the public domain
down to the point where dangerous erosion is a foregone
conclusion, and they trespass on his neighbor's water. He
doesn't care — he is making more money than ever before,
and even though his grazing land will be a desert in a few
years, he can always mortgage his springs to the bank today,
and in due time let the bank foreclose on his barren, de-
serted property.
Meanwhile, take the small rancher who cuts, say, a hun-
dred tons of hay. He may own twice as many springs as his
hay-rich neighbor, and have had use, by precedent, of twice
the range lands, including both summer and winter grazing.
But he is now allowed only two hundred head of cattle, where
he may always have run five hundred before. His land taxes
and overhead remain exactly the same, but his profits are nil.
He sees his neighbor's range reduced to desert, endangering
his own watershed; he spends all his time trying to keep
his neighbor's thirsty cattle off his own water; and unless
he defies the Taylor Act, he is reduced to starvation as soon
as a dry summer or a severe winter comes along. He has no
margin and no chance of one. No money to take the law
to the Supreme Court, no leisure to leave his ranch and
organize a lobby in Washington, and no future but to sell his
ranch as fast as he can (he will be lucky if he hasn't a mort-
gage to clear) and try to get work as a hired hand on the
land of some more prosperous neighbor. His family — well,
they won't starve, if they have relatives to go to, but your
once-independent landowner doesn't take gracefully to relief.
THE ULTIMATE FUTURE OF THE WEST UNDER THE TAYLOR AcT
appears to be a return to large ranches, cattle kings, and fierc-
er, more cutthroat overgrazing than ever before. And what
could be done about it? It happens that if the Taylor Act had
never been written, the government already had a fully de-
veloped and smoothly working mechanism for controlling the
problems of the public range. That is the National Forest
Reserve. That domain is used for cattle and sheep range
wherever it exists in the West, but there is no overgrazing or
trespassing there. The ranchers who use it rent the right to
run there, and their stock is counted once or twice a year.
Its enforcement is rigid. Its operation is known and ac-
cepted throughout the West. Its well organized personnel
has long been trained to recognize and prevent even in-
cipient overgrazing.
When it became evident that the free use of the public
domain outside the Forest Reserve must be controlled, I
wonder why this excellent Forest Reserve organization was
not used and extended to include the entire area.
JULY 1937
387
Labor, Management and the Public
by STANLEY B. MATHEWSON
The historic Supreme Court decision sustaining the Wagner Act charted a
course of future labor-management relationships which are here explored in
terms of today's organization drives in the public service as well as in industry.
WlTH THE RAPID GROWTH OF ORGANIZED LABOR GROUPS SINCE
the Supreme Court decision on the Wagner Act, there is
already developing a strong demand for more responsi-
bility and control of labor organizations. The American
Institute of Public Opinion, under date of May 16, says
that a nation-wide poll to the question, "Do you think
labor unions should be regulated by government?" pro-
duced a majority of seven to three in favor of such regu-
lation.
It is evident that with the rising power of organized
labor, there is a well defined growth of public opinion,
insisting that the unions become more "responsible" under
their own motivation or that government through the
passage of laws demand from them greater responsibility.
One of the recurrent suggestions is that this responsibility
may be brought about by incorporation. It will be well to
look carefully at this subject. It is quite possible for the
board of directors or the management of an incorporated
body, be it a union or an ordinary business, to act upon
the matters of major importance without any pre-reference
whatever to the stockholders.
The executives and boards of corporations can often
pursue a course of action untrammeled by a vote of the
stockholders while the usual practice of an unincorporated
labor group is, in some respects, much more a truly demo-
cratic one. I refer to the fact that most labor leaders go
back to a vote of their constituencies for approval of a con-
tract, initiation of a strike, the settlement of a dispute and
the like, while the board of directors of a business corpora-
tion could determine such major policies without any ref-
erence whatever to a vote of the stockholders.
This problem appears to be more logically associated
with the type of leadership that will evolve under the new-
er relationships. An important labor leader has said to me:
"As long as we were forced to fight for our mere exist-
ence, we naturally turned for leadership to the warriors
within our ranks. Now that we are becoming 'big busi-
ness,' what is more natural than that we elect to leadership
our businessmen members? Expansion of our union into
wider occupational fields will automatically bring in more
of such leaders. Our increased financial ability will also
make it quite possible to take a leaf out of the book of
business and employ the best legal, fiscal and executive
talent available whether such persons are former members
of organized labor or not."
Especially since the Supreme Court decision sustaining
the Wagner Labor Relations Act the whole nation appears
to be on the threshold of entirely new concepts, new meth-
ods and new procedures in labor-management relation-
ships.
The crux of national concern with labor relations as a
matter of interstate commerce was boldly stated by Chief
388
Justice Hughes in the majority opinion of the Jones and
Laughlin case. [See Listening in on the Supreme Court,
by Beulah Amidon, Survey Graphic March 1937].
Quoting from a preceding case (First Coronado), the
Chief Justice said, "If Congress deems certain recurring
practices, though not really part of interstate commerce,
likely to obstruct, restrain or burden it, it has the power
to subject them to national supervision and restraint."
Then, going completely beyond specific points, the ma-
jority decision laid down some broad social principles in
labor-management relationships. Read these words care-
fully: "When industries organize themselves on a national
scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the
dominant factor in their activities, how can it be main-
tained that their industrial labor relations constitute a for-
bidden field into which Congress may not enter when
it is necessary to protect interstate commerce from the
paralyzing consequences of industrial war . . . ?
"We have often said that interstate commerce itself is
a practical conception" (and here the Chief Justice went
back to his previously expressed concern that one should
not shut one's eyes to the "plainest facts of our national
life") : "It is equally true that interferences with that com-
merce must be appraised by a judgment that does not ig-
nore actual experience." Then burning all the covered
bridges behind him, he proceeded to say: "Experience has
abundantly demonstrated that the recognition of the right
of employes to self-organization and to have representa-
tives of their own choosing for the purpose of collective
bargaining is often an essential condition of industrial
peace. Refusal to confer and negotiate has been one of the
most prolific causes of strike. This is such an outstanding
fact in the history of labor disturbances that it is a proper
subject of judicial notice and requires no citation of in-
stances."
Toward the end of the decision, the majority group then
declared :
"It would seem that when employers freely recognize the
right of their employes to their own organizations and
their unrestricted right of representation there will be
much less occasion for controversy in respect to the free
and appropriate exercise of the right of selection and
discharge."
THAT, BRIEFLY, EXPRESSES A TRANSITION IN AMERICAN: LABOR
relations thinking from the old to the new. The implica-
tions and ramifications are so tremendous that it is impos-
sible to cover more than a few high spots of what this
genuine metamorphosis really portends for the future.
In the minority decision Justice McReynolds asked some
very pertinent questions. For example, he wanted to know
if; under the new program, Congress may interest itself
SURVEY GRAPHIC
in the labor relations between
an employer and his employes
under the interstate clause in
I he Constitution, may Congress
also not go much further and
cause a mill owner to be "pro-
hibited from closing his factory
or discontinuing his business
because so to do would stop the
flow of products to and from
his plant in interstate com-
merce? May employes in a fac-
tory be restrained from quit-
ting work in a body because
this will close the factory and
thereby stop the flow of com-
merce? May arson of a factory
be made a federal offense when-
ever this would interfere with
such flow? If a business cannot
continue with the existing wage
scale, may Congress command
a reduction?" In order that a
business be continued and
hence not interfere with the
flow of the products and "if this theory of a continuous
'stream of commerce' as now denned (by the Labor de-
cision) is correct, will it become the duty of the federal
government hereafter to suppress every strike which by
possibility may cause a blockade in that stream?"
In other words, as we look forward to new methods in
labor relationships, has the federal government under-
taken to remove all forms of blockade and accepted the
responsibility of keeping clear the channels of interstate
commerce regardless of the nature of the disturbance that
interrupts the flow?
It has become increasingly clear that we need a national
labor policy, that we can no longer permit labor-manage-
ment relationships to drift aimlessly either in private or
public employment. Private employers, their workers, and
the representatives of those workers, must perforce adopt
policies which make either for peaceful conference or per-
petual conflict. Temporizing is
no longer possible.
WHEN IT COMES TO METHODS
used by labor organizations in
dealing with private industry, we
cannot ignore a condition of the
spectacular device of sit-down
strikes. [See Sit-Down by Louis
Stark, Survey Graphic June
1937.]
One possible aspect of the sit-
down strike leads to a complete
reversal of the usual situation,
wherein the management estab-
lishes a picket line at the gate to
prevent the passage of food and
supplies to the sit-downers with-
in the plant. It is too early in the
technique of this instrument of
industrial warfare to state
whether it is a spectacular but
passing phase of industrial con-
JULY 1937
Wide World
New York headquarters when eastern seamen joined the West in ship strike last year
flict, or really a new technique that will have to be dealt
with officially by labor boards and the courts.
I, for one, am always hopeful that progression in indus-
trial relations will be along the lines of peace rather than
toward the improvements of the instruments of warfare.
The National Labor Relations Board has pointed out in
a comprehensive report that in the years of 1933, 1934,
and 1935, some fifty million man-days were lost from
strikes and that the greatest single cause was disputes
over the right of collective organization and bargaining.
Now that the Supreme Court has spoken on this subject,
perhaps we need to turn our attention more specifically
to the improvement of the techniques of peace rather
than strengthening the sinews of war.
I look for a tremendous increase in both the local and
national facilities available for mediation. Unquestion-
ably, the National Labor Relations Board is now one
•
Wide World
Police escorted strikebreakers to the city dump when Philadelphia ashmen struck
389
Wide World
The Labor Board conducted the Jones and Laughlin election
of the most important institutions in America; but it
covers only a part of the field. I look for the addition of
other boards to handle specific groups patterned after
the National Mediation Board which now handles spe-
cial problems in transportation. [See What Can We Do
About Strikes, by William M. Leiserson, Survey Graphic
March 1937.] I look for the cities and states to increase
the number of local boards to mediate disputes that do
not properly fall within the jurisdiction of the national
boards concerned with inter-
state commerce.
It is nevertheless clear that a
government that undertakes to
sustain the right of employes
to organize, bargain collectively
and enforce demands has cer-
tainly embarked upon some
new and untried areas of juris-
prudence, public welfare and
intimate operating conditions.
Especially in the essential utili-
ties and in the public service it-
self the future abounds in inter-
esting possibilities.
For example, federal em-
ployes have the choice of be-
longing to one of two national
unions. One of these unions is
affiliated with the AF of L and
one is not. The National Labor
Relations Board itself has a
large number of federal em-
ployes whose hours, wages and
working conditions are no doubt legally subject to col-
lective bargaining. Although the Wagner Act does not
cover public employes at present, let us suppose the not
impossible future condition that the National Labor Re-
lations Board employes tiled charges with the hoard that
they, the board, had failed to bargain collectively with
the proper group, and some of the employes then engaged
in a nation-wide sit-down strike until the board held an
election. Question: Is the board engaged in interstate
commerce? And if so, does it have jurisdiction over the
dispute with its own employes? Can it hold an election
to determine the bargaining agency within its own
ranks? In case of a sit-down strike, should it bring in
strikebreakers to prepare and hear the case brought by
its own employes?
I AM NOT ATTEMPTING TO BE AMUSING. BlIT I AM ATTEMPT-
ing to point out how necessary it is to pick out just a few
important threads in the new social relationships and to
try to follow them as best we may through the weaving
patterns of our varicolored, complex present-day indus-
trial fabrics.
Labor disputes may occur in any employer-employe
relationship, but the public welfare aspects of such dis-
putes appear to classify them and make a vast difference
in their nature. When a dispute concerns public em-
ployes, some may say that surely a government that
states that employes of other organizations may freely
organize, bargain collectively, strike and picket and be
backed up by governmental authority, in so doing, could
not rightly withhold such legal rights from its own
personnel.
It is not well to be too glib in considering that question.
Governments — federal, state, county and municipal —
that are concerned with certain essential services need
rapidly to bring about a clear-cut understanding with
their employes who are charged with the responsibility
of rendering these services whether or not there is in-
herent in the employment contract the surrender of
certain individual rights and privileges. That the unions
have a legal right to admit to membership in their organ-
Wide World
In Detroit 14,000 Packard employes' ballots were counted in the Federal Building
390
SURVEY GRAPHIC
i/.utum the non-military em-
ployes of government has been
little questioned. There must,
however, be certain clearly de-
fined limitations to the indi-
vidual's right to a collective
action that would interrupt es-
sential public services.
Employes of the various gov-
ernments now constitute the
largest single unorganized
group in the country, and
while the American Federation
of Government Employes
which functions among federal
workers has a constitutional
ban on strikes and picketing,
the newer organizations in this
field appear to be restricted by
no such limitation. We are now
confronted with the age-old
question of the rights of certain
individuals as opposed to the
broader welfare of their social
group.
It should not be an impossible task to determine, per-
haps, that a meter reader in a city waterworks need not
surrender his collective right to strike as a condition of his
employment, while, in the interest of the public welfare,
the pump house employe must. We can contemplate with
equanimity a strike of all the workers at a state agricul-
tural experiment station, but we can look with no such
calm upon a walk-out of state prison guards.
Perhaps we may say that the uniformed employes of
government are different from the non-uniformed. That
does not seem to help much when we remember that post-
men, liquor store employes, street sweepers, and other gov-
ernment employes already often wear uniforms while on
duty. Civil service status is just as inadequate as a line of
demarcation for those government employes who may be
said to have all the rights of organized laborers as against
those who are limited, in the interests of the public wel-
fare, in the full exercise of their rights as organized
workers.
The National Labor Relations Board and Congress
should bestir themselves in laying out an intelligent pat-
tern for this bit of our politico-social fabric. Perhaps a
clear understanding as to those employes concerned with
the public welfare is what is needed. We may in the future
be hearing decisions from the Supreme Court as to what
constitutes public welfare and what groups of employes
may or may not strike.
There should be no possibility of misunderstanding of
the suggestion in this connection, that perhaps the out-
lawed individual contract that was so distasteful in private
use may yet become an instrument of respectability in
public employment as a method of making clear to each
new employe in a public, tax-supported service whether
he may join a union with persuasive powers only or may
join one that can use the force of collective action in a
strike.
This matter of status and obligation 10 public welfare
was silhouetted sharply in the case of a sit-down striker
at Flint who left his seat in an automobile plant and
donned the uniform of a state militiaman to preserve the
Wide World
In May an emergency board, appointed by the President, settled a threatened strike of 25,000 rail-
way clerks, under the first test of the mediation procedure amendment to the Railway Labor Act
peace of the community. Had Governor Murphy ordered
the militia to eject the sit-down strikers by force, can you
imagine the emotion of that particular striker under such
an order ?
The city of Indianapolis has a privately owned water-
works; the city of Cincinnati a publicly owned one. The
water supply of a community is an essential public service
to health, decency and life. The question arises: Can the
employes of a private concern legally or more legitimately
strike than those of a publicly owned waterworks system?
So far as public welfare is concerned, it makes little dif-
ference to the welfare of the users whether the funds for
the construction of the plant come from private or public
sources. Again, in the field of electricity and gas which are
both publicly and privately owned in various communi-
ties, a labor dispute that might interrupt the source of light
at the operating table of a hospital could very possibly
cause the death of a patient. When we come to the inter-
ruption of a gas supply in a labor dispute, we shudder to
think of the consequences which might ensue from inter-
ruption of the gas flow and its subsequent resumption to
the open pilots and jets of domestic use. We are con-
fronted here chiefly with the question of possible life and
death of innocent parties.
THUS, AS GOVERNMENT ENTERS THE FIELD OF LABOR RELA-
tions, a whole flock of new problems and new relationships
arise
Those of us who have day to day dealings with wide
varieties of workers and managements must approach, and
must persuade others to approach, labor relations with the
same thoughtful, unemotional attitude that would be dis-
played toward any other problem. There is really no more
reason to lose poise and to quit thinking in an orderly
manner over the possible interruption of the labor supply
than over a possible interruption in the flow of raw mate-
rials. We must go to the causes of discontent and seek for
intelligent, practical solutions that are tair to workers, to
the public and to industry. Less heat and more light is
what is needed.
JULY 1937
391
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Leaks Around the Bulkheads
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
YOU WILL REMEMBER ROBERT FROST'S REMARKS ABOUT
wall building and builders, wall mending and menders,
and the old saying, parroted like other rural adages
through ancient seedy whiskers : "Good fences make good
neighbors." One may search far for a more fiercely cut-
ting question, peculiarly apt to the introverted "states-
men" of these days, than that in his poem, Mending
Wall, flung at his own neighbor vis-ti-vis across the
tumbled line-stones constructively designed to keep his
apples from crossing to eat the other's pine-cones. "Why
do they make good neighbors?" He visions the wall
builder as moving in a "darkness not of woods only and
the shade of trees ... he will not go behind his father's
saying."
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
I commend that poem to you in this distracted period
when "old-stone savages" of neolithic psychology under
whatever modern uniforms and nominal citizenship,
armed not with stones but with diabolical devices of
"civilized" science, are bedevilling the world, mending
and heightening old walls and constructing new ones,
behind which to brew and across which to spread the
antediluvian ideas which we fondly thought we had
outgrown. Frost has no use for all this business between
neighbors :
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Sitting smugly, defiantly complacent behind his rebuilt
ancient Roman wall, Dictator Mussolini said not long ago
to an American visitor:
"Why will not the world believe me when I say that I
desire only peace? We have gained our objectives. . . ."
Meaning of course especially the rape of Abyssinia.
Nothing else in the way of international outrage in mind
— at the moment. If only he could get out of that hot
spot in Spain! He does not say that aloud of course;
but there is little secret about his wish that somehow
he could let go of that particular snarling bear's tail.
Not merely is that tail grip slipping, with no salvage of
glory to Italian military prowess — quite the contrary —
but there is little hope that any swag from Spain will
contribute toward the already great and mounting costs.
Germany will not help him: Hitlerland is in much the
same case, and behind the superficial appearance of com-
mon aims for the destruction of democracy and the in-
stallation of fascism everywhere lies the old inexorable
fact that they are rivals politically; from that point of
view in the last analysis Germany's meat is Italy's poison,
and vice versa. There is grim humor in Hitler's award to
Mussolini and his understudy, Count Ciano, of the Grand
Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, the
highest decoration for foreigners within the gift of the
Reich. Oblivious of Italy's contribution in the World
War, despite repudiated previous alliance with her and
Austria-Hungary, to the wreck of Germany. At the same
moment, at Naples, Mussolini in person was drawing the
attention of the German War Minister, Field Marshal
von Blomberg, as the Associated Press account remarks,
to "what naval strength Italy could provide — as a friend
or as an enemy."
SMASHING THE ABYSSINIAN WALL AND GRABBING THAT ROCKY
upland pasture hasn't got Mussolini anywhere except
deeper into the contempt and fear and hatred of the world.
With that atrocious enterprise went the last vestige of
possible faith in his word. Italy was a party to the Pact
of Paris, by which the whole civilized world in irrevocable
words condemned and renounced "recourse to war for
the solution of international controversies"; agreeing that
the solution of all disputes "of whatever nature . . . shall
never be sought except by pacific means." What possible
value remains to the Italian word upon any "scrap of
paper" on any subject — even upon an Italian government
promise to pay? Signer Mussolini, why should anybody
anywhere believe you? Even the Germans with whom
at this particular moment you are flirting?
The bills for the Abyssinian adventure are coming in;
for the first time we have at least an inkling of their
total, in figures given out just now in Rome — and Rome
hardly would be likely to exaggerate them. They show
that the cost of the war in Abyssinia has been to Italy up
to date 11,350,000,000 lire: that is around $600 million
in American money. There is no intimation as to how
this prodigious cost is to be met. The road to empire is
a costly one; on a far stretch of it, in India, Great Britain
for a distinguished example is pretty well bogged down
—nobody knows how that is coming out. But in the
Italian manner you have to live off the country that you
conquer, and Abyssinia has not been and probably will
not be worth a nickel. Nobody is going to help pay that
bill; in the international pawnshops even the Grand
Cross of the German Eagle would be high at 30 cents.
Small wonder that II Duce has just now no pressing
appetite for further military adventures and touts himself
as a man of peace.
PERHAPS HE is MAKING THE ITALIAN PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT.
They have done some pretty swallowing during his
regime. We have now, through the enterprise of anti-
fascist newspapers in England and America, the text of
secret instructions to the Italian press, covering the period
from January almost to date. I wish I had space to recite
them, and to point out their precise similarity to those
governing "news" publicity in Germany. Yes, and in
Soviet Russia; for the technique of control of public in-
formation is substantially identical under all dictatorships,
which see to it that the people hear only what is good for
them from the government point of view. After the previ-
ous disclosure of confidential instructions during the
Abyssinian war it was ordered that in future such com-
munications must be given orally; but this proved im-
392
SURVEY GRAPHIC
practicable, so we have the text. Here are a few samples:
January 16: Give no news of the bombardment of inhabited
centers by the Spanish "Nationalists," and above all deny
that it was done by Italian or German aviators.
March 5: Suppress entirely news of the arrival at Naples of
wounded volunteers coming from Spain and transported by
our hospital ships.
April 14: Reproduce and amplify the news about how de-
sirable it would be to burn the contagious quarters of London,
unworthy of a civilized age. Add that Edward if he had
continued to reign would have provided for it.
April 18: Go carefully about the conflict between the Vatican
and Germany; stay neutral. In any case, incline to the side
of Germany.
May 10: Stress any unfortunate incident that may happen
during the Coronation celebrations.
So readers of the Italian newspapers knew of the
coronation of George VI only that a man was killed in
London during the festivities; for under date of May 6
it had been "absolutely forbidden to make any reference
whatever to the British government." But on that day the
papal newspaper in Vatican City (beyond Mussolini's
control) had a phenomenal bulge of circulation!
When it is fully demonstrated that conquered Abys-
sinia cannot pay for its conquest and the home people
have to foot the bill, it will be "just too bad." Abraham
Lincoln stated the formula: "You can fool some of the
people all of the time, and all of the people some of the
time; but you can't fool all the people all the time."
As FOR WALL-SURROUNDED GERMANY, JUST AS I CLOSE THIS
article comes the blistering letter addressed to Hitler in
person by the Rev. Dr. Charles S. Macfarland, general
secretary emeritus of the Federal Council of Churches of
Christ in America, accusing the Reichsfuhrer personally
of having violated every assurance given to Dr. Macfar-
land himself on the subject of the Nazi policies and prac-
tice as regards the churches. It would be hard to draft a
more scathing indictment of bad faith and broken prom-
ises. It gains the more force from the fact that Dr. Mac-
farland's friendship for Germany and admiration of the
German folk have been, even as far back as the World
War, the subject of intolerant criticism in this country;
he was charged with being "pro-German" when that was
a bitter wartime epithet. Half his lifetime Dr. Macfarland
has been student, traveler, sympathetic friend and inter-
preter in and of Germany; often he has lectured at the
University of Berlin. From the hand of no other Amer-
ican could come a denunciation more effective, of falsity
and brutality. And on German soil the Nazi regime has
succeeded in crystallizing against itself Catholic and
Protestant churches as well as Jews and all the liberal
political elements. Through the loudly advertised "unity
of the German people" open defiance is breaking. Prob-
ably it would be too much to call this increasing revolt
the beginning of Hitler's end; but the signs are ominous.
Germany is a deeply religious nation. According to the
last census there were 20,200,000 Catholics among her
people — more than a third of the population. Called upon
to choose between Hitler and their church — it is not hard
to foresee the answer.
THE BLOOD-BROTHERHOOD OF FASCISM AND NAZI-ISM FINDS
attestations afresh in warning to the Jews in Italy by
Mussolini's Milan newspaper, Popolo d'haha, that they
JULY 1937
must cease opposition to the German Nazi principle oi
"a pure Teutonic race," and all participation in the
Zionist movement. The paper intimates that there will be
no diminution in Mussolini's declared policy of justice
and friendship for the Jews; but the establishment of a
Jewish national homeland in Palestine under British
domination would be not only offensive to the Arabs
and Moslems toward whom he has been making eyes,
but contrary to "the Mediterranean spirit of Italy." Jews
in Italy must not exhibit "even theoretical sympathy with
problems and actions hostile to Italy, to the King and to
II Duce." They must conform or get out.
Meanwhile it is interesting to note that Italy, though
refusing to participate in any activities at Geneva
(ostensibly because Abyssinia still is recognized as a mem-
ber of the League of Nations) and professing great con-
tempt for the league, continues to pay its dues, having
forwarded its last quarterly instalment of 345,907 gold
francs. The best possible evidence of continuing mem-
bership. And by the way Japan, no longer a member of
the league, sent a voluntary contribution of nearly 50,000
gold francs, to help defray the expenses of certain tech-
nical committees with which the Japanese continue to
cooperate. Anchors to windward, these?
For the wall builders and restorers, seeking to immure
themselves and imprison their peoples behind these
barriers, know that they are in highly precarious posture.
Within their boundaries they multiply tyrannies; without
real bases of unity they exchange empty pledges and
compliments, neither having the slightest faith in the
other; frantically they seek by propaganda to gain the
faith and friendship of a world increasingly fearful of
them and hateful toward their policies and doings.
One of the extraordinary accompaniments of the civil
war in Spain — to a considerable extent a consequence of it
— is the greatly accelerated development of the coopera-
tive movement, especially in the government controlled
territory. The insurgent military command and the feudal
forces allied with it are naturally unfriendly toward any
evidences of self-reliance and self-sufficiency on the part
of the people. Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion the
movement was relatively feeble, but necessity of organ-
izing the food supply has compelled its strengthening.
Now behind the lines, almost within sound of the guns,
are vigorous cooperative societies of grape growers and
vintners, jute textiles and other enterprises. John Dos
Passos reports after living in villages near Madrid, in
Valencia and Catalonia, that fifty kilometers from the
front they are setting up new irrigation systems, experi-
menting with new pumps, trying new methods of agricul-
ture, alternating wheat and rice in the same season.
Everywhere one comes upon the remains of old walls,
built by forgotten men to emphasize divisions. The men
who built them are gone to dust; the reasons for building
them nobody remembers. Life has swept over them. These
"old-stone savages armed" who imagine that in the long
run they can hold great nations of well-intending people
apart and do their will upon them within areas artificially
delimited are seeking with feeble brooms to sweep back a
tide which throughout all time has drowned their
predecessors. Every permanent trend and tendency of
mankind conspires toward common purpose and friendly
interchange, not only of goods but of thought. As Robert
Frost says at the outset of the poem with which we began,
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
393
LIFE AND LETTERS
In Defense of Both Sides
by LEON WHIPPLE
THROUGH SOME SECRET QUOTA TREATY WITH THE STORK, EVERY
British baby is, as the acute W. S. Gilbert pointed out, born
to be either a little lib-er-al or a little con-serva-tive. In man-
hood the citizen finds that Parliament provides him not only
with His Majesty's Government, but also with His Majesty's
Opposition. The political sagacity of the English has elevated
the folk maxim — "There are two sides to every question"-
to the rank of a natural law; and their concern for freedom
of expression is rooted in the belief that both sides must be
discussed. In the United States, however, no eugenical
providence has arranged our genes to divide us into natural
political parties. We are born mugwumps. Our failure to
recognize the invaluable services of the opposition is a grave
defect in our democracy. In recent years this listening post
of literature has felt the profound need for the intelligent
presentation in print of the conservative view.
There are signs that the need is being recognized. The
Pulitzer prize for an editorial has recently been awarded to
the Baltimore Sun for an article by John Owens titled, The
Opposition. Its thesis is that intellectual opposition to Mr.
Roosevelt has simply ceased to exist because the Republican
party cannot muster brains enough to offer an intelligent
philosophy or program. That is a startling challenge. Mr.
Ogden Mills has just given a series of lectures on the future
of the Republican party before the New School for Social
Research in New York. That was a useful enterprise for both
participants. There is significance in the very title of a recent
book,* written avowedly for business men — In Defense of
Capitalism.
Now it has not been the habit of capitalism in the past
to take the defendant's chair; or to admit, as these authors
do, that there have been failures in the workings of the
American system. True, they believe that capitalism is not by
nature at fault, but that its failures are due to our ignorance
concerning its functioning. It is an ideal that has never been
achieved. It would work, they declare, if the defects of our
monetary system were remedied, and they offer very detailed
prescriptions as to the remedies needed. That seems to me to
be treating symptoms rather than causes, and a failure in real-
istic thinking on the deep forces at work in our continental
technological civilization. But at least here is a view presented
in open forum for debate, and a view not less interesting
because Mr. Cromwell is the husband of the former Doris
Duke.
OUR CRAVE NEED IS NOT FOR BETTER TECHNICAL DIALECTICS
from the conservatives, and still less for a fury of partisan
debate, but for an intelligent, and we hope literary, presenta-
tion of the philosophy of conservatism, and of the values the
honest conservative is so seriously concerned to protect. We
do not want any more of the spacious window dressing of
the hired public relations counsellor, or the synthetic prod-
ucts of ghost writers, or even the much better informed pieces
by bright young men who are beginning to exemplify a
kind of "careerism" on the conservative side. The careerist is
not convincing no matter how well trained his pen.
* IN DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM, by James H. R. I'rumwtll anil Hugo
K. Czerwonky. Si-riliiii-r. ,i7.i pp. I'rii'i- $.*.?» p'-tpaid of -Vnrtv.v iimphic.
I SEVEN YEARS' HARVEST, by Henry Seidel Canby. b'arrar & Kine-
hart. 310 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
The need will not be met satisfactorily by interpretations
of conservatism by liberals — fresh or tired — though that may
be the best we shall get. Henry Canby in a few pages called
Specifications for a Conservative Literature included among
those wise essays, Seven Years' Harvest,f says: "The trouble
with conservative literature has been that one had to be a
liberal to write it!" The liberal who swings to the Right
does so often from taste and temperament rather than from
inner conversion. He grows weary of the bombast and ig-
norance and stupidity of the extreme radical, and thinks
there is discipline and balance to be gained by a consideration
of the other side. He tells us what a liberal thinks a con-
servative ought to be, and that may confound us with a new
confusion.
IT MAY BE A FORLORN HOPE THAT WE CAN DISCOVER THE
natural conservative who can present his faith with conscience,
intellectual honesty and personal disinterestedness. What are
the omens? Mr. Canby believes that the curve of radical
literature is pretty well charted, and that the great change will
come, should come, in conservative literature. He says: "A
conservative, by definition, wishes to preserve or restore values
that he thinks are being sacrificed or destroyed." The essential
thing is the values he fights for. That we need the assertion
of values today is clear, and we need this, not because we are
fearful of change, but because as the English have learned,
progress is lopsided unless we consider the other side.
I venture the opinion that the principal impediment to the
creation of an intelligent and useful conservative literature is
spiritual. There is no lack of outlets of publication. The
newspapers in 1936 were eager enough to print the conserva-
tive view, but what they were offered was often so stupid and
futile that as the Sun editor points out it was not worth the
front page. Fortune, The American Mercury, the quality re-
views want to cover the other side, as a duty and as good busi-
ness. Nor would the conservative authors lack rewards. On
that side still to a considerable degree lie the honors and emol-
uments though perhaps not the readers. In our present fer-
ment the people seem more interested in the drama of experi-
ment than in the lessons of experience.
Certainly there is no lack of material whether for social
criticism or belles lettres. An author might find it hard going
to make drama or even sense out of the ignorant acquisitive-
ness of the die-hard for whom the only values worth conserv-
ing are himself and his privileges. Sloganeering and vitupera-
tion will not interest the creator with fire in his blood, but his
vision will find themes. One at present is the life of the late
John D. Rockefeller, for years archetype of the continental
monopolist, then the unparalleled donor of wealth for rea-
soned social purposes. What an enigma of debit and credit to
fix in cool words! Or in the field of analysis how useful it
would be for some honest conservative to offer a sensible
definition of the term "bureaucracy" — that empty epithet of
damnation. Yes, there is plenty of material for it has not been
touched in years. The pains and dangers of thinking were
not demanded of conservatives in this rich loose land.
But the spirit as ever governs. The impediment to fruitful
conservative thinking is the failure to recognize that this age,
right or wrong, has espoused the doctrine of change. We have
translated evolution into progress, and change has become
righteous. So, mysteriously, the burden of proof has been
shifted from the advocate of change to the advocate of the
status quo. For the present the conservatives are the perma-
nent minority. What is at issue is not change, but its rate
and direction. And precisely here is where the priceless ser-
394
vice of the conservative can be rendered. He can regulate the
tempo to a safe rate, and honor his title by conserving the
perdurable values ot human lite-.
To date he seems only to stand pat and die hard, appealing
to a Utopian past that never existed save in the nostalgias ot
certain prestige societies. He therefore falls into the two car-
dinal errors: he will not recognize that the experiments he
damns are not the inventions of dictatorial rogues, but the
often desperately delayed experiments to conform to the in-
exorable changes; and second, he offers no program of his
own. Here he has never learned the canny skill of the English
conservative at borrowing just enough of the liberal thunder
to keep his hold on power. Therefore, as at present, we have
only the bitter and sterile criticism of every proposal. We re-
fuse to believe that this is all the true conservatives of this
nation have to offer. We need their real gifts.
Men of talent will then arise to voice the conservative point
of view, for authors after all deal in things of the spirit. They
want a cause that enlists both heart and mind. They find no
sustenance or peace in window dressing for selfishness, or
shadow boxing with words, or defending concepts that the
very man in the street knows are no longer valid. That is why,
in recent years, to defend conservatism has not been fashion-
able or indeed respectable. That is why we hope for a new
interpretation of conservatism.
This essay is a plea' for human values. It is not concerned
with the Republican or Democratic party, or the administra-
tion, or capitalism, or any economic doctrine. We think of the
radio beacon that guides the aviator. If he swerves to left or
right, the signal warns him back on his course. We need the
conservative flash from our social beacon if we are to come
to a safe landing.
Twilight and Tempest
TWIUCHT OF A WORM), by Franz Wcrfel. Viking Press, 692 j)[J.
Price $3.
THE YEARS. l,y Virginia Woolf. Harcourt Brace. 435 pp. Price $2.50
LIGHT WOMAN, by Zona Gale. Appleton-Century. 221 pp. Price $2.
BY DAY AND BY NIGHT, by Johan Bojer. Appleton-Century. 314 pi..
Price $2.50.
TOGETHER AND APART, by Margaret Kennedy. Random House. 32-1
pp. Price $2.50.
THE GODS ARRIVE, by Grant I.ewi. I.ippincott. 472 pp. Price $2.5(1
CENTRAL STANDARD TIME by Harlan Hatcher. Farrar and Rinehan
314 pp. Price $2.50.
JORDANSTOWN, by Josephine Johnson. Simon & Schuster. 259 pp. Price
$2.
PEACE IS WHERE THE TEMPESTS BLOW, by Valentin" Kataev.
Farrar and Rinehart. 341 pp. Price $2.50.
Prices postpaid of Surrey Graphic.
"THE IMPERIAL IDEA! How MAKE ITS MEANING CLEAR TO
a reader remote from its scene?" Franz Werfel asks in the
brilliant and specious prologue to his eight short stories as-
sembled under the title," Twilight of a World. The stories
themselves provide the answer. They express, partly uncon-
sciously, the suave cruelty, the elegant perversion, the emi-
nently civilized injustice of the old Austrian empire, pre-
sided over by Franz Joseph, himself a symbol and a myth.
It is indeed a twilit world through which these characters
move, a world suddenly illumined by a Viennese sky at eve-
ning and as suddenly blown upon by a sharp November wind.
Hugo, the boy who lives in the eighteenth century stone
mansion on the boulevard, walks day after day on the ter-
raced slope of the old city wall with his nurse, and gradually
becomes aware of the suffering of the very poor; Fraulein
F.dith, the sage "housekeeper" of an ancient and honorable
brothel built by Charles IV, is suddenly called upon to turn
the Blue Room, hung with tapestries and mirrors, into a
funeral room for the degenerate host who died in his sleep;
Herr Fiala, once magnificent in braid and gilt as doorman
When THE LITERARY DIGEST says that
JOHN L.
LEWIS
"considers Morris Ernst's The Ultimate
Power is one of his reading 'musts,' " it
reflects the feeling of liberal readers and
thinkers everywhere.
THE
ULTIMATE
POWER
by Morris L Ernst
At all booksellers $3.00
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
TWO NEW BOOKS
of real social significance
WHAT IS
AHEAD OF US?
Six experts predict the future course of our
civilization; separate chapters by G. D. H. Cole,
Sidney Webb, Wickham Steed, Sir Arthur Salter
and Professors P. M. S. Blackett and Lancelot
Hogben. $2.00.
ANARCHY OR
HIERARCHY
by S. de Madariaga
An examination of various axioms, postulates and
practices of liberal democracy in relation to the
present social order ; and a plan for a new form
of democracy, $2.50.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK CITY
(In aniiveritlg advertisements pleiise mention SI'RVKV GRAPHIC;
395
to the Treasury, now struggles to secure a worthless insur-
ance policy for an epileptic son.
In his epilogue Werfel remarks, "Everything is meaning-
less which does not contribute to the world new blood, new
life, new reality. All that matters is this new reality." But it
is not a "new reality" which emerges from these subtle and
absorbing stories; it is, rather, a nostalgia for a civilization
whose twilight we cannot but believe was somewhat too
prolonged.
Essentially the same familiar world of outworn values and
wistful sympathies is evoked by Virginia Woolf in a novel
as beautiful as it is finally disappointing. What are the obser-
vations that we make on The Years as we float so serenely,
so ironically down the stream of time, with the Pargiter
family, with Rose and Edward, Eleanor and Morris? It is
1880. "It was an uncertain spring. ... In London umbrellas
were opened and then shut by people looking up at the sky."
It is 1908. A March wind blows against a dust cart and scat-
ters a litter of old envelopes, twists of hair, papers smudged
with print. It is 1914 and a brilliant spring. "In the country
old church clocks rasped out the hour."
But has Edward, whom we first see as a young student at
Oxford, sipping his wine and reading vEschylus aloud,
really changed or developed when we meet him years later
as a somewhat stranded elderly professor in the corner of
Delia's drawing room? Eleanor, drawing a line under the
family accounts in 1880 and musingly chewing her pen, is
the same "broody" Eleanor who beams so kindly on her
assembled brothers and sisters at the final party in 1917,
older certainly, but no more experienced. North, the nephew
home from Africa, feels the aimlessness of this strange voy-
age of his elders. "To live differently . . . differently," are
the only words he can find as he looks questioningly at his
uncles and aunts. They have stayed too long at the party.
"It's time to go," said Delia, crossing the room and opening
a window. "The dawn!" she exclaimed dramatically as the
morning light gleamed on soiled plates and empty wine
glasses. "And there against the window, gathered in a group
were the old brothers and sisters" who had lifted their glasses
and drunk "to the New World," and smilingly wondered
what they meant.
It is in this same "twilight of a world" that Zona Gale,
Johan Bojer, and Margaret Kennedy are spinning their some-
what tenuous tales. In Light Woman, Zona Gale tries to con-
vince us that Mitty is at once completely irresponsible and
completely innocent — the result is simply unreal. In By Day
and By Night, Bojer sets his hero, a millionaire inventor of
machine guns haunted by the faces of dead soldiers, on a
spiritual quest for Christ, which ends, as one might expect,
in suicide. In Together and Apart, Margaret Kennedy deftly
twists and tangles the feelings of Alec and Betsy, who,
though divorced and remarried, never cease to love each
other. But one knows all the time that the luxury of such
intricate feelings is only for those who have money and
leisure. As one of their children observes, "There's nothing
for a young man in a civilized country to do but sit and
watch the ship go down and everybody is sick of it."
It is something of a relief to turn to two sturdy tales of
young men in civilized countries who do not intend to sit
and watch the ship go down. Grant Lewi (The Gods Ar-
rive) and Harlan Hatcher (Central Standard Time) have
no interest in twilit worlds; in the broad light of day they
attempt to cope with "American life and American business"
of the last ten years. Their method is "realism," their views
are "liberal"; they are not wholly successful because they
themselves are a part of the hocus-pocus of contemporary
talk. There is, however, honesty and fresh vigor in these
attempts to understand what is happening to our society.
Josephine Johnson's passionately conceived novel, Jordans-
town, comes nearer to the "new reality" one is always hoping
to find in current novels. At the death of his bankrupt father,
Allen Craig takes his small inheritance and buys a news-
paper in which he hopes to defend the poor and the abused
in his small midwestern industrial town. His efforts bring
him only hunger, loneliness and, finally, the death of his
friend, Dave. One is left with the picture of a miserable group
gathered around Dave's grave on a cold December afternoon.
Something of the inner despair and latent glory involved in
the struggle for social justice breaks through the author's
mannered and expressionistic prose, though one cannot but
realize that her grasp of the underlying labor question is
slight.
If Josephine Johnson's vision of reality is wavering and in-
secure, Valentine Kataev's is as direct and fresh as the eyes
of the two Odessa boys through which his story is seen. His
enchanting tale, Peace Is Where the Tempests Blow, gives
one assurance that here in this novel of Soviet Russia at
least, is the "new blood, new life, new reality," which Wer-
fel was seeking in vain. Petya, the son of a kindly, near-
sighted school teacher, is returning to Odessa from his
summer holiday in the fateful year, 1905. Quite unconscious-
ly he assists in the escape of a mutinous sailor from the
famous ship, Potemkin. Gavril and his grandfather, a fisher-
man, who live on the edge of the Black Sea, later hide the
sailor in their miserable hut. The two boys thus become
involved in one of the early and tragic chapters of the Rus-
sian Revolution. But they are quite as interested in swimming
in the sea, in gazing at the rustling pile of lobsters in the
market place, in losing themselves in the back streets of
Odessa, as they are in their mysterious sailor, who periodical-
ly turns up in the story with a grin and a wink. The little
sail of the grandfather's wherry, "as light and airy as a sea
gull," becomes the symbol of this story around which strange
storms blow.
His track is luminously azure
His sky is molten gold aglow . . .
Yet only storms are his pleasure
His peace is where the tempests blow.
A peace, one concludes, to be preferred to that of the deca-
dent Austrian empire, seen in twilight colors.
Rutgers University CLARA MARBURG
What Is Education?
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA, by Robert Maynard Hutchins.
Yale University Press. 119 pp. Price $2 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
PRESIDENT HUTCHINS' BOOK is READABLE, AMUSING AND HERE
and there soundly pungent, but in the end merely fantastic.
The first two chapters, dealing with the external conditions
in which the higher learning in America is set and with "the
dilemmas of the higher learning," contain a number of
worthwhile jibes at a variety of abuses and absurdities with
which our colleges and universities are afflicted, including the
mania for numbers, the credit-hour system, degree-hunting,
excessive departmentalization, and the like.
But the great abuse and absurdity,*it appears, is "vocational-
ism," that is, our endeavor to prepare students for medicine,
law and engineering, and even for such occupations as "jour-
nalism, business, librarianship, social service, education . . .
and public administration," to cite part of a long list presented
with hearty disapprobation. Associated with this major evil
of vocationalism is our tendency to deal extensively with mere
facts, as distinguished from "first principles," and particu-
larly to deal with current practice in the various vocations
and with "current events" in society. All these things, it
seems, are works of the Devil, at least when they intrude
upon the higher learning and are brought to the attention
of youth.
And how does President Hutchins propose to cure these
evils? Virtually by reestablishing, so far as practicable, the
curriculum of the Middle Ages. He suggests a secondary
school for the age period, seventeen to twenty, devoted ex-
396
clusively to the subjects of the medieval trivium (grammar,
rhetoric, and logic), plus arithmetic and geometry from the
quadrivium (the other two quadrivial subjects, music and
astronomy, are overlooked; perhaps with their modern con-
tent they would not be sufficiently formal), plus the reading
of "books which have through the centuries attained to the
dimensions of classics" (illustrated by mention of Plato, Aris-
totle, Cicero, Milton, Galileo, Adam Smith and Newton's
Pnncipia). This program is proposed for all the young men
and women of the nation.
President Hutchins has heard of individual differences.
Once at least he refers to them by name, and they bother
him just a little. But his nonchalant answer is that the edu-
cation he proposes "is the kind that everybody should have,"
and that we must "find out how to give it to those whom we
do not know how to teach at present."
But if President Hutchins is slightly troubled about in-
dividual differences, his simple faith in formal discipline has
never been disturbed. He repeatedly affirms that badly dam-
aged dogma in its most naive forms: "Grammar disciplines
the mind and develops the logical faculty. . . ." "Correctness
in thinking may be more directly and impressively taught
through mathematics than in any other way," and so forth.
From the above-mentioned "permanent subjects" of "gen-
eral education" selected youth would proceed to a three-year
university program centered in metaphysics, "the science of
first principles," which is reluctantly accepted as a necessary
modern substitute for the medieval theology. With meta-
physics in the university would be associated "the social
sciences" and "natural science"; but the two last-named
branches are to be studied only deductively. "The study would
not proceed from the most recent observations back to first
principles but from first principles to whatever recent obser-
vations were significant in understanding them."
Thus the scientific method is to be ejected from the edu-
cational process along with individual differences, and the
whole university program, as well as the whole secondary
program, is to be devoted to formal discipline.
Meanwhile all research (or at least all research which con-
cerns itself with facts as distinguished from "first principles")
and all professional education are summarily assigned to a
series of "institutes," which must be separate from the uni-
versity, although apparently some geographical proximity
might be tolerated.
Of course President Hutchins has a truth by the tail. Our
modern life and modern education are chaotic for lack of a
philosophy. We shall not have harmony or even efficiency in
either until we achieve a new synthesis. President Hutchins
appears to suppose that there is some ancient synthesis which
would serve today and which need only be resurrected and
taught to the people. What is that ancient synthesis, so un-
wisely overlooked? Deponent sayeth not; but one is led to
infer that it may be derived from Aristotle and Aquinas.
It may be added that it seems unfortunate to have taken
over in full the title of Thorstein Veblen's much more pro-
found book, published only nine years ago.
Dean, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa. MAX McCoNN
The Supreme Court at the Breakfast Table
THE SUPREME COURT, INDEPENDENT OR CONTROLLED, by
Walter Lippmann. Harper. 56 pp. Price 50 cents direct of publisher.
THE SUPREME COURT ISSUE AND THE CONSTITUTION, COM-
MENTS PRO AND CON BY DISTINGUISHED MEN, by W. R. Barnes and A.
W. Littlefield. Barnes and Noble. 149 pp. Price $1 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
FOR THOSE WHO WOULD KEEP THEIR WALTER LlPPMANN WITH
them longer than their breakfast coffee, this little pamphlet
reprints in convenient form his series of Herald-Tribune
articles on the judicial struggle. The first of the series ap-
peared before the President's proposal was made public, and
the others cover the period from the publication of the pro-
(In answering advertisements plea
397
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posal through the early hearings of the Senate Judiciary Com-
mittee and include comment on some of the testimony there.
Lippmann expresses very clearly his fears that the proposal
will destroy the independence of the judiciary, and makes a
good case for his ideas concerning amendments. He pro-
poses that if an act of Congress is held unconstitutional by a
vote of less than seven to two justices of the Supreme Court,
the act is to be submitted to specially elected conventions in
each state to decide in that case what they wish the Constitu-
tion to mean. His suggestion, combining the revised Wheel-
er-Bone plan with the Norris idea, is well worth further ex-
ploration.
MANY PROPONENTS AND OPPONENTS OF THE PRESIDENT'S RE-
cent proposals for judicial reform realize that action by the
present Congress and even by the present President settles
nothing permanently. In the realization that discussion of
the powers of the judiciary may be a perennial subject for
discussion, the editors of the second volume have attempted to
give an impartial compilation of outstanding views on this
subject. The difficulty with the book is that many of the
views included are so unimportant and so ephemeral that
they will contribute little to any long range discussion of the
position and organization of the federal courts.
Barnard College JANE PERRY CLARK
The TVA Seen Through French Eyes
A FOREIGNER LOOKS AT THE TVA. by Odette' Keun. Longmans,
Green. 89 pp. Price $1.25 postpaid of Surrey Graphic.
FOR FOUR YEARS NOW, TVA DIRECTORS HAVE BEEN MAKING
speeches and writing articles about the TVA; publicity men
have been issuing news releases, circulating moving pictures
and conducting tours of the Tennessee Valley; this in an
earnest effort to make America understand what the TVA
is all about.
For the most part, it must be admitted that their efforts
have fallen on barren ground. The Average American
thinks of the TVA little, if at all. When he does, he is apt
to think of it only as an arena for the noisy combat between
advocates of public and private ownership.
So now, ironically enough, it remains for a Frenchwoman
to come to America, read all the speeches, articles and news
releases, visit all the dams — and then give us the most com-
plete popular interpretation of the TVA which has yet been
written. Perhaps it is a sign that America is still coming of
age.
Mme. Keun's style is as extraordinary as her personality.
The serious-minded may resent having economic discussion
presented with quite so much animation. Yet any approach
to TVA must be emotional as well as intellectual. Because she
is a woman and a Latin, Mme. Keun writes passionately of
the TVA and its battle against poverty and exploitation.
Having been brought up, like all Europeans, to love and
respect the land, she has an almost physical feeling of hurt
at seeing a country once beautiful now "slashed and gashed
and scarred and broken by erosion, barren through incessant
exploitation, dishevelled, miserable, and abandoned in des-
pair." Americans, who are apt to be stolid and indifferent
about such things, would do well to catch some of Mme.
Keun's fiery intensity.
San Francisco, Calif. WILLIAM I. NICHOLS
Prices and Stability
PRICES IN RECESSION AND RECOVERY: A SURVEY OF RECENT
CHANGES, by Frederick C. Mills. National Bureau of Economic Research.
581 pp. Price $4 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
BENEATH THE FAMILIAR STATISTICAL DRESS FAVORED BY THE
National Bureau of Economic Research, a dress repellant to
certain types of mind in spite of its obvious usefulness, there
is to be found in this book a problem of "high social con-
cern," as Professor Mills himself would put it. The author
has tried to find out which Americans, come good weather
come bad, have received the benefits of our higher produc-
tivity and declining real costs. With the aid of his price fig-
ures he has succeeded, and the conclusions are disturbing.
From 1899 to 1914 gains in productivity were passed along to
consumers. Since then, through the boom period and the
recession, the benefits of higher productivity and declining
real costs have gone largely to the producing groups: the
wage earners, the owners and the managers.
Those for whom the welfare of the whole body of con-
sumers is a matter of prime concern will realize the nature
and intricacy of the problem to be tackled. "From a social
point of view it is desirable that gains in productivity should
bring a larger output, with advanced living standards for
consumers at large, rather than special advantages for some,
coexisting with idleness of important productive resources."
What can be done under the existing economic organization,
against which Professor Mills apparently does not struggle?
Lower prices would help to diffuse the gains, but our sys-
tem is so complicated that prices are often far beyond the
control of manufacturers several stages removed from the
final market. In the end Professor Mills leaves the precise
tactics to the persons involved. For the time being he has
limited himself to laying down the lines of strategy.
Professor Mills' own foreword, emphasizing the limits of
the work, is too modest. The Committee on Recent Economic
Changes appraises the volume more fairly in its introductory
note saying that "it makes available to the producer, the fab-
ricator, the distributor, the consumer, the economist, the
leaders of labor, and the agencies of government, a factual
basis for a more intelligent attack on the fundamental prob-
lem of economic stability."
Mount Holyot(e College ALZADA COMSTOCK
Red Russia After Twenty Years
THE SOVIETS, by Albert Rhys Williams. Harcourt Brace. 554 pp. Price
$3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
RETURN FROM THE U.S.S.R., by Andre Gide. Knopf. 94 pp. Price
$1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
FEW AMERICANS KNOW THE SOVIET UNION AS INTIMATELY AS
Albert Rhys Williams, and none are more qualified to write
a much needed comprehensive book covering all aspects of
Soviet life. The arrangement of the volumes suggests its dif-
ferences from the Webbs' monumental work, or any other
that has gone before it. For the sake of simplicity and con-
venience in dealing with such a complex subject, Mr. Wil
liams has employed the question and answer technique. A>
a result, he is able to cover a much wider area than would be
possible with the conventional chapter arrangement. He has
managed to present his material so simply and vividly that
no one any longer has an excuse for not being well informed
about the most spectacular experiment of the modern day.
Mr. Williams does not waste pages trying to evaluate the
Soviet system. The book is in no sense propaganda for or
against the present government. It sets down the facts in as
nearly objective fashion as possible with a subject as contro-
versial as present-day Russia. In dealing with housing, for
example, the author admits that conditions are extremely bad
and gives details to prove it. But he also sets forth the un-
deniable fact that, bad as they are, housing conditions are
much better than they were under the old regime.
As a guide to the new Russia, Mr. Williams' volume is
especially valuable in that it is completely up-to-date. In a
country where conditions change as rapidly as in the Soviet
Union, this is extremely important. References are to be found
to the third Five- Year Plan, to the political changes brought
about by the new constitution, and to the most recent revisions
in social insurance regulations. Yet at the same time the book
is unusually rich in anecdotes and stories regarding the old
Russia, material that could only be obtained by long residence
and intimate knowledge of the country. For one who only has
393
time to read one book on the Soviet Union, or one who wishes
a well-rounded library on the subject, The Soviets must un-
questionably be put first on one's list.
M. Gide's little book has provoked more controversy than
anything which has recently been published on the Soviet
Union. It is brilliantly written, sensitive, and in some respects
amazingly penetrating for one who has visited Russia so
briefly. There is perhaps no place else in current literature
where the spirit of the common people, the joyousness of
Soviet youth, and the essential humanity of the workers are
more poignantly reflected. Yet these sections are offset by
amazing statements such as: "What strikes one first (regard-
ing the people of Moscow) is their extraordinary indolence."
Gide is particularly concerned, as is perhaps natural for a
Frenchman, about the uniformity of thought and lack of
individuality which he finds. But in expressing this concern
he very clearly overstates the amount of such standardization
which exists. (One wonders what Gide's reaction to the prod-
ucts of America's school system would be on this score.)
Nevertheless, it is a thorougly honest, sincere piece of writing,
and reflects the mental conflict which any individualist, who
is at the same time an idealist, must pass through in a visit to
the new Russia.
New Yor/{ MAXWELL S. STEWART
Minneapolis — Picture of a City
AMERICAN CITY, by Charles Rumford Walker. Farrar and Rinehart.
278 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE SURVEY GRAPHIC IN THREE RECENT ISSUES CARRIED A
series of articles by Charles Rumford Walker on Minnesota
and particularly the Minneapolis labor situation. These
articles whetted the appetite for the book which all knew
must follow.
American City is no disappointment. Throughout it there
breathes that quality of vital description and analysis which
makes good reading. It also presents a faithful portrayal of
those basic organizing drives in people engaged in action and
pursuing their ends with vigor, courage and determination.
The drama of these people, faced by a great crisis, but un-
yielding in the matter of compromise with their dominating
and governing philosophies, constitutes the real core of the
book. There is a common factor which is present in the
behavior of all the principal characters involved. None of
them thought that the teamsters' strike of 1934 was a tea
party which could be handled by oily words or skillful
maneuvering of people. All knew the situation for exactly
what it was — a war.
Mr. Walker, throughout the first part of his book, method-
ically assembles the data, economic, historical and psycholog-
ical, needed for the understanding of the terrific clash
between the employers, whose army of tacticians were the
members of the Citizens' Alliance, and the militant labor
forces represented by the leaders of "General Drivers Union,
Local 574."
Mr. Walker writes from a pro-labor point of view. His
assemblage of facts is imposing and his method of treating
those facts is characterized by a sense of true dramatic value
as well as fair-mindedness. Rather than bias, one gathers
from time to time throughout the book the impression that
the same historical facts which had played such a significant
part in the philosophical synthesis of the leaders of Local 574
were operating with the author and giving him a like "set."
American City gives more than a historical picture; it
even ventures prediction. Some of those prophecies have al-
ready been fulfilled. Labor history in Minnesota, subsequent
to 1934, shows definite gains; and even those opposing
forces, such as the Citizens' Alliance, have changed not only
their forms of organization but, what is more important,
their tactics.
Commissioner of Education
St. Paul, Minn. JOHN G. ROCKWELL
(In answering advertisements please
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Laboratory Tests for Marriage
by A. FREDERICK MIGNONE
A NEW PROVISION OF THE CONNECTICUT MARRIAGE LAW
requires all prospective brides and grooms to submit to a
Wassermann, or Kahn, or other similar standard laboratory
blood test, before a license to wed will be granted. A physi-
cian's statement must certify that neither is infected with
syphilis or in a stage of that disease that may become com-
municable. The statement must be accompanied by the rec-
ord of the testing laboratory including the exact name of the
applicant. The test must be made not more than forty days
before the issuance of the marriage license. If more than
forty days have elapsed, the test is invalid.
This Connecticut law is but a step forward in combating
the scourge of syphilis. There is still some resentment against
bringing the problem out into the open, as if it were an
infringement against the individual's right of personal lib-
erty to ask him to submit to the test for the sake of his
family's future. Some couples contemplating marriage and not
considering themselves duty-bound to find out whether their
physical condition warrants taking such an important step,
skip over the line to neighboring states. Carmel, N. Y., did
a land office business in licenses and marriages during the
early months of the Connecticut law. New York State
requires only an affidavit that applicants are, to the best of
their knowledge, free of venereal disease. The law does not
deter certain offenders from perjuring themselves.
The fact that syphilitics may, and in many instances will,
proceed to get married in another state where no real restric-
tion exists, shows the obvious difficulties confronting the pro-
gressive Connecticut law. Nevertheless, the trend is in the
direction of the Connecticut law. In a recent poll by the
American Institute of Public Opinion 92 percent of the thou-
sands of persons questioned favored compulsory pre-nuptial
tests. And several states, including Illinois, have made the
Connecticut statute their model for proposed legislation.
In April an examination of the marriage laws in the states
revealed an almost unbelievable heterogeneity — states' rights
with a vengeance! In eleven states the marriage laws have no
eugenics aspect. In seventeen other states, although the mar-
riage laws contain various eugenic restrictions, such as pro-
hibiting marriages where one or both of the parties are
epileptic, insane or imbeciles, they make no provisions cov-
ering venereal diseases. In twenty other states the marriage
laws contain some provision relating to venereal disease, al-
though there is a wide divergency among the provisions.
The new Connecticut blood test requirement is much more
far-reaching than the marriage laws of any other state. The
Wisconsin law of this type, enacted in 1913, applied only To the
male. It also provided that the doctor's maximum examina-
tion fee should be $3. This law created considerable con-
fusion and met with much opposition from the medical pro-
fession. The law made no provision for free laboratory tests
and the doctors felt they could not possibly fulfill the re-
quirements of the law for the fee of $3 provided. The con-
stitutionality of the law was assailed and a test action was
brought to the Supreme Court which upheld it by a three-
to-two decision. At the next session of the Wisconsin legisla-
ture in 1915 an amended bill was finally passed, providing
for clinical and laboratory tests for the male applicant only
when in the discretion of the physician he believed such
tests necessary; otherwise it called for just a "thorough ex-
amination." The law provided for free laboratory service
by the state — which cured an important deficiency in the
1913 law — -but reduced the maximum physician's fee to $2.
This law with a minor change providing for examination by
out-of-state physicians for out-of-state applicants remains in
effect, despite criticism and numerous attempts to change it.
Fred S. Hall of the Russell Sage Foundation made an ex-
haustive study and analysis of the working of this Wisconsin
law (the results of which were published in 1925 under the
title, Medical Certification for Marriage). He pointed out
that it was not surprising to find many defects in the pro-
visions and operation of this pioneer Wisconsin marriage
eugenics law. To begin with, the law required an examination
only of the prospective groom. Furthermore, it provided for
a recognized laboratory test only in the discretion of the
physician. It is questionable how far the requirement of a
"thorough examination" is carried out by physicians, espe-
cially since the law sets a maximum fee of $2.
The State Board of Health has no general authority or
practical check on the working of the law, and the free
laboratory service provided by the board does not seem to be
utilized to full advantage. Another criticism is that a strict
adherence to the provision of the law that the applicant must
be found "free from all acquired venereal diseases" appar-
ently would shut out the case where the applicant has the
disease in a non-communicable state.
The Connecticut law offers the best practicable check so
far in preventing the marriage of syphilitics. The human
element is reduced to a minimum, because all applicants,
male and female, must submit to a blood test. It reduces the
possibility of snap judgments or indifference on the part
of physicians. If a physician receives a laboratory test indicat-
ing a definite positive reaction showing the presence of the
infection, he cannot in honesty sign the blood certificate
attesting that the applicant is free of disease entirely or in
any communicable stage. It goes without saying that the
efficacy of the law depends to a very great extent on the in-
tegrity of the medical body throughout the state in admin
istering it. In addition, since copies of all marriage records
must be sent to the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the State
Health Department, a continuous check can be made at all
times to trace violations of the law. Although exact figures
from the State Health Department are not available, it is
known that the tests during the first year the law has been in
effect have revealed quite a number of cases where infection
was found to exist. In some of these cases it is fair to assume
that had it not been for such tests the person infected would
not have become aware of his condition.
There are undoubtedly defects in the Connecticut law.
For example, although application for the marriage license
must be made within forty days from the date of the blood
certificate, yet once the license to wed is obtained there is
no restriction on the length of time within which it must be
used. In order to be consistent with the evident purpose of the
law, it would seem imperative that a time limitation be
placed on the validity of the marriage license. Another source
of friction has been the fact that out-of-state applicants as
well as those in Connecticut must have their blood tests
made by a Connecticut licensed physician and a Connecticut
laboratory. This has made it very burdensome for certain
out-of-state applicants who find it difficult to come to Con-
necticut for the test in advance of their wedding day. It
would seem reasonable to expect eventually some method of
reciprocity in recognizing tests made by other state health
department laboratories, or recognized private laboratories.
Meanwhile, if we are to stamp out syphilis, other states will
have to be urged to similar marriage legislation. Connecticut
has set an example showing that it can be done.
400
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
CALENDAR FOR 1937-1938
Fall Quarter October 1 - December 23
Application date, July 28
Winter Quarter January 3 - March 23
Application date, November 3
Spring Quarter March 28 - June 18
Application date, January 26
Summer Quarter June 20 - August 31
Term A June 20 - July 26
Application date, April 20
Term B July 27 - August 31
Application date, May 26
Catalogues will be mailed upon request.
122 EAST TWENTY-SECOND STREET
New York, N. Y.
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Academic Year 1937 - 1938
ADVANCED CURRICULUM
Supervision of Social Case Work
Teaching of Social Case Work
Psychological Treatment of Children
GRADUATE DEPARTMENT
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
EXTENSION DEPARTMENT
Courses in Residence
Extramural Courses
Fall semester begins September 29. Catalog on request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Offers the Following Seminars:
I Application of Mental Hygiene to Present Day Problems
in Case Work with Families. Miss Grace Marcus and
Dr. Evelyn Alpern. July 12-24.
II Application of Depth Psychology to Social Case Work.
Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder and Miss Beatrice H. Wajdyk.
July 26-August 1. Registration now complete.
Ill The Supervisor in Public Welfare. Mr. Glenn Jackson
and Miss Mary Whitehead. August 9-21.
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for June, 1937
The Home Situations of the Children in a Preprimary
School : A Study for Visiting Teachers
Virginia Wallis Bowers
Factors Influencing the Amenability of Mothers and
Children to Treatment in a Child Guidance Clinic
Pearl Kotzen Lodgen
The Work of a Family Agency with Clients Receiving
Public Relief Lois Shattuck Parsons
Published Quarterly 75 cents a copy; $2.00 a year
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an Intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to th«
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from *
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
SUMMER SESSION
1937
JUNE 21 - AUGUST 14
The following are among the Courses offered:
Dramatics and Personality Development
Recreational Therapy
Family Case Work
Psychiatry for Social Workers
Publicity for Social Work
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
Division of Social Work
Chicago Avenue Chicago, 111.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
401
AMERICAN NOTES
Transient
by ALFRED FRIENDLY
"WHICH is OSCAR?" I ASKED A CROUP OF MEN LOUNGING
around the dormitory.
"That's me."
The owner of the voice was a little man of about fifty,
overall-clad, sitting on an upturned fruit crate at the far end
of the room.
"I'm supposed to work for you while I'm here," I said
as I walked over to him. "Here's the card Frenchy gave
me in the front office."
Oscar took my card and examined it with the dignity en-
titled him by his position — charge d'affaires of the main dor-
mitory of the government transient shelter.
"OK, son," he said genially. "The main job here is mak-
ing beds. I'll show you how."
He got off his box and demonstrated, taking pains to make
clear to me the importance of folding the sheets and placing
the pillows in such a way that a man standing at one end
of the room, looking down the row of double-decked iron
cots, would see each sheet turned back and each pillow lying
on the same line.
There were four rows of about fifteen bedsteads each. Two
beds to a stead, that would make about 120 beds, I figured.
I fell to on one row, Oscar began work on the next one.
The job was not too appetizing. Although clean sheets
were supplied to each new transient, and were changed once
a week, the knights of the road who used this particular one
of the chain of Harry Hopkins' Hostelries were not overly
fastidious in matters of personal cleanliness, especially about
the feet. I worked as fast as I could to be done with the
unpleasant task.
My speed was a mistake. Oscar saw I was making such
good time that he could afford to return to his box and
devote himself solely to the arduous task of supervision.
"You've caught on to this job faster than any transient
stiff I ever broke in before," he told me, with fatherly pride.
"Some of these bums just can't learn." He cast a deprecating
look at two elderly dodderers who were also detailed to
dormitory work, but who were taking an interminable time
over each bed.
IN AN HOUR AND A HALF WE HAD FINISHED OUR WORK. MY
two colleagues disappeared, but I reported back to Oscar.
"What's next, Chief?" I asked.
Oscar was visibly embarrassed. In theory, he and his crew,
as everyone else in the shelter, were supposed to put in
twenty-six hours of work each week in return for the food,
lodging and 50 cents which the government granted. There
was not that much work to be done in the dormitory but
Oscar had never before been put in the position of being
pressed by one of his subordinates for more employment.
He cogitated some time and finally hit upon the idea of
setting me to work washing windows.
After an hour of that I caught on, and came back to
Oscar's fruit-box throne.
I said, "That ought to be about enough for the day, hadn't
it, Chief?"
He beamed. I dragged up another box beside his and sat
down. Oscar was pleased to talk about himself.
His story came out in a tumble of simple words. With
deviations of place and occupation it followed the pattern of
the histories of most other residents in the shelter.
Oscar was born in Illinois, less than a hundred miles from
the old Marine hospital, converted now into a haven for wan-
dering homeless men, which sheltered him. Until 1923 he
had been a coal miner. Then came the disastrous Herrin
strike.
"That was one helluva thing," said Oscar. "Every man
had a gun and we had them operators so damn scared that
not one ounce of coal came off the tipples. The operators
tried to get the sheriff to protect their scabs, but he was all
for us. When they got the militia out half of the kids was
scared to fight and the rest was on our side and wouldn't.
Finally they armed the scabs, and there was plenty of bloody
days. Two of our boys got killed, but we done in forty-
eight of them. After it was all over, ten of us was to stand
trial. I was ninth man on the list, but they only tried eight.
I was plenty lucky."
HE WAS NOT LUCKY ENOUGH TO GET BACK IN THE MINES,
however. Too prominent in the union to escape the black-
list, his attempts to go back to the work he knew were
futile. After a time he gave up the fight and crossed the river
into Missouri. There he made a precarious living as flour-
miller, boiler fireman, street railway repair man. Then came
the depression, and his living even more hand to mouth.
"I couldn't get no job, and I can't now. They got a ma-
chine for everything I learned how to do. They go too fast
for me. The bosses want somebody quick and young. My
fingers are too stiff. Hell, even if I did get a job I couldn't
hold it. They'd cull me in no time. I'm burned out."
He seemed frightened at the thought he had conjured up
for himself. Then suddenly his melancholy was gone and he
was almost gay.
"I had a hard time since 1931, but when the government
opened up these things," his gesture included the four build-
ings of the shelter, "things was different. A man could get
three squares again and a roof over his head. Of course some
of these camps ain't no good, like the one across the river in
Poplar Bluffs, where they sleep niggers in the same room as
whites. But take this one now. This is the best home I ever
had. I been here ten months and I aim to stay."
But again a cloud came over his face. His voice dropped to
a near whisper and he grabbed me by the arm. He spoke
no longer as a genial superior to his employe, but as one
desperate man to another.
"This thing ain't going to last, though. They're going to
throw us out one of these days. They're opening up these
old barracks, and the new camps they build, like the one
over to Ullin, all have a drill ground in front of 'em. They're
building 'em for war. And then they're going to throw us-
out on the road."
Anyone who knew what the symptoms indicated — which
I did not, at that time — could have diagnosed Oscar's disease
as shelter fever, as solace in security, fear lest that security be
snatched away.
When he continued his voice was almost a wail.
"There won't be no living for us on the outside. When
the time comes when they start to put us out, then we all
got to stick together, partner, everybody's got to stick to-
gether!"
His hand was clenched around my arm. In his eyes there
was a horrible nameless terror.
Gleanings from a young American's wander-year — First of a series.
402
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position in Institution. Long years experience.
Excellent references. 7446 Survey.
ROOM FOR RENT
At 52 Gramercy Park North. Double room and
bath overlooking the Park to sublet. Un-
furnished $60 a month ; furnished $70 a month.
Rate includes maid service and telephone. For
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FOR PARENTS ONLY
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ALgonquin 4-5730.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA FOR SALE
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Price $49.00 cash.
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CLOTH, 205 pages, $2.00
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403
(Continued from page 359)
ter, Mr. Mathewson has been an industrial
executive and personnel manager, as well as
a regional director of the National Labor
Relations Board (1934-35). His article was
adapted from his challenging address to the
National Federation of Settlements at Bloom-
ington, Ind., in May. (Page 388)
LAST JULY IN Survey Graphic AND Reader's
Digest, Surgeon General Parran launched a
far flung national campaign to stamp out
syphilis, the next great plague to go. In ad-
dition to his book (which Reynal and
Hitchcock will publish in July) on the until
recently almost unmentionable disease. Dr.
Parran is preparing an article for us on the
social hygiene demonstrations that have been
undertaken in the South. Meanwhile, the
Connecticut marriage law requiring pre-
nuptial tests for both bride and groom
dramatizes a development which other states,
notably Illinois, are beginning to copy. The
first year of the Conneticut law is appraised
(page 400) in a brief article by A. Frederick
Mignone, New Haven attorney.
WELL NAMED is ALFRED FRIENDLY, WHO
indulged his wanderlust last year after get-
ting out of college, and dropped in on folks
about the country. The first of his sheaf of
sketches appears on page 402.
Survival of the Fittest
FEW VISITORS TO OUR OFFICE HAVE A
greater fund of anecdotes than William Jay
Schieffelin, who writes about P.R. in this
issue. One amusing story which he brought
to the office along with his manuscript
described a dinner at which Theodore
Roosevelt, then Civil Service commissioner,
was addressing the National Civil Service
Association.
Speaking of the practical examinations he
had introduced to select customs inspectors
along the Rio Grande, Theodore Roosevelt
explained that they had to know how to
ride and to shoot. So candidates for the job,
said the rough riding Civil Service com-
missioner, were graded on records made
firing at a target which they passed at a
gallop on horseback. At the conclusion of this
exposition on he-man civil service exams,
Charles Joseph Bonaparte, then president of
the Civil Service Association, asked wryly,
"But would it not have been more effective
if you had had them shoot at each other?"
The British Tradition
B. SEEBOHM ROWNTREE, THE ENGLISH
industrialist and social scientist whose book,
The Human Needs of Labor, has recently
been published by Longmans Green, states in
a recent letter that, since his retirement as
director of the famous cocoa works, he is so
busy that he cannot even find time for some
of his favorite recreations. A staff of in-
vestigators is working under his direction
to prepare a new edition of Poverty — a
forerunner thirty years ago among social
surveys. He is also, in association with Lord
Astor and others, working on a study of the
part which agriculture should play in the
economy of an industrial country like Eng-
land. And he is planning a book about the
social philosophy embodied in the industrial
management methods of his own company.
All this is in addition to Mr. Rowntree's
part in the administration of the trust re-
cently established by Lord Nuffield (English
automobile magnate) to rehabilitate the
depressed areas of Wales, a task involving
social planning on a comprehensive scale.
On Discovering America
SELDOM HAS AN ARTICLE MET WITH SUCH
an enthusiastic response as On Discovering
America by Pearl S. Buck, in our June
issue. One reader telephoned the office to
say that he hadn't read anything so thrilling
since The Message to Garcia. Another friend
promptly ordered reprints of it made for
wide distribution ; newspapers quoted widely
from it, and Reader's Digest reprinted it.
In our next issue we hope to have space to
print some of the correspondence received
about the article, including a letter from
Richards M. Bradley of Boston, in which
he expresses the opinion that our contro-
versies and conflicts are not so bitter, or
their sources so deep, as in the countries
occupied by so-called homogeneous peoples.
Christian Faith
To THE EDITOR: THE REVIEW OF MY ON
Journey in the May Surrey Graphic is so
kind that it humbles me. At the same time
it moves me to vigorous protest. I don't
like to have it said that I have "stepped
aside" from "the conflict" and have taken to
religion as an escape. On the contrary, were
it not for my religion 1 should have stepped
aside long ago. As it is, one does what one
can. At seventy-five, one can not rush around
promoting revolution; but of the sixty-odd
reform societies to which I belong, including
the Socialist party, those farthest to the
Left get the most money (not that there is
much money for anyone). I obediently pepper
the President and Senators and Congress
with letters and telegrams at the behest of
groups on the firing line; and whatever I
write has behind it the demand for a class-
less society in which private ownership shall
be rigidly limited to consumption goods.
There is no retirement from "our turbulent
American life" in the fact that in common
with sundry other outstanding and active
women, I say my prayers to this effect in
our "House of Holiness." — "La freghiera
cambia le cose" — so runs a motto dear to our
friends the Larks of St. Francis.
I suspect that my dear friend Mrs. Robert
Brookings would feel, similarly, that the
establishment of Brookings Institution was not
wholly irrelevant to her husband's religion.
I am glad Mr. Bruere notes that my devo-
tion to the saints is supplemented, whether
"oddly" or not, by gratitude to Karl Marx.
Few of my reviewers have had the sense to
see that, to me, central fact. Too long a letter
about one small person. But the misapprehen-
sion made me sad. Why won't people see that
the Christian faith is the most revolutionary
dynamic extant? VIDA D. SCUDDER
Postscripts
They Like Their Spinach
QUESTIONNAIRES SOMETIMES ELICIT AMAZ-
ing social data. A set of questions asked in
192 organizations, representing 110,000 ju-
veniles of the Children's Welfare Federation,
brought to light the fact that next to potatoes
children like spinach best of all the vege-
tables. Girls liked mathematics better than
the boys did. Boys preferred baseball to any
other sport. More girls than boys nominated
their favorite sport as swimming, basketball,
tennis or hunting. One out of five of the boys
wanted to be a newspaperman when he grew
up; 49 percent of the girls wanted to be
secretaries. Boys were stronger on hobbies
than the girls, 44 percent of them being
stamp collectors, 31 percent autograph col-
lectors, and every boy boasted at least one
hobby, from scrapbooks to a handicraft. A
third of the girls had no hobby at all, and
another third claimed dancing as their special
pastime. The one thing upon which the
majority of the boys and girls were united
was a preference for dry cereals.
Labor Is Human
ADDRESSING THE PORTLAND CEMENT Asso-
ciation, Whiting Williams recently said that
there are three specific contributions an exe-
cutive can make toward harmony with labor:
Reduce fear of the loss of the job
Regularize jobs as far as possible
Cut out all favoritism
"I would urge the employer to let nothing
happen that will serve to separate him from
his belief in the reasonableness of those in-
dividuals who comprise the general, average
60 percent of his employe group. . . . This
average typical worker is not a Red. He is
better educated than any other worker group
in the world. ... He has more faith in the
American scheme of things than you think.
. . . He lives and moves and has his being
there on the job — even as you and I."
Mental Picnic
IN OAK PARK, CALIF., A GROUP OF HOUSE-
wives are experimenting with a new kind of
stay-at-home vacation. They pick a regular
time of the week to take the family picnick-
ing. After the sandwiches, pickles and lemon-
ade, they frolic with their minds. Regular in-
structors lead discussions in such summerish
subjects as "shore life; safer auto driving;
Spanish conversation; how to look at pic-
tures; sketching; first aid in the home."
Art in Main Street
ART USED TO BE A NATURAL ELEMENT OF
everyday work, reflected in the crafts of our
ancestors. Some time ago the Carnegie Cor-
poration set out to see if something of this
old-time regard for beauty couldn't be recap
tured in a typical American town. They picked
Owatonna, Minn., pop. 8000, and started
something a lot bigger than the usual clean-up
week. Artists who were called in began on
the ground floor of the power house, with
color designs and a power-conscious decor.
Then they moved on to stores, offices, homes,
the local hotel and the library. The people
of Owatonna soon got into the spirit of the
enterprise, and even designed their gardens
with an eye to community beauty. Art courses
were put into the elementary school. The
demonstration over, the Carnegie people are
withdrawing, leaving behind them an enthu-
siastic town that is determined not to let the
billboard age ever get the best of them again.
404
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URVEY
AUGUST 1937
RAPHIC
AGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
WORKERS INVOLVED IN STRIKES
WCTOVAl STATISTIC^ WC
Eoch man r*pr*Mnft 25,000 worUra involved «ach month
The processions show the average number on strike per month in 19I9 and I929 and the first four months of I929
Shaping a Labor Policy
by GOVERNOR FRANK MURPHY OF MICHIGAN
Science in Germany
by FRANZ BOAS
Tax for Democracy!
by DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE
wo Experiments with the Unemployed: Richmond by J. Russell Smith/ Dyess by Joanna C. Colcord
Mexico's Cardenas: Frank Tannenbaum... Hospital Strikes: J. S. Gambs... The Press: Leon Whipple
iO CENTS A COPY
$3.00 A YEAR
Hands That Shape Modern Living
SKILLED hands that join glass and metal
so that the human voice can reach
millions of listeners. They first fashioned the
high-power vacuum tube on a principle used
today in every broadcasting station. They
built the x-ray tube which has become an
indispensable aid to the physician. They are
the hands of craftsmen in the General Electric
Research Laboratory, in Schenectady.
They are the hands that enacted much of the
thrilling history of the tubes in your radio,
of phototubes that outperform the human
eye, of sodium lamps that make night driving
safer on many American highways. Skilled
and experienced, these craftsmen built the
first models of many of the new devices
which now play an important part in modern
civilization.
Research combines the abstract genius of the
mathematician, the ingenuity of the ex-
perimenter, the practical skill of the crafts-
man. Our whole American system is built
on the co-operation of many hands and
minds to translate the findings of science
into an abundance of the necessities, com-
forts, and luxuries we all desire. More goods
for more people — at less cost — is the goal of
American industry. It is the goal toward
which G-E research has made and is making
significant progress.
G-E research has saved the puhlic Jrom ten to one hundred dollars
Jor every dollar it has earned Jor General Electric
GENERAL m ELECTRIC
Do you know a man who has stood up
bravely for the principles on which
freedom is founded in America? Of
course you do! Then tell his story in
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406
The Gist of It
VOL. xxvi No. 8
THE COVER DESIGN, BY PICTORIAL STATIS-
tics, shows the average number of workers AUGUST 1937 CONTENTS
involved in strikes per month in three sig- L
nificant post-war years. The figures for 1937 Workers involved in Strikes. . COVER DESIGN
are based upon the first four months of this
year- Among Ourselves 408
OUR LEADING ARTICLE THIS MONTH is OF The Review— Painting by Allen Tucker . . .FRONTISPIECE
historic importance (Page 411). Governor
Frank Murphy states his labor policy and in- The Shaping of a Labor Policy FRANK MURPHY 411
terprets the new Michigan Labor Relations
Act. Followers of the headlines through the Germany's Aspiration (A Cartoon) 414
months of industrial cleavage in the automo- .
bile industry, and especially those who heard Science in Nazi Germany. . .FRANZ BOAS
Governor Murphy's two addresses in May, Tenam into Ownef (The D Col ) .JOANNA c. COLCORD 418
at the Consumers League or New York, in
New York and at the National Conference of fax for Democracy! DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE 421
Social Work, in Indianapolis, know his philos-
ophy of government and how it has been Cardenas (An Informal Portrait) FRANK TANNENBAUM 425
applied. In presenting what is bound
to be one of the most widely discussed arti- Cotton Pickers (A Poem) . . GRACE NOLL CROWELL 427
cles of the year, Survey Graphic invites com- •» j .. * « ;J.' •»» • • ,10
mem— from labor leaders, from industrial- Portfolio of American Paintings..
ists from representatives of the general Make Jobs or Perish . . j. RUSSELL SMITH 430
public.
Hospitals and the Unions. . . JOHN s. GAMES 435
THIS TIME, TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO, NO
one could have predicted the changes war Through Neighbors' Doorways
would bring to the way of life in Europe. Cluster of Grim Conundrums. . JOHN PALMER GAVIT 440
Behold Germany, discussed (Page 414) by
Franz Boas, in terms of intellectual and Card Game (A Poem) STANTON A. COBLENTZ 441
scientific life alone. Emotional antiquarianism
has supplanted history; the immediate prac- Life and Letters
tical exploitation of physics and chemistry Eyes and Ears Over the World LEON WHIPPLE 442
has eclipsed the fundamental research on
which the greatness of German industry was Servants of the People
built. All this is reviewed, sadly but without III At the Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM 447
malice, by an anthropologist whose real con-
cern is for the human values that are stifled Southwestern Art Survives the Depression EVELYN MILLER CROWELL 448
by the Fascist conception of the State. @ Survey Associates, Inc.
WITH THE SYMPATHETIC APPRECIATION OF
a social worker and the weather eye of a
Maine sailorwoman, Joanna C. Colcord, con-
tributing editor, and member of the staff of
the Russell Sage Foundation, gives us a
firsthand glimpse of the Dyess rehabilitation
project set up several years ago by F.E.R.A.
(Page 418). Born at sea, the daughter of a
captain, Miss Colcord has brought to her
notable career in social work a refreshing
Down East talent for personal observation
and expression.
WHAT, BESIDES THE TREASURY, WE MUST
pay taxes for is dramatically put in the
article by David Cushman Coyle (Page
421). At about the same time that this arti-
cle appears, his volume containing part of
the same material will be published by the
National Home Library (Washington, D.C.;
twenty-five cents; its title will be Why Pay
Taxes?). Mr. Coyle, one of the modern
engineers who has made a mark upon social
thinking, is known in professional circles as
the structural designer of such buildings as
the New York Life Building, Washington
State Capitol, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Building and the Roerich Museum.
A DOZEN YEARS AGO WE TURNED TO FRANK
Tannenbaum to edit our special number on
Mexico: A Promise (Survey Graphic, May
1924). And so it is with a sense of personal
pride that we tell of the honor which now
comes to him from the Mexican govern-
ment. He has been decorated with the Mexi-
can Order of the Aztec Eagle, Fifth Grade
(Insignia), according to the consul general
in New York, "for his scholarly researches
in Mexican social and economic problems
and for his consistently sympathetic attitude
toward Mexico and its people." Dr. Tan-
nenbaum has been lecturing at Columbia
University on Latin-American history and
is the author of Peace by Revolution (Co-
lumbia University Press) and Mexico's
Agrarian Revolution (Macmillan). His por-
trait of President Cardenas (Page 425) is
an informal narrative, written about a friend
with whom he has traveled and talked and
camped upon the hilltops.
FOR THE POEM COTTON PICKERS BY GRACK
Noll Crowell (Page 427) we are indebted
to associate editor John Palmer Gavit as
well as to the Rust Cotton Picker (See Sur-
vey Graphic, July 1936) which inspired it.
Last winter Mr. Gavit forwarded the poem
from Rollins College, Florida, where Mrs.
Crowell divided the first prize of the Allied
Arts and Poetry Society with Professor David
Morton of Amherst, Mass. Mrs. Crowell
lives in Dallas, Texas.
IN THE FIELD OF INDUSTRIAL GEOGRAPHY,
conservation, flood control, Survey Graphic
readers are well acquainted with the work
of Professor J. Russell Smith of Columbia
University. He has vigorously expounded
bold programs for the planned use of natural
resources. Plan or Perish (Survey Graphic,
July 1927) and Wealth From Mississippi
Mud (Survey Graphic, November 1927) are
still widely quoted, still used in classrooms.
Now Professor Smith writes (Page 430) as
a citizen perturbed by the trend of relief and
determined to make business men think and
act as well as talk about it. To him the only
alternative, is the renascence of self-help co-
operatives through which the unemployed
can produce some of the things they need for
themselves, including skill and morale. De-
spite the failure of self-help coops all over
the map, Professor Smith points to a notable
experiment that has survived — the Richmond
Citizens' Service Exchange. A resident of
Virginia part of the year, Professor Smith
is acquainted with that enterprise and with
the community that has backed it. In it he
sees the germ of a valid idea, susceptible of
much wider application. He agrees with Pro-
fessor Graham whose article in the Mid-
monthly Survey is cited in the footnote on
Page 430, that self-help cooperatives need
not hurt existing industry. His vigorous
challenge to communities elsewhere merits
presentation. Professor Smith will be glad to
hear from readers, pro, con, skeptical, or
curious, on the whole range of the self-help
cooperative in theory and practice.
407
LAST MONTH STANLEY B. MATHEWSON Dis-
cussed some of the problems that arise when
labor strikes occur in the essential public
services. This month we consider a concrete
example — strikes in hospitals. Recently in
New York such strikes were called by the
non-professional workers — the maintenance
crew, the cooks, the laundry workers — in
three New York hospitals. One hospital
signed with the union; another dealt orally
with the union; the third locked the union
members out, and prosecuted a number of
the workers, resulting in their conviction
under an old law (with sentences suspend-
ed). Thus we have a series of actual situa-
tions and the way in which they were met;
John S. Gambs probes their significance
(Page 435). Mr. Gambs, an authority on
pressure groups, and a professor of sociol-
ogy at New College, Columbia University,
is inclined to believe that the maintenance
workers can, as a last resort, strike without
jeopardizing patients. With few exceptions,
doctors disagree. Hospital directors, in their
own journal and in interviews with Mr.
Gambs, agree that hospitals have not always
been the most enlightened of employers, and
that a good deal of the work done by the
non-professional workers is comparable to
the chores in a hotel, long hours and low
pay. Certain it is that hospital workers are
organizing and that some institutions are
recognizing the unions. Sooner or later many
of them will have to face the unique prob-
lem of management-worker disputes in a
non-profit humanitarian setting. Mr. Gambs
ventilates a problem as he sees it, in its dra-
matic repercussions in New York.
Among Ourselves
Headliners
ON JULY 10, THE HEADLINERS' CLUB, A
national association of prominent newspaper
men, meeting at Atlantic City, presented to
U. S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran, M.D.,
their citation of his article Stamp Out Syphi-
lis! published in Surrey Graphic and Read-
ers Digest, July 1936, as the "Best Non-
Fiction Article of General News Interest" to
appear in an American magazine during the
past year. That article, we are safe in saying,
has been more widely circulated, reprinted
and quoted, than any article published in
the past decade. It launched a campaign
which promises eventually to free the United
States of the curse of venereal disease.
Just as we went to press with the July
issue of Survey Graphic, containing an arti-
cle on the pre-nuptial tests for venereal dis-
ease required by law in Connecticut, a similar
law went into effect in Illinois. That the
cooperation of the public, as well as of the
legislators, public health administrators and
the medical profession is essential, is indi-
cated by the rush for marriage licenses the
day before the law went into effect. The
first day of the law set a new low for licenses
throughout the state. But the Connecticut
experience demonstrates that social attitudes
will catch up with knowledge.
Guardsmen and Hoppers
IN COLORADO, EARLY IN JULY, GOVERNOR
Teller Ammons called out the National
Guard to quell an unusual horde of unruly
visitors — an army of invading grasshoppers
that threatened to devastate nine eastern and
southeastern counties of the state. The mili-
tia, using their motor equipment, delivered
tons of sawdust, bran and sodium arsenite
to distributing centers, where the CCC. WPA
workers and farmers kept up the fight. As
the pest killers got the situation in hand,
and the migratory 'hoppers seemed to be
conquered, the National Guard trucks oper-
ated only in daylight and the wartime aspect
of the highways disappeared. At a time when
guard facilities were being used to protect
property or men in Eastern industrial sec-
tions, the editor of the Pueblo Chieftain
wrote: "It would be a good thing if this
were the only warfare our guardsmen and
armed forces ever had to wage — one against
enemies of mankind rather than one of man
against man."
The Assessors
SPEAKING OF TAXES, AND TAX RATES, AS
David Cushman Coyle does on Page 421, and
as Stanley High did in a recent issue, the
home-owner and the landlord may watch
with interest a current effort toward more
equitable assessment of real estate values. In
most parts of the United States, appraisal of
property value for taxing purposes is a hap-
hazard, often political and frequently dis-
honest procedure
Now the Public Administration Clearing
House of Chicago announces that there is a
movement under foot to require assessing
officers of local governments to take special
courses to train them for their jobs. In
Michigan a school is being planned by the
State Board for Vocational Education, co-
operating with the state university and the
Municipal League, to provide assessors not
only with training in valuation and appraisal
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RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
EMERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD. RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPFR, R. L. DUFFUS,
contributing editors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MAKY R. ANDERSON, adver-
tising manager.
techniques, but likewise to enrich their back-
grounds in the theory and practice of taxa-
tion and public administration. Already 23
states require assessors to meet regularly in a
combined convention and institute. The State
Tax Commission of Missouri has urged that
a compulsory three-week course be planned
for all county assessors. No one knows his
home town well enough through the mere
fact of association to set a fair value 'on all
property; that is a matter of the most pains-
taking application of special training and
technical skill.
The World We Live In
FORTY THOUSAND REPRINTS OF PEARL
Buck's article. On Discovering America,
have been distributed by a member of Sur-
vey Associates as a contribution to tolerance
and understanding. (Reprints are available
at five cents postpaid, with a discount for
quantity orders.) Response to the article
comes from all directions. We print below
one letter that differs with some of Miss
Buck's conclusions. For lack of space we are
unable to print, as we had planned, several
pages of letters elicited by the article.
To THE EDITOR: I have read with interest
the recent article of Pearl Buck, containing
the impression that America makes upon a
fresh and intelligent mind whose main life
experience has been in China. It contains
much that is of value. The long view ; the
conviction that race individuality will per-
sist for generations. That has been shown to
be true. (The sturdier the race, the greater
will be that persistence, and the more
valuable its contributon if we give the best
the chance to survive.)
And yet, I think, we see in the impres-
sions of this recent arrival from China, the
natural effect of sudden access to utterly
changed surroundings. Just as darkness
seems deeper when we come out of a bril-
liantly lighted room, and light seems more
glaring when we come in from darkness, a
certain set of impressions have predominated
owing to what has gone before.
In this case, dissimilarities and racial in-
compatibilities seem to have somewhat mo-
nopolized the keen perceptions of one
accustomed to being surrounded by a homo-
geneous race. She senses a chaos of differences
and disagreements between the inhabitants
of our country. Yet, to one who has Jived
long in America, and very little in the
Orient, it is possible to perceive an entirely
different set of facts. To one coming out of
Europe, the main perceptions are still more
completely reversed. The wonder of such an
observer is: How can peoples whose an-
cestors have fought each other periodically
for centuries, whose brothers and cousins
even now seem preparing to spring again at
each other's throats: How can these be living
together in America as they are? Why this
peace?
Here, living side by side, are peoples of
all kinds, showing every day far more of
peace, friendship and understanding than ot
those animosities and differences that seem
to have monopolized Miss Buck's attention.
With all our differences and with all oui
prejudices, we are not a seething mass ot
hates, but very much the opposite.
There is a reason for this. Underlying
all the differences that distinguish the nu-
merous races that have flooded into our con-
408
tinent, there is that long enduring human
nature with so many points of similarity and
sympathy that the differences, in comparison,
are slight and superficial.
"One touch of nature makes the whole
world kin" ; and we who have come to
dwell here together have been finding day
by day millions of such touches. We may
scrap occasionally, like brothers, but we do
not hate — Miss Buck, to the contrary, not-
withstanding. We live and work side by
side, making allowance for differences and
joshing each other's peculiarities, while at
the same time respecting individuality, help-
ing each other in trouble, making friends,
and getting along together in a way that is
not understandable by the members of racial
or political aggregations in other parts of
the world. It is just this, we may say,
together with the general desire to give
every one a chance, that makes America what
it is. It permeates and forms the American
mind. The man or woman who lives here
for only ten or twenty years, and revisits
the fatherland, feels it through and through
and returns aware of possessing an outlook
and an allegiance that differ essentially from
the thoughts and feelings of those who are
left behind. The thought, "I am an Amer-
ican," then has a meaning that Miss Buck
may not yet have sensed.
We have our private conflicts and we
settle them too often in ways that are open
to no defense; but we have no collective
wish to kill each other, and we do not re-
frain from doing so because, as she intimates,
we are uncertain in what direction to begin.
"How nice it is that they are not all hating
each other over here," said a young girl
whom I knew, an immigrant from a dis-
tracted land.
We also have our class controversies and
conflicts, but they are not in any way so
bitter, nor do their sources lie so deep, as
in many countries inhabited by so-called
homogeneous peoples. There the descendant
of the overlord fears the son of the serf.
"We could not let our people do what you
let yours do here, they would overwhelm
us." That has been said to me by an intel-
ligent European.
Miss Buck's impressions are interesting
and enlightening, but they are not the whole
thing; nor is it probable that she thinks
them so. When she comes nearer to the
concrete, and to our immediate problems,
she leaves us where we were.
America wants to give everyone a chance
and they don't want to in many other coun-
tries. We have given many their chance, but
we have also failed with far too many. A
better chance for some of our own people is
one of our problems with which the im-
migrant is concerned, for our first duty is
to our own, a duty that we have failed to
fulfill. We certainly must limit and select;
but how? When business revives, must senti-
ment and avarice again combine to select
the cheapest to fill sweat shops and labor
gangs, and keep our living standard down?
Shall we improve and humanize our laws of
admission or sweep those laws aside and
throw admission open to the discretion of
any administration that chances to be in
power? These are some of the issues that
are now confronting us. Miss Buck has re-
frained from entering this field of discussion,
and, in view of what she, has told us, she
has been wise in so doing.
Boston. .M.m. RICHARDS M. BRADLEY
The sturdy individualist at prayer: "Oh Lord in Thy mercy . . . please
allow Prosperity to come to us just once more . . . never mind what
happens in this world . . . even war is better than this . . . but allow
Prosperity to come just once more . . . please . . . if only for three or
four weef^s . . . so that I can grab a little something . . . and this time,
dear Lord, I shall hang on to it ... I will sell out the moment I have got
a jew thousand dollars . . . and I will go and live somewhere very quietly
and I will never asf^ anything of you again, dear Lord . . . and I will
teach my children to love you . . . but, dear Lord . . . just one little
bit of prosperity . . . just once more . . . Amen." — H. v. L.
Chaingangs
To THE EDITOR: Won't some of you join
in an effort I have deeply at heart, to get
the chaingangs humanized?
I think a good beginning would be a
health survey.
Perhaps a group of women will take hold
and get a Congressional — or a church-spon-
sored— or a determined private — investiga-
tion made of health and sanitation in chain-
gangs all over the South. Will the Quakers?
the Episcopalians? Catholic or Methodist
women? the Women's Clubs?
I have forty-five dollars to begin a fund
with. It was voted by the women of the
Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Long Island
last January. They wanted to help humanize
the chaingangs. Since then two ameliorations
have taken place in Georgia.
The Osborne Society has investigated but
its report is asleep in a bureau drawer and
shows no sign, I believe, of coming out
where we can read and circulate it. What
can be done? Something soon, I hope!
SARAH N. CLEGHORN
Manchester. Vermont
409
«>S>.*-*\ AlA*
Courtesy Rehn Galleries, New York
THE REVIEW
Painting by ALLEN TUCKER
August 1937 recalls another August — 1914
AUGUST 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 8
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Shaping of a Labor Policy
by FRANK MURPHY
First interpretation of the new Michigan Labor Relations Act, and a broad
formulation of labor policy by the governor of a great industrial state.
THE PRESENT SITUATION IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS PRESENTS
an incomparable opportunity for enlightened government
to show its worth. But, in doing its part, government can-
not afford to forget the lessons of history. The peaceful
way is the right way. Violence on one side of an industrial
dispute begets violence on the other. The public is easily
infected by the ill will which is generated. In such a situa-
tion government is often urged to undertake oppressive
measures. In my own state of Michigan, had the govern-
ment chosen to "shoot it out" with the sit-down strikers
in the automobile plants early in the year, there is no
doubt that force would have emptied the plants. But
bloodshed and violence would have meant that govern-
ment in Michigan today would be thought of by many
people as a horrible, oppressive thing which coldly ignored
human values and demanded human life as the price of
its own ruthless supremacy. This did not happen in
Michigan because the concept of government on the basis
of which the situation was ironed out has no room for
violence and bloodshed. Rather, it holds that force is an
archaic, outmoded and, above all, utterly futile method
which, in the end, settles nothing for anybody.
In the great General Motors strike involving 250,000
workers, the Chrysler strike involving 100,000, and indeed
in the whole course of the Michigan disputes, there was
no suppression of civil liberties, no factories were closed
by the government, and there were no deaths in the few
spirited encounters between opposing forces. They were
settled in friendly conferences conducted in a spirit of
reason and justice. No bitterness exists between employer
and employe in these great industries today and they are
doing their own peak business of all time. There were
situations, however, in which the new and zealous unions
failed to reckon with the value of public opinion. After
the auto strikes were settled three instances, in particular,
antagonized many citizens: the demonstration at Monroe,
where armed men blockaded an important public high-
way; the mass demonstration which the press mistakenly
referred to as the "seizure" of Lansing; and the Con-
sumers Power shut-off which, though it occurred in the
daytime, interfered with a service essential to health and
comfort in a thickly settled section of the state. Discount-
ing the exaggerations in the press, these occurrences were
nevertheless serious, in reality and in implication.
Although these conflicts were fortunately ended by gov-
ernment intervention and by emergency conciliation, up
to the end of June there was no real formula on the
Michigan statute books for dealing with modern indus-
trial relations. Picketing in any form did not have the
sanction of legality, and it was obvious that many labor
demonstrations were a protest against the lag of law be-
hind modern industrial developments. Vigilantes, so-called
law-and-order organizations, began to blossom. However
reports of their numbers are greatly exaggerated. Although
some of them were perfectly sincere, all of them were far
from being the non-partisan influence that law and order
through government must represent. Public opinion has
reacted against the sit-down. Labor leaders, I am con-
vinced, are developing a greater sense of responsibility to
the public and exercising more reasoned judgment in
their decisions. Public opinion will react likewise against
anti-union organizations that seek to take the law into
their own hands. Labor excesses, when they have occurred,
have been in large measure incident to. the new found
power and while excesses must be curbed it must be done
intelligently. I have reason to believe that the fact that
as governor I constantly strove for conciliation, and
firmly avoided needless violence, has strengthened the
respect for government in Michigan.
Throughout the trying times of the strikes the state
legislature, not unaware of the ominous effect of tensions
and cleavages upon public opinion, was working upon a
bill that, when perfected in the midsummer session, should
go a long way to heal the wounds of industrial controver-
sies in Michigan. It is based upon the rule of reason.
The Michigan Labor Relations Act
THE LAW GUARANTEES FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS TO LABOR, IN-
dustry and public. But like every law dealing with an
emergent situation, it is bound to be criticized by extrem-
ists. It guarantees to labor the fundamental right of col-
lective bargaining through representatives of their own
choosing, and the right to strike. For the first time in
Michigan it clearly legalizes picketing; but at the same
411
time it forbids blocking a public highway or the entrance
of a place of business or a residence. It empowers a
state industrial relations board to set up subordinate
boards by areas, plants or industries, to mediate disputes.
The board, voluntarily, or by request of either side, may
encourage submission to voluntary arbitration. The act
places the emphasis upon conciliation. In no sense does it
regulate by compulsion. It guarantees all the rights of
labor. It restricts the use of injunctions in labor disputes.
But going beyond the Wagner Act, which applies to in-
dustries of interstate significance, and beyond similar local
acts passed by various states, it protects both employers
and employes from unfair practices. It authorizes the
board to investigate espionage and racketeering. Its pro-
visions dealing with picketing and mass patrolling have
latitude enough to apply to vigilante groups who may
attempt to intimidate labor organization. The provisions
of the entire act are too lengthy to quote. But the Sections
of its Chapter IX, quoted on the next page, are new and
distinctive in American legislation. They must, however,
be understood as part of a document which outlaws com-
pany unions and guarantees exclusive collective bargain-
ing to the representatives designated by a majority. The
board has the authority to decide whether the unit shall
be employer, craft, plant or some other body.
Another provision of the act requires each union in the
state to file the name and address of its secretary and its
affiliation with other organizations.
It has been urged from many quarters that, since labor
organizations are coming to wield great power over the
lives of workmen and over the operations of industries,
they ought to be held legally responsible for their acts.
There has been great pressure for compulsory incorpora-
tion of trade unions, for public supervision of union elec-
tions, for requiring that their books and membership lists
be a matter of public record.
It is axiomatic, of course, that responsible leaders of
responsible labor organizations should be accountable for
the acts of such organizations. Irresponsible leadership has
done labor more harm in the public mind than all the
attacks of employers' associations. Labor must learn to
discipline its forces, to hold in check impractical or un-
timely demands. It must keep its agreements inviolate.
Only by scrupulous adherence to such a program can
labor become an active and constructive force in industry.
If labor's leaders fail in those respects, the public demand
for drastic restrictive legislation will surely be irresistible.
Labor organizations have, generally, opposed proposals
which aim to restrict their activities. The recent disclosures
before the Senate committee investigating industrial espi-
onage reveal the basis of their fears. In considering the
merit of proposals for controlling labor organizations, even
their proponents must concede that the analogy between
the incorporation of trade unions and of a business pro-
ducing goods is not perfect. A union's assets consist of the
good will of its members and such funds as it may have
with which to pay strike benefits or to maintain its staff.
The property of a corporation, on the other hand, consists
of buildings, machines, materials and other highly tangible
assets. An injunction tying up the corporation's liquid
funds does not close its production operations. But a court
order which ties up the union's funds absolutely disables
it, preventing the performance of its functions during the
period of the injunction. In Michigan, the legality of a
trade union's activities hitherto depended largely upon the
viewpoint of the judges involved in a particular case. The
new Michigan law clearly defines labor's legal responsi-
bilities as well as its legal rights.
The government takes its place as an active participant
with labor and employers in finding a solution to dis-
putes. Its view is the public view. Public interest is para-
mount. The government insists on peace and orderliness.
It also insists on the building up of mutual self-respect.
To these ends, the public is represented by continuing
agencies specializing in the problems of industrial rela-
tions, covering the entire field from fact-finding to medi-
ation, conciliation, and, if necessary, aid in creating the
machinery for voluntary arbitration. The government
makes available at all times the most effective possible
kind of mediation agencies. These are set up on the basis
of each industry if necessary, as well as on a geographical
basis. Every measure and method of conciliation and
mediation is at hand, always in the name of impartial
government.
The Basis of Stability
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING REPRESENTS A POWER DELEGATED BY
the workers because as individuals they have been ineffec-
tive in protecting their rights. Before passing judgment
on the principle of collective bargaining, industry should
realize that a worker will not delegate a power to some-
one else if he can do it better himself.
Despite ominous predictions to the contrary, I am con-
vinced that the present wave of industrial disputes repre-
sents merely a normal reaction of working people to eco-
nomic insecurity. They are giving vent to the frustrating
effects of five years of depression and the fear of inse-
curity. They are asking a share in the control and determi-
nation of working conditions. The sit-down strikes and
mass picketing are indications of their desire to employ
more effective techniques. With those they are reaching out
into new industries. But the recent strikes signify nothing
new in terms of what labor has been striving for since cor-
porate industry first spread in the United States following
the Civil War. The clamor for genuinely drastic control of
labor organizations, and of employers on the other hand,
is undoubtedly due in large part to the unusual turmoil
and strife of .recent months, rather than to any extraordi-
nary change in the attitude of labor.
Unfortunately, recent strikes becloud the fact that in
a considerable number of American industries, stability
has actually been achieved through orderly processes of
collective relations between labor and capital. Working
conditions have been set forth in trade agreements in the
railway, coal, clothing, and printing industries, to cite but
a few. Those agreements have set up orderly procedures
for the conduct of relations between several million
workers and their employers. Strikes take place only after
long established machinery has failed to arrive at settle-
ments. Disputes and grievances, which are inevitable
wherever human beings are involved, are aired in discus-
sions around conference tables rather than in struggles
along picket lines. They are then enforced by customary
precedent and mutual self-respect. In this way great cor-
porations have gone about their business of producing
goods and services without a major stoppage in a quarter
of a century. As a democratic process for controlling
working conditions this peaceful technique has built up
a common and statute law in wide branches of industry,
with its own bill of rights and "constitutional" guarantees.
412
SURVEY GRAPHIC
FROM CHAPTER IX OF THE NEW MICHIGAN LAW
Sec. 15. Nothing contained in this act shall prevent an
employer from entering into an all-union agreement (an
agreement that all eligible employes shall be required to
join a union) with one or more labor organizations.
.Vet. 16. Nothing in this act shall be construed to require
any person to perform any work or continue in the service
of any employer without his free will and consent, or to
make it unlawful for any employe to discontinue work or
employment without notice to or permission of his
employer, or to prevent an employer of his own free will
from discharging an employe except as specifically pro-
hibited in this act.
Sec. 17. Except as expressly provided herein, this act
shall not be so construed as to interfere with, impede or
diminish in any way the right of employes to strike or
engage in other concerted activities.
Sec. 18. Except as otherwise provided for in this act, no
court of this State shall issue any restraining order or
temporary or permanent injunction in any case growing out
of any labor dispute to prohibit any person or persons in-
terested in such dispute from doing, whether singly or in
concert, any of the following acts:
(a) Ceasing or refusing to perform any work or to re-
main in any relation of employment.
(b) Becoming or remaining a member of any labor
organization or of any employer organization.
(c) Paying or giving any strike benefits to or withholding
them from any person participating or interested in any
labor dispute.
(d) Giving publicity to the existence of any labor dispute
or to the facts involved, whether by advertising, speaking,
picketing or by any other method not involving fraud or
violence, coercion or intimidation.
(e) Assembling peaceably to act or organize to act in
promotion of their interests in a labor dispute.
Sec. 19. For the purposes of this act, picketing is hereby
declared to be lawful in this State, except under the follow-
ing conditions and circumstances:
(a) Patrolling or attendance by any persons, whether on
behalf of a labor organization or otherwise, at or near a
place of business or employment affected by a labor dispute,
or the residence of any person employed therein or other
place where such person may be, in such manner or num-
bers as to (1) obstruct or otherwise interfere with approach
thereto or egress therefrom, or (2) to interfere with the
free and unimpeded use of a public highway.
(b) Patrolling or picketing in or about any premises or
place of business involved in a labor dispute by a person
who is neither employed therein nor a party to the dispute
nor an official of a labor organization that is a party to the
dispute.
Editor's Note: It is understood that Governor Murphy is asking reconsideration of
the law at the midsummer session beginning July 29 in order to perfect it in vari-
ous particulars. For example Section 19(b) prohibiting patrolling or picketing by
those not party to an industrial dispute: As this now stands it would constrict the
right of members of the same union to picket.
The American public, through legislation, has tended to
recognize this development and the social desirability of
collective bargaining. By implication it has said that the
individual worker is not able to protect himself against
the vagaries of industrial competition, and that wages,
hours, promotion and lay-offs can best be determined with
workers acting in concert. Such legislation as the Railway
Mediation Act, the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction
Act, and the National Labor Relations Act, is evidence
that the public believes industrial peace and social order
can best be attained by encouraging workers to organize.
These laws, therefore, seek to remove from the statute
books restrictions which hamper the free organization of
labor and to eliminate interference by employers or by
courts. They seek in effect to write into public policy the
theory that industrial peace can be achieved most readily
if there is a balance of power between labor and capital.
A great preponderance of industrial power on one side or
the other has never made for long time stability except
on the basis of exploitation and coercion. The history of
industrial disputes in this country and abroad indicates
that collective arrangements are most successful in indus-
tries where both labor and capital have been effectively
organized. If, therefore, the present drive to organize labor
results in equalizing the status of workers and their em-
ployers, we shall unquestionably be far along the road to
industrial peace.
I am little disturbed by the effect collective bargaining
agreements may have upon competitive processes. We
long ago ceased to rely exclusively upon competition as
a regulator of our economic life. The free operation of
competitive forces has for years been restrained by trade
associations, by monopolistic practices, by so-called "gentle-
men's agreements," by government regulations, and by the
operation of collective bargaining itself. These forces are
not new. They have been in the making for a generation.
In fact, we have tried to curb them through our anti-trust
laws, but in this attempt we have not been too successful.
We have incorporated into our complex economic system
a large number of institutional checks on the operation of
free competition. It is my belief that the future trend of
government will be in the direction of keeping these in-
stitutions under control rather than of outlawing them
or of removing the restrictions which inhere in them.
Certainly a hands-off policy is indefensible. Modern eco-
nomic living is highly interde- {Continued on page 450)
AUGUST 1937
413
From Klaaderadatsch (Berlin)
GERMANY'S ASPIRATION . . . a mystic expression of the Nazi goal
Science in Nazi Germany
by FRANZ BOAS
The dean of American anthropologists writes on a tragic aftermath of 1914 —
the intellectual and scientific decline in a country once distinguished for the
richness of its culture and the greatness of its scholarship.
ALL OF us WHO ARE INTERESTED IN CULTURAL VALUES FEEL
a deep abhorrence of the fanaticism, tyranny and cruelty
of the rulers of the third empire. Added to this is a feeling
of shame on account of the weakness of those to whose
charge the precious treasure of German culture was in-
trusted, and who allowed it to fall a prey to those who
are dominated by a hate of all they do not understand
and whose only reaction to cultural values they do not
grasp is the intense drive to destroy them.
The more so behooves it to preserve a judicious temper
in trying to evaluate what has been destroyed and what
has been put in its place. We should not repeat the shame-
ful spectacle of those who, during the World War, were
carried away by their passion to condemn what they did
not know. Do not let us cry out as in 1919 one man did
who is even now at the head of one of our great scientific
institutions, saying that "the entire educational system of
Germany, in the schools and out, was permeated with an
antiquated, unchristian, inhuman, abhorrent system of
ethics and morality. That it was rotten at the heart." He
did so without the slightest knowledge of what he was
talking about, without knowing the spirit of German .
schools of that period and the fundamental changes that
were going on in the general educational system between
1900 and 1914; or like the dean of one of our great col-
leges who in 1915 made the statement that German
schools were intended only to train in discipline and obe-
dience, evidently ignorant of the stress laid in the general
system of that time to train for intellectual independence.
It is true, I have not seen the present schools at work,
but by personal contact with children and adults, with
discharged teachers and with more or less willing follow-
ers of the present regime, I feel competent to form an
opinion in regard to what is attempted and of its effects
upon German youth and German science.
In the nineteenth century the aim of the school was
primarily to lead to intellectual freedom. With the begin-
ning of our century a strong current set in similar to the
one that finds expression in our public education, the de-
sire to break down the aloofness of the school from
everyday life. With the end of the War and the establish-
ment of the Republic these tendencies were strongly em-
phasized and the attempt was made to unite intellectual
development with that of the emotional attitudes con-
nected with the participation in the present problems of
mankind. Among the young this found expression in the
various forms of youth movement.
During this time the gnawing feeling, not only of de-
feat but also of injustice that Poincare's policies, the yield-
ing of the League of Nations to French pressure in the
matter of the plebiscite of Upper Silesia, and finally the
interference in the planned Customs Union with Austria,
AUGUST 1937
contributed to the development of a passionate national-
ism. Added to this was the desperate economic situation
which led people to grasp at any remedy, to listen to the
voices of the rankest demagogues who promised them a
way out of their misery. National revival as a cure for the
ills of the day was fostered in the schools by the older
generation of teachers, and the schools suffered under the
conflict of the ideals of human solidarity that they were
to teach and the nationalistic spirit of the teachers. At
that time the teachers of elementary schools were far in
advance of the great body of teachers in higher schools in
their fervor for the ideals of the republic.
This is the background of the school position when the
burning of the Reichstag inflamed the nation and put in
the saddle National Socialism, which before this, for the
party, eminently convenient event had been losing con-
siderably in strength.
The experienced leaders of education were speedily
removed and the aim of the school was at once oriented
according to the principle that intellectual development
was to be of minor importance, that the principal object
should be to stir up the most emotional patriotism and
hatred of the alien.
I SHALL LEAVE ASIDE IN THIS DISCUSSION THE QUESTION OF
whom they considered aliens and the whole weary dis-
cussion of the race nonsense preached by Hitler, Goebbels
and the unspeakable Streicher; with Hitler, probably an
expression of fanatical ignorance; with the other two, in-
famous lying. It is, however, impossible to pass by its
effects on the children who are infected in the schools by
this poison. Here is a dictation to ten-year-old children
who had to learn it by heart and repeat it:
"The Jewish Question. The swastika is our flag. This ancient
symbol of the sun and of salvation means to us today the
necessity of keeping our race pure and in this sense it is a
symbol directed against the Jews. The Nuremberg laws of
1935 bring us the prohibition of all marriages between Ger-
mans and Jews. At all times the Jews lived on dishonest
trade, that is, on fraud; and on usury, that is lending out of
money at a high rate of interest. The medieval Catholic
church had in its laws all the regulations against Jews which
now, at last, have been given back to us. In medieval cities
the Jews lived in separate quarters of the city in the same way
as nowadays Negroes and Chinese do in a number of foreign
cities. The Jewish quarter was called the ghetto, the streets
were narrow, crooked and dirty."
Such a sample shows the methods by which hatred and
contempt are inculcated into the minds of the young.
More than that, the young are questioned in regard to the
political opinions of their parents and they are taught the
infamous system of spying and denunciation which un-
415
dermines the morale of the whole people. The effect is a
general atmosphere of distrust. They speak nowadays of
the German glance, the anxious look right and left, front
and back, above and below to make sure that nobody
listens to what may be said. It is the same as in all terror-
istic reigns in which nobody is safe from the denunciation
of neighbor or supposed friend, and more so of anyone
who would like to profit by the downfall of his fellow
citizen.
But I am straying from my topic. The attempt to subor-
dinate entirely intellectual training to emotions and to
bodily dvelopment which is thought necessary for the
advancement of the race has had a catastrophic effect upon
schools. Where formerly during the monarchy as well as
under the republic the aim was to free the individual from
fetters of prejudice, particularly in the free schools that
sprang up since 1900, there is only one aim now; to make
the individual emotionally a fit member of the party.
It is the old story which we should mind here also. If
we want to raise a people of free citizens we must not
subject them to the influence of catch-words and symbols,
but lead them by reasoned emotional training to devotion
to ideals that they understand. If we want to train the
coming generation to become a powerful machine, indi-
viduality must be suppressed, for it is the bitter enemy of
power. They must rather be caught in the network of
symbols without meaning that serve the purposes of rulers.
The ideal of nazism is power and since power must be
based on the sameness of ideals among the whole people
the one leading idea is to bring about absolute conform-
ity, to eradicate every trace of independent thought, to
subjugate every individual so that he will fall in line
with the common will.
THE NUMBER OF REGULATIONS IN SCHOOL, IN UNIVERSITY,
in the youth movement that serve this purpose is legion.
The most powerful means in the school is the selection of
teachers who are convinced members of the party.
Nazism was not satisfied with the patriotic fervor of
the older teachers, for notwithstanding their patriotism
many of them were not Nazis. Very soon they found
themselves out of sympathy with the crudeness of the new
dispensation and those who did not yield were eliminated.
The children were so burdened with bodily exercise, their
actual schooling was so much curtailed, that the efficiency
of the school suffered immensely. Finally the protests of
the parents became so loud that a certain amount of
relaxation of the demands made upon the physical
strength of the children had to be allowed. Uniformity of
thought, however, has been intensified by the carefully
supervised youth movement.
Will the tyrannical masters of Germany succeed in
subduing the individual by this means? I believe not.
From the mental anguish of maltreated young minds will
spring the forces that will shake off the chains in which
they have lain. The cells of opposition in the youth move-
ment are active, and danger does not terrify the young
suffering souls. The attempts to shield them from learn-
ing unorthodox thoughts are vain. Through a thousand
channels they flow and bring the fresh air of the outside
world into the stifling atmosphere in which Germans are
compelled to live. They give support to a revolt against
the brutal subjugation of minds and help to form the
leaders who will shake off the intolerable yoke.
We may believe that in our own country similar condi-
tions are impossible. Let us hope that this may be true,
but if we want to avoid them we ought to combat even
the slightest beginnings or sporadic outbreaks of suppres-
sion. Without reference to purely political events, such
as the interference with the free speech of a presidential
candidate last year, we may consider the evils that exist
in our schools. One of these is the catchword "red"
under which everyone understands whatever he pleases,
provided it refers to the advocacy of changes in existing
conditions that do not support or lead to autocracy. The
word has no tangible content but serves to excite the
minds. The persecution of teachers who are supposed to
be "red" is one of these dangers that we ought to combat.
And what should we say in regard to race prejudice?
Have we not the Negro problem constantly on our hands
which among the majority of our people is attacked not
intelligently but according to ancient catchwords of
the inferiority and sensuality and laziness of the Negro
and the like. The power of these catchwords would dis-
appear if we were willing to meet the Negro individually
eye to eye. Is not antisemitism a problem that plays a role
in our lives? Have we not summer resorts, apartment
houses and the like that exclude Jews?
While our public schools are happily fairly free of this
poison, private schools and private colleges, if not anti-
semitic, make at least concessions to antisemitism by
segregating Jews as the one single group for which they
prescribe openly or by devious means a quota. It may be
granted that it is a laudable aim to try to get an inter-
mingling of a variety of social groups; but ought this not
be attained by considering the character of the individual
rather than by judging him by the rule of thumb, by
throwing him into an arbitrary class with which, if it
exists, he may have nothing in common?
I HAVE SO FAR SPOKEN ONLY OF THE EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG.
Higher education presents an equally sad spectacle. The
course of schooling is shortened at the behest of the army
that needs young men who are to become officers. The
university student and the young decent are pressed into
activities that do not allow them adequate time for study
and research. A clique of fanatic Nazi students practically
rules the university. It is sufficient that one of these
youngsters denounce a professor and the likelihood is that
he may be retired or dismissed. New appointments are
made from among members of the party, and it has hap-
pened that these have made themselves so ridiculous that
even the students would not tolerate their ignorance. As
a consolation it may be said that there are still some people
in the government who regret this course and who enable
the retired scientists to continue their work in peace.
The wholesale dismissal of all Jews, those married to
Jewesses, or of mixed descent, which has been decried
all over the world is only one side of the picture. Oppo-
nents of nazism have been treated just as unmercifully
and sent adrift. Incalculable damage to German science
has thus been done. There are professors or directors of
great scientific institutions who have been replaced by
students, because no scientist belonging to the party could
he found to fill the place made vacant for political rea-
sons.
It might be assumed that it the purpose of the Nazis
was to protect the students against doctrines opposed to
their ideology, that sciences like physics, chemistry, astron-
omy, biology might have been allowed to go on undis-
416
SURVEY GRAPHIC
turbed; but far from it. The greatest scientific achieve-
ments did not protect against dismissal anyone who had
found displeasure in the eyes of the government. At an
early time almost the whole mathematical faculty of G6t-
tingen was dismissed. Haber, the great chemist whose in-
ventions and discoveries enabled Germany to conduct the
war to the bitter end was persecuted and died an exile. It
would weary the patience of the reader if we should dis-
cuss in detail the havoc played in university life.
More important is it to dwell on the role played by
biologists, particularly by anthropologists, during these
years.
I believe that I may say without exaggeration that if
they had been true to their scientific convictions the myth
of the great blonde Aryan as the chosen people would
have died — except in the heads of fanatics, before it be-
came a fixed idea. The curious twist of mind of many
compromisers is illustrated by a remark of a rich German-
American man, now one of the pillars of nazism, but
formerly a friend of the socialist President Ebert. He said,
"If the Jews have become powerful by their steady adher-
ence to the belief that they were the chosen people, why
should not the Germans now try to gain power by the
same means?" To this the reply should be given that intel-
ligent Jews have long since discarded this view, but that
according to him the Germans have become more Jewish
than Jews.
PERHAPS BIOLOGISTS AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS WOULD NOT SUB-
scribe to the belief in a chosen race expressed so crudely,
but the modern development of genetics and lack of clear
thinking has led them to a hopeless confusion between
characteristics that are racially determined and those
formed by social environment. The geneticist has to do
only with parents and their genealogical descendants. By
extending the concept of genealogical unity to a whole
nation the whole problem becomes confused and the in-
numerable books written on mental characteristics of races
have not a whit of scientific basis. Even if the descriptions
were true no scintilla of evidence has ever been brought
forward to show that the mental characteristics of peoples
are not essentially the result of social and historical condi-
tions.
It is painful to a scientist to confess that the search for
truth in one field does not make him capable to with-
stand prejudice and to retain a clear head in troubled
times. It is not Germany alone that presents this spectacle.
Twenty years ago our scientists did not prove any stronger
and clearer of judgment.
A curious side development of Nazi ideology is the in-
credible stimulus given to research in proto-history and
prehistoric archaeology. Interest in these subjects has al-
ways been strong in every European country. In our
country also, there is more interest in the ancient remains
of the country than in the living. In Germany antiquarian
research is flourishing as perhaps never before. There are
not only studies of ancient remains of all sorts, but also
careful studies of German superstitions, German folk
tales and German folk-song. The slant of search for the
special greatness of German antiquity is, of course, not
absent in much of this work.
THE FATE OF THOSE DEALING WITH SOCIAL SCIENCES IN GfiR-
many is saddest of all, for here the threat of heterodoxy
is most imminent. If the student is to be protected against
the danger of doubting the wisdom of Nazi ideology
he must not know of any social science that accepts differ-
ent tenets. Therefore it is not surprising that the revolu-
tion in the universities in these sciences was most thor-
ough.
The greatest of German sociologists, Ferdinand Ton-
nies, was dismissed and conformity was rapidly brought
about by new appointments or by the accommodating
willingness of others to obey. What wonder, if upright
scientists give up in despair and are seeking work in for-
eign countries. I do not mean Jews or political opponents,
but those who cannot endure the slavery to which they
are condemned.
The general condition of science is made still more un-
bearable by the regulation of publication. Nothing can be
published that has not the approval of the government.
Recently an American scientist of Jewish descent was
naively asked by a German serious scientist to join him
in the editorship of a scientific journal. The American
pointed out to him that if his name appeared on the jour-
nal he would not be allowed to publish it, and after in-
quiring he had to agree that the American was right. I do
not know in how far state supervision may interfere with
publications in mathematics, physics and chemistry. If
Professor Biberbach speaks of Jewish mathematics it may
be feared that what he does not consider as Aryan mathe-
matics may not be printed. I presume that there are still
ways of circumventing these strictures but certainly they
do not serve the advancement of science.
No LESS SERIOUS IS THE STATE CONTROL OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
Where once free discussion was expected, only such mat-
ters can be discussed that have approval of the state and
since by the latest orders all criticism is forbidden the
voices of those courageous souls who might venture to
disagree will be stilled.
The very soul of intellectual life lies in the clash of
opinion, in the opportunity to thrash out the problems
that beset us.
It may be that the practical exploitation of physics and
chemistry demanded by the exigencies of the economic
situation and fostered in polytechnic schools will continue.
The present tendency, however, seems to be to look too
much at immediate practical results and to disregard the
importance of the advance of fundamental theory on
which the greatness of German industry was founded.
Of late its importance has come to be recognized by our
great American manufacturing concerns in which insti-
tutes of physical and chemical research are maintained
that do not look always forward to immediate practical
results.
THE PROBABILITY IS THAT GERMAN SCIENCE WILL DECAY, IF
the present situation continues for any length of time.
There are still enough men trained under the Empire and
Republic who are competent and capable to carry on the
old tradition, although many of the best have been driven
out or are on the point of leaving. When their place will
be taken by the younger generation, selected not accord-
ing to ability but according to length of membership in
the party the most dismal results may be foreseen. The
light that shone forth from school and university, from
laboratory and quiet study will be dimmed and infinite
labor and time will be needed to reestablish what has
been lost.
AUGUST 1937
417
Tenant Into Owner
by JOANNA C. COLCORD
In the Dyess "colony" the federal government is trying to build a real com-
munity out of a chance-gathered collection of relief clients. A Survey editor
drops in, and discovers that the experiment is something to write home about.
"WHATEVER HAS HAPPENED TO THOSE FERA REHABILITATION
colonies?" is a question one sometimes hears asked. Find-
ing herself just across the broad Mississippi from the
Dyess Colony, a wandering contributing editor decided
to go and find out.
It was Memorial Sunday, and hot as only the bottom
lands can be that border on Old Man River. Elsewhere
in the South, they celebrate their own Memorial Day for
the boys in grey; but Dyess is federal property, so flags
were hung out and there was a ball game on the village
green. E. S. Dudley, resident manager of the colony, who
drove us from Memphis into Mississippi County, Arkan-
sas, where the colony is situated, outlined its history on
the way. Conceived in the mind of the late W. R. Dyess,
state relief administrator for Arkansas, and strongly
backed by Col. Lawrence Westbrook, who still serves as
managing counsel to the enterprise, the first steps were
taken in 1933 when a grant of several million dollars was
secured from the FERA for the establishment of a reha-
bilitation colony in Arkansas, and a holding corporation
was formed, with three ex-orficio shareholders who re-
ceive neither salaries nor profits. The funds are to be
administered for relief in the State of Arkansas, and can
neither be recovered by the federal government nor divert-
ed to other purposes by the state.
It was known that much valuable agricultural land
lay uncleared along the Mississippi bottoms. Surveys were
made, and several parcels of land were acquired along the
little Tyronza River which flows into the Mississippi.
Most of it was in "bush," some virgin timber, some second
growth. Owners of large tracts had been unable to meet
assessments for drainage canals and the property had re-
verted to the state for taxes. This land the corporation
secured for $2.50 an acre. Other tracts which had been
acquired solely on account
of the standing timber by
a now bankrupt box-and-
crate manufacturing con-
cern, came a little higher,
but in all, 16,000 acres
were secured at an average
cost of $6 per acre. So rich
and deep is the alluvial de-
posit from countless floods
— the topsoil is over 40 feet
deep in most parts — that
no fertilizer is ever needed,
and a simple crop rotation
system is all that is re-
quired to maintain fertil-
ity. It is stated that the
same land, cleared, sells
for $60 or more an acre.
Clearing the timber on the future farmland
It was decided to restrict the colony to whites, and
that 500 families would be the optimum size for a rehabil-
itation project, but before they could be selected and
placed on the land, much preliminary investment had to
be made. Roads had to be driven in, a drainage system
completed, a central village site cleared and graded, and
buildings constructed to house the administration and cen-
tral services, as well as dwellings to shelter the employed
personnel. Construction was begun in May 1934, and the
process of selecting colonists started during the summer.
In October of that year, the "original thirteen" colonists
had been accepted. They were nominated by county Rural
Rehabilitation staff, and investigated by county ERC
staff. Physical health, age, previous farming experience,
and adaptability, were all considered. Nevertheless, there
remains in the mind of the management a feeling that
there was some "dumping" of unwanted problems in the
early stages, and that better results were secured after
selection was left entirely to people with agricultural
training. After trial on the land, 125 families have moved
off of their own accord or been dismissed.
IN PREPARATION FOR RECEIVING THE COLONISTS, HOMES1TES
were cleared and homes constructed. These are simple
frame dwellings, white with green trim, and while the
style of architecture is similar throughout, no two are
precisely alike and monotony is avoided. Care was taken
not to denude the homesites of trees, enough being left
for shade and beauty. There are 206 five-room cottages,
233 four-room, and 61 three-room at present on the colony,
and all but fifteen are occupied. Each house has a water
supply, with plumbing, bath and septic tank, and each is
wired for electricity which a project of the Rural Electri-
fication Corporation is expected to make available within
another year. Each house
has a barn and poultry
houses, and smokehouses
are being constructed for
each. In addition, forty
houses at the "center"
are rented to employes
of the management.
The farmsites, of twen-
ty, thirty or forty acres,
according to size of house
and family it is to accom-
modate, were not cleared
when the settlers moved
in. The plan was adopted
of fixing a selling price
for the land as if cleared,
and paying the farmers
work relief wages of $15
418
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A typical three-room farmhouse
an acre while logging off their own land. This fur-
nished firewood and a cash income at the outset,
supplemented by the system of advances of seeds, tools,
livestock and subsistence goods which is universally
known throughout the South as "furnish." In all, a capita!
outlay of over $3 million has been made of which $315,000
has been these advances in kind made to settlers. It was
stated that enough funds remain from the original grant
to insure operating costs at the present rate for from ten
to fifteen years, if that should prove necessary.
The "furnish debt" is a prior lien on the crops raised
by colonists. It is expected that the majority will clear off
their "furnish debt" this fall, and start 1938 with a clean
slate. Otherwise the corporation has not been precipitate
in presenting contracts for signature, preferring to try the
families out and make sure they want to stay. The first
deeds are only now ready to pass and new families will
be on probation from six months to a year. The agree-
ments, when signed, will call for easy payments, averaging
$120 a year plus taxes, over thirty years. Earlier clearance
of the mortgage will be encouraged when possible. Total
additional outlay for electricity and maintenance will
average per family perhaps another $100 per year.
It is obligatory that each family raise a kitchen garden
and set aside enough land to provide grain and forage
for its livestock. The chief cash crop will be cotton, the
land being capable of producing a bale an acre. Standard-
ized seed will be used, grown on the central experimental
farm and producing a superior variety of cotton; and the
surplus seed can be sold outside for more than it is worth
for oil and cake. With what the farm family can pick up
in the way of selling poultry, fruit and vegetables, and
with odd jobs in the winter, it is believed that each can
count on a gross annual cash income of from $500 to
$700, in addition to what they consume from their own
products. Since only 9000 acres are at present in cultiva-
tion, this estimate has not been checked, and the present
growing season is the first during which it can be put to
the test.
Cooperation in purchasing, processing and marketing
is the keystone of the Dyess plan. Common services which
are at present either self-supporting or showing a surplus
are:
1. The general store, managed like any cooperative store,
the colonists purchasing by coupons and receiving regular
dividends from profits.
Moving in
2. The cafe, which serves a full meal for as low as 29
cents.
3. The hospital, with a capacity of sixty patients. Since it
is the only hospital in the region, it serves both the colonists
and their neighbors, but on a strictly pay basis. For the pres-
ent, medical service to colonists is charged against their "fur-
nish debt."
4. The cotton gin.
5. The central canning factory.
6. A variety of minor enterprises including a barber shop,
a sorghum mill, a feed mill, a garage, an ice house, a service
station, a sawmill, and several warehouses.
Products may be shipped either via the barge system on
the Mississippi, twenty-five miles away, or by railroad
through a spur line which runs to the colony.
OTHER COMMON SERVICES WHICH ARE NOT SELF-SUPPORTING,
and which require additional paid personnel of twen-
ty-three, include general administration, farm supervision,
recreation and home demonstration work. A central com-
munity building is temporarily used as a school, but with
the completion of a new highschool now under construc-
tion on the property as a PWA project, this building will
be returned to its original purpose.
Church services held in the community center must be
undenominational; but any church group which wants
to erect a chapel will be furnished land on which to build.
There are four grade schools scattered about the property,
employing twenty-four teachers and teaching 1200 chil-
dren; but these are part of the local school district system,
and together with the new highschool, will be supported
from the taxes which will be paid by the colonists.
Up to now, the corporation has paid taxes in full on its
holdings.
As far as the unpracticed eye can see, Dyess is a going
concern. The young cotton is shooting from the black,
black gumbo soil; the alfalfa hides it with a curtain of
green and furnishes four or five crops a year. Mules, cows,
pigs and poultry look thrifty and well cared for. Most of
the yards are full of posies; most of the gardens are well
tended. Overalled boys, with fishing poles on shoulder,
and pig-tailed little girls on their way to pick berries, look
as rosy and happy as all children should be. An advisory
council of the fathers of the flock is developing leadership
among the men; home demonstration clubs that meet in
the homes are doing the same for the mothers. The Colony
Herald, now in its second volume, brings the news and
AUGUST 1937
419
The children's ward of the community hospital
preaches the gospel of cooperation to the settlers. There
have already been a few marriages among the older lads
and lasses and a tract is being reserved to provide homes
for this new generation if they elect to stay. Six new babies
came into the colony via the hospital in April. Vigorous
anti-malaria treatment, the screening of all houses and
instruction in health and nutrition are said to have
raised remarkably the general health conditions of the
settlers in the two years they have been actually in
residence.
Yet a number of questions rise in the mind of the be-
holder. Some of them were given expression in subse-
quent interviews with the promoters of the enterprise.
DOES THE DYESS SCHEME OFFER ANY SOLUTION TO THE
problems of tenant-farming and sharecropping in the
South? We cannot tell that yet, says Mr. Dudley; but it
is true that already we can note a diminution in the criti-
cism and hostility of independent landlords, and one large
plantation owner, whose fields border on the colony, has
already pulled down the hovels in which his tenants were
formerly housed, built decent cottages and embarked on
cooperative buying and selling with his tenants.
Can a chance-gathered collection of relief clients be
made into a real community and taught to live the co-
operative life? Not easily, Mr. Dudley admits; but before
the payments are completed, the children will have
grown, and there is more hope of training them in the
cooperative way than of remolding the habits of the par-
ents. And yet — "What was the thing that first made you
feel you wanted to stay and help build Dyess?" we asked
one woman as we sat by her fireside. "That's easy — it was
the Home Demonstration Club," she answered with
shining eyes. "It taught me what working together
meant."
Supposing the 500 families succeed in paying for their
farms, how can they be expected to purchase and there-
after maintain the central services now being run for them
by the corporation? Can the corporation ever withdraw
its guiding hand and leave the colonists to direct their
own destinies? Floyd Sharp, WPA director in Arkansas
who carries a union labor card himself, points out that
most of the central services are self-supporting already;
and that management of the others can be assumed by the
colonists themselves little by little, as leadership abilities
develop. Before that time comes, other cooperative ven-
420
tures in production will be developed by the corporation
to the point of self-support and beyond it if possible — in
particular a furniture-making plant and a factory for the
production of working clothes for men, women and chil-
dren, which is projected for the immediate future. "Our
problem is to get these people over the habit of looking to
and leaning on others for direction and support," he says.
"The natural resources are there, and within ten or fif-
teen years we ought to be able to develop the human
material so as to be able to utilize it."
And finally, is an investment of $3 million in relief
funds to benefit only 500 families, a justifiable one? Bear
in mind, says Mr. Sharp, that this outlay is not to be con-
sumed by the families benefited, as ordinary relief expen-
ditures are consumed merely to maintain life, but is to be
the means of maintaining them, if they use the opportun-
ity rightly, for the rest of their natural lives, and to do the
same for some of their children after them. After the
titles to the properties pass to the colonists individually,
there will be no way to prevent their selling out if they
wish to do so; but by that time it is hoped they will have
learned how to make themselves better off at Dyess than
they could be elsewhere. Meantime, the value of land
and buildings is ample surety for the monies invested;
and as fast as the individual debts are retired, the funds
recovered can be used by the corporation to start other
colonies. In fact, a similar project for Negro families is
already being planned.
None of these answers is final. No one claims to have
made more than a beginning. The human material at
Dyess is not as favored by nature as are the material re-
sources. The process of cutting the leading strings, of
forcing the colonists to assume their own destinies, will
call for patience, understanding, persistence, decision.
Vicissitudes will be encountered. Already a very minor
wash of flood water, which caused no damage to build-
ings, led to wholesale evacuation of the settlement for a
few weeks, and Memphis, which had to care for the refu-
gee settlement, wonders about Dyess. Its infant fortunes
may suffer serious ups and downs with the price of cot-
ton. More basic changes in values may endanger the
relations of the corporation and the home purchasers, as
has happened in recent years with similar enterprises. The
most that can be said is that here a group of hitherto sub-
merged people is to be taught to want better things and
shown how they may secure them. We shall watch its
future with interest and wish it well.
A Sunday School class at the community center
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Tax for Democracy!
by DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE
Now we must tax to balance the budget, says Mr. Coyle, and, even
more important, we must tax to preserve capitalism and competition as
the breeding ground of free men.
THE DEPRESSION WAS EASY. IT IS THE BOOM THAT WILL TEST
American democracy. It was easy to spend borrowed
money; but the idea of taxing to pay the national debt
makes shivers go down the spines of Congressmen. The
Congressmen may well shiver, for any government that
cannot tax is going to have unpleasant things happen to
it. The power to tax is the power to survive.
Taxation is much more than a means of collecting
money to balance the budget or to pay the public debt.
Taxation is the most powerful of the instruments by
which a democratic nation can protect its liberties and
its form of government. For a democratic government,
like any other, has to govern. It cannot allow any private
power to rule the people in defiance of the people's will.
In ancient Athens every year the people were asked
whether there should be an "ostracism." If the answer was
yes, an election was held and each citizen voted, by
secret ballot, the name of any man whom he regarded
as too powerful to be safe. If 6000 votes were cast, the man
who was elected had to leave the country for ten years.
Ostracism is too crude a method for a modern democ-
racy, but the need for keeping private powers within
bounds is no less pressing today than it was in Athens
2400 years ago.
Small business men and other "middle class" people
who fear dictatorships and regimentation are sometimes
unwisely carefree about the growth of private economic
powers which have not yet reached out to stifle them per-
sonally. They retain their traditional distrust of govern-
ment and their love of individual freedom, even though
certain individuals may be corralling all the freedom and
leaving the majority of citizens with only the right to
vote, sometimes not even with that. The fact is that now,
as so often in the history of democracy, the common man
has to grasp the weapon of democratic government to
protect his liberties. We have to stick together or we
shall be stuck separately.
Our country has been struggling with the private
powers of big business and high finance for the past fifty
years with indifferent success. Of late two new powers
have risen to combat the powers of Wall Street. First
the farmers, in an effort to restore the balance between
farm prices and industrial prices, obtained government
help through the AAA. Now comes the CIO to organize
labor into unions which may be strong enough to hold
their own against General Motors and U. S. Steel.
The manager of a factory employing some 3000 men
was discussing the problem of whether to meet the CIO
half way or whether to sit tight and hope for a turn of
the tide. He had little to fear within his own organiza-
tion for the union men were already active in the plant
councils and were, as he said, a most reasonable lot.
But he stuck at yielding to John L. Lewis, for the perfectly
good American reason that he feared the power of na-
tionally organized labor controlled by one man. He was
less impressed with the need for enlarged government
control over big business because his company happens
to be strong enough to hold its own with the help of
the present anti-trust laws.
But the American people have to look with a cautious
eye, not only at organized labor, organized farmers, and
all other powerful organizations, but also at the mother
of them all, organized finance. So long as high finance
extends its controls by mergers, interlocking directorates,
holding companies and centralized banking, farmers and
workers cannot escape the necessity for national organi-
zation in self-defense. The total effect is that the country
is divided into contending factions, each one trying to
restrict production so as to get a larger share of a smaller
national income. Fighting fire with fire, they burn up
the house.
OUT OF THIS SYSTEM OF COMPETITIVE SCARCITY THERE SEEM
to be only two ways of escape. One is the way of dic-
tatorship. Some one of the private powers may grow so
strong as to take over the government, as high finance has
done in Italy and Germany, and as labor has done in
Russia. It might happen here. The other way is for the
national government to strengthen itself, as it is doing in
the other democracies of the world, until perhaps it may
control the power of high finance and make it unneces-
sary for other organizations to grow dangerous. The
survival of democratic processes depends on the effective
power of democratic government.
The main job of democratic government in modern
conditions is to keep the economic system in a balance
which allows high production, instead of letting it de-
generate into the wasteful balance of conflicting interests
from which we now suffer. Economic balance has to be
intelligently created, or it will create itself at starvation
levels. The balance between saving and spending has
to be made right, or excessive savings will regulate them-
selves by excessive bankruptcy as they did after 1929. The
balance between creditor areas in the Northeast and the
debtor areas of the South and West has to be redressed
by government, or else it will redress itself at a low
level by foreclosures and growing poverty. The balance
between rich and poor has to be corrected by government,
or it will correct itself by collapse of the national eco-
nomic system leading at the extreme to revolution. For
all these problems in economic balance, the federal tax
system is the most potent instrument of government
action.
The American people have used taxation as an instru-
AUGUST 1937
421
ment of control ever since the First Congress when
Alexander Hamilton obtained the passage of a protective
tariff. The purpose of the tariff was to shift the emphasis
of American development toward manufacturing so as
to free this country from dependence on England. This
purpose was successfully accomplished. But although the
tariff was successful as an instrument of economic plan-
ning, the people were not led to any wide expansion of
the tax method of control. Slate bank notes were elim-
inated by a prohibitive tax of 10 percent; oleomargarine
was taxed to protect butter, but that is about the whole
list down to 1913. Then came the income tax, followed
by the excess profits tax during the war, both designed
to restrict the overgrowth of great fortunes. In the main,
however, we have tried to control our affairs principally
by exhortation and prohibition, neither of which are
notably successful among the individualistic people of
our country. With the Great Depression and the over-
throw of Big Business in government, the time came for
a larger use of taxes as economic instruments.
The New Deal has begun to use taxation for purposes
of economic adjustment, but the principle has not been
fully recognized in Congress nor fully accepted by the
people. Most of the work is still to be done.
Budget policies have so far been generally sound, bin
perhaps more by necessity than by clear public under-
standing. The federal budget is our greatest example of
what the experts call an "open market operation." That
is, the government, by buying goods and hiring labor,
and by borrowing or taxing, pumps money into the na-
tional pocket or draws money out, as the case may be.
A "deficit" occurs when the Treasury is pumping money
into the nation; a "surplus" when the Treasury is taking
money out of the nation. The budget should therefore be
so managed as to run a large deficit in depression, when
the people are short of money, and a large surplus in
boom times when money is over plentiful. Under Mr.
Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt we have had deficits which
restored all the money destroyed by the panic, and a little
more. Now it is time to start having a surplus, to keep
business and finance from getting high blood pressure.
New Dealers and Old Dealers agree that the time
for surplus has come, but there is plenty of disagreement
about whether the correct way to create a surplus is by
less spending or by more taxes. That brings up the ques-
tion of the proper size of the federal budget.
The budget has to be large enough to do the work
that must be done. In a rough way you can judge by the
amount of unemployment. So long as many potential
workers are idle, the budget is too small. If high unem-
ployment and symptoms of boom come together as they
do now, that is a sign that the government ought to
spend more, and tax enough to create a surplus. A Con-
gressman's life may not be a happy one, but facts are
facts, and the fact now is that we need more and better
taxes.
Another line on the proper size of the budget can be
found in consideration of the waste of natural resources.
The American people have always run an unbalanced
budget with nature. We are so used to living on our
capital that it hardly seems immoral. We have the Midas
touch, that turns fertile wealth into sterile gold.
The other day a conservative, viewing higher income
taxes with alarm, cited the case of a man who had made
a large fortune in lumber. "After all, this man had added
422
millions to the national wealth; why should he not be
rewarded with a million or two for himself?" But in
making his fortune this man had left a wide trail of
cutover land where the national wealth had been de-
stroyed. Why should not the profits from destruction of
the forest be taxed to help replant the forest? Dollar
wealth is often created by destroying real wealth; it is time
dollars should be used to preserve and rebuild the capital
assets of the nation.
We are cutting more timber than we grow. We are
blowing as much natural gas into the air in the Texas
Panhandle as all the gas that is burned in the United
States. We have already lost $10 billion in land values by
soil erosion, which is no measure of the eternal loss of
land forever made useless.
We are rich enough to sacrifice our wealth on the altar
of money, but we are too poor to fight insect pests and
disease. When the grasshoppers came last year, we saved
a few million dollars on poison and lost a hundred mil-
lion. We let the boll-weevil sweep the country, and the
corn-borer march across the Middlewest. The chestnut
blight won a mighty victory. Economy did it.
Our people have suffered losses in this depression that
are not measured in the mere 200 billions that dropped
out of the national income. Health and skill and morale
were allowed to go by the board while we tried to keep
down the money deficit. Now we need to train or re-
train at least a million men a year to fit them for jobs
Where is the money coming from? Not out of a budget
balanced by cutting expenses.
So long as federal money is needed to save the land,
the forests, the minerals and the people, to balance our
economic budget and preserve the capital wealth of Amer-
ica, there is no balance of the Treasury books that means
anything. To balance the federal budget by disregarding
the waste of national wealth is to eat our patrimony with
a vengeance.
The times call for more and better taxes. Also, there
are jobs to be done that can best be done through well
designed taxation.
The personal income tax in our country is too small
Halliday in the Providence Journal
Well, which is it?
SURVEY GRAPHIC
to give proper results. The income tax is really in two
parts: the high brackets and the lower brackets. Both
should be increased, for different reasons. The high
bracket taxes should be increased beyond the "point ol
diminishing return," that is, they should be used to elim-
inate overgrown incomes rather than to get revenue.
This is the missing element in the New Deal effort to
overcome high finance. Prohibiting the activities of finan-
cial operators, while leaving them the means to corrupt
legislatures and confuse the courts, is largely useless.
The middle and lower brackets of the income tax, on
the other hand, are the most proper source of revenue.
They take money from the taxpayer in proportion to his
power to save and invest. High middle-bracket taxes are
the prime means for redressing the unbalance between
saving and spending. The larger the income, the more is
saved; the smaller the income, the more is spent. There-
» i^iwi^ic *r^tft&"-/&fin
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(iale in tr,
"Old Faithful"
IMS Angeles Examiner
fore if income taxes are higher, more money will be
taken from savers and turned into spending. There will
be more market for goods and services, the national in-
come will be increased, and people will have more money
to pay taxes with. Since we need more revenue with
which to hire the unemployed workers for conservation,
this is the answer.
Higher income taxes will cut down the surplus money
income available for speculation. If the government can
have a budget surplus drawn from income taxes it will
be extracting money from Wall Street. That is the way to
prevent a stock market boom.
Along with higher income taxes should go a policy of
reducing or eliminating sales taxes. Whereas income tax-
ation increases income, sales taxation decreases sales. In
fact, a reduction of sales taxes is practically as good for
business as an increase in public spending. In some ways
Chamberlain for King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Isn't your friend leaving with you?
it is better because it makes for simplicity in government.
Reform of those taxes which affect distribution of in-
come is the first requirement of a well planned tax sys-
tem. Secondary but still important are a series of taxes
tor the control of business practices.
A well established policy is the taxation of "capital
gains," or profits from buying and selling property. This
tax is under constant fire because it interferes with gam-
bling in securities and land — a habit that is deeply in-
grained in our pioneer tradition. But although doctors
and lawyers, bishops, and poor widows, have always
gambled in land and sometimes in stocks, the fact re-
mains that to use the means of production as poker chips
is intolerably dangerous. Lotteries and horse racing, if
honestly run, would be far less harmful, and the tax laws
should therefore give no advantage to those who want
to gamble in the life blood of industry.
Another regulatory tax is the graduated tax on corpora-
tion incomes. Although the graduation of personal in-
come taxes is based on ability to pay, the similar tax on
corporation incomes has no relation to ability to pay.
It is a tax to control. A particular big corporation may be
highly efficient and useful; a small one may be no better
than a racket — but big business is frequently a threat
to the liberty of the people and little business is not. Also
keeping order among giant corporations is expensive.
Moreover, if a big company is not really as efficient as
its small competitors, the extra tax may sometimes be
enough to overbalance the power of mere size and let
the little fellows take the business.
Closely related to the graduated tax is the new tax
on undivided corporate profits. The present law has been
justly criticized for several mistakes in detail. For in-
stance, there is no point in applying this tax to cor-
porations that make less than $15,000 a year. The defini-
AUGUST 1937
423
tions of profit under the law are not always in line with
the real situation of the corporation. Corporations, like
the government, should be allowed to go in the red part
of the time and balance their losses by profits in later
years without being penalized. If the law were amended
to spread the bookkeeping over several years, to give a
true definition of profit and loss, and exempt small com-
panies, most of the legitimate criticisms would be met.
THE MAIN FOUNDATION OF THE UNDIVIDED PROFITS TAX IS IN
three parts. First, a corporation should not be allowed
to reinvest the income of its stockholders for them, so as
to protect the rich stockholders from the income tax.
This practice has been one of the biggest holes in the
income tax, and it explains a good deal of the opposition
to the present law. Second, no corporation should be
allowed to invest the income of any stockholder without
first sending him the money and then asking if he wants
to invest it in additional stock. This is to cut down the
arbitrary power of managers to play games with the
stockholders' money regardless of the consent of the real
owners, and sometimes even against the owners' inter-
est. Naturally some corporation officers dislike losing their
freedom to control other people's money. Third, no cor-
poration that wants to set up a surplus of cash against a
rainy day should be allowed to do anything with the
money except hold it in cash. This is to prevent using
the cash to help blow up the stock market at the top of a
boom, or investing it in various things that have no value
when hard times come. Business men talk about a cash
nest egg, but they are somewhat vague about what they
mean. The law should be amended to exempt a fair
amount of surplus, if held as real cash.
Another kind of tax for regulating business is the tax
on dividends paid by one corporation to another. The
object of this tax is to put a penalty on complicated
interlocked companies. The lawyers have built up a web
of darkness in American business in which inefficient
management goes unpunished, markets are manipulated,
stockholders are deprived of their dividends, and taxable
incomes are hidden. Whatever advantages there may be
in all this network, its overall results are not compatible
with a free and intelligent democracy. Complexity is a
means of confounding the minds of simple men, and an
"electorate of bewildered voters is hard put to it to choose
wise policies. A heavy tax on darkness is an essential
instrument of freedom.
The real purpose back of all these varied tax measures,
from income taxes to corporation taxes, is the restoration
and protection of capitalism, believe it or not. Capitalism
is another name for small business, competing, either
on price or on quality, in a free market. Big business,
controlling prices and production, abolishing by force the
law of supply and demand, and crushing competition,
is a disease of capitalism. The job of government is to
cure or control that disease. Some big businesses can be
broken down into competing elements, others are nat-
urally monopolistic and will have to be controlled or
owned by the government. By one means or the other,
small competing business has to be freed from the rackets
of the upper world as well as from the rackets of the
underworld. Taxes are a main instrument in the build-
ing of a wall of protection within which capitalism can
survive.
The resulting economic order will not be a capitalist
system as a whole. It will be made up of at least five
systems— as it is now— but with a change of emphasis.
They are: 1. Small business, or capitalism. 2. Big busi-
ness, a few relics, carefully w.itched. 3. Private non-profit
institutions, from churches to country clubs. 4. Coopera-
tives. 5. Government services, considerably enlarged to
include real conservation.
In this picture the capitalist profit system has an im-
portant place as the breeding ground of free men and the
guarantee of free speech. With all its faults and wastes,
an area of economic action where a man can make a liv-
ing without being subject to centralized planning is a
necessary organ of democracy. Even the wage worker
would be more nearly free in a world of competing busi-
nesses than in any other that we can imagine. Like his
employer, he has lost his liberty by the growth of cen-
tralized private finance. The blacklist and the company
town and, for that matter, the nation-wide labor union,
are functions not of competition but of the lack of com-
petition.
The technical utility of freedom needs to be studied and
defined. It is related not only to the flow of criticism
which becomes all the more essential as the rate of social
change speeds up; it is also involved in the need for a
personnel capable of handling executive decisions on all
levels of organization. An example of the automatic
sabotage of executive responsibility appears to have oc-
curred in Russia following the punishment of prominent
executives. An increase in "paper work" is believed to in-
dicate buck-passing by lower executives to their superiors,
as so often happens in American corporations and gov-
ernments when punishment for errors outweighs rewards
for success. Freedom to "go somewhere else" is essential
to the maximum development of efficiency in organiza-
tion. A viable economic system using high technology will
apparently need free areas of action even more than a
primitive system.
THE BASIS OF DEMOCRACY THEN IS COMPOSED OF VARIOUS
old and well tried elements which need to be rearranged
and strengthened with changing times. First is freedom
of discussion, by which all policies, even the form of the
system itself, may be criticized and kept up to date. Sec-
ond is the power of democratic government to control all
private powers that may arise, so that none may destroy
the necessary liberties of the people. Third is a system of
economic policy that will conserve the capital resources of
the nation and at the same time release its productive
powers to the full extent of its material, technological
and human possibilities. To meet these requirements,
democratic nations have to strengthen their powers of
government without relinquishing the people's control
over the government's policies. The taxing and spending
systems are means by which power can be used with a
minimum of regimentation.
In these times, when immense social forces have to be
socially controlled, the power of taxation stands out as the
main road to freedom. For the alternative is control by
centralized planning of production and distribution, that
is, by dictatorship. And dictatorship cannot permit free-
dom. Dictators tax the people too. We can choose whether
to tax ourselves to protect our liberty or whether to lose
our liberty and be taxed anyway. Representation with
niggardly taxation is the road to taxation without repre-
sentation.
424
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Cardenas-That Is the Way He Is
by FRANK TANNENBAUM
Not an essay on Mexico but an impression of its president by
an American who for two months watched him deal directly
with the people and the problems of remote villages.
"SOMEONE WILL KILL YOU," I REMARKED ONCE TO PRESIDENT
Cardenas of Mexico as I heard him object to an escort ol
military guards. He replied, "It is better to die trying to
do good than to keep oneself alive by evil methods." Gen-
eral Lazaro Cardenas is very stubborn about the things
he is sure of. He is sure that he wants no elaborate protec-
tion. His is the only train in Mexico that does not carry
military guards. One day a guard was attached to his train;
on our arrival in Torreon, he ordered the car of soldiers
left on a siding. I heard the military commander in one city
say to the officer of the day, "Keep the soldiers out of sight
and don't permit them to go past his window. If he knows
they are here he will send them away." He has always
been like that, say those who know him best. He belongs
to the people and will not permit anyone to stand between
him and them.
In the state of Hidalgo while he was on his way to in-
spect a new dam that was to irrigate thousands of acres of
dust driven lands occupied by the Otomi Indians, the chief
of military operations said rather diffidently : "Mi General,
if you find a few soldiers out at the dam, blame them on
me. After all when you are in my district I am responsi-
ble for your safety."
"But," objected General Cardenas, "if the president of
the country isn't safe in Mexico, who is?"
"He loves to mix with the crowd," a friend explained
to me. "On the sixteenth of September for instance he
likes to leave the palace and mix with the people on the
streets." I was to see something of that myself. In Actopan,
at night, the President sat on a park bench — with hundreds
of people, mainly Indians, crowding about him. In a hill
town in the state of San Luis Potosi where there were no
street lights, he sat himself down in the little plaza among
the people, who crowded about him late into the night
talking and jesting, answering questions and listening to
tales. I recall how in Saltillo he stood on the sidewalk for
over two hours, leaning against the door of the local
palace, receiving people — masses of them — and he was
alone except for a secretary who took down his answers to
the problems and questions that were laid before him.
"There is nothing to do about it," one of the officers said
to me. "Asi es," that is the way he is.
The Indians gather and make long speeches to him.
They lack brevity. They stand before him with their hats
in their hands — sometimes he makes them sit down beside
him — and they explain their needs, problems, aspirations,
the difficulties of their life. They have come to him for suc-
cor. And he listens for hours without showing fatigue or
impatience. When I spoke of the way he taxed himself, he
replied, "For Dios, these people need so much. At least
patience I have to give them."
I traveled with him for two long months over northern
AUGUST 1937
Mexico — by automobile, train, horseback, on foot. We slept
where we could, in hotels, in private homes, under the
sky in the desert between Coahuila and Chihuahua. Dur-
ing this time he probably never slept more than four
hours a night, yet never seemed tired or bored, although
people everywhere crowded about him. The meanest, the
humblest always received an audience. The day would
begin at six in the morning and end at twelve at night,
sometimes later. In one place we waited for supper till
midnight, and after that the President stood talking for
two hours with a friend. Next morning he seemed as
fresh and energetic as ever.
WHEN I SUGGESTED THAT HE MIGHT BREAK DOWN AT THE
pace he was going, he replied, "No, I am feeling fine and
am in good health." And then reflectively, "A man is like
a race horse. The horse gets years of care just for one short
race. Well, I have been brought up and cared for for many
years — now it is my turn to be used and if necessary to be
used up." I returned later to the subject of his driving
energy. "I have always been that way. I remember when
I was a little boy, I would work till late in the night and
my mother would have to come and take the hammer
away from me. I was never tired." His friends say: "Asi
es. That is the way he is. We who have been with him
for these many years understand his ways. Why, when he
was a colonel in the army or even only a captain, he was
like that. There was always something to do — the barracks
to paint, the roof to re-cover, the street to pave; there were
schools to organize for the soldiers and for the children;
and then there were always the peasants to help. He found
things to keep him busy all day long."
On this long journey the presidential party varied from
day to day. Sometimes there were as many as fifty people,
at times only a dozen. The President always knew their
names, who they were, why they were there. In places
where there were no hotels he would make sure that
everyone had a place to sleep, and that everyone had eaten.
425
When he first invited me to go with him on a trip he
said, "We can go wherever it pleases you most." I objected,
saying that we should go wherever he felt it most neces-
sary to go. His reply was revealing. "It does not really
matter. I cannot solve all of the problems of the villages in
one visit, so I return when I can conveniently."
The President spends the greater part of his time travel-
ing in the country. It is out there that the most pressing
problems exist — and it is there, away from Mexico City,
that the least attention has been paid to the needs of the
people. In fact, when he was still a candidate, he spent an
entire year on horseback traveling over every out of the
way corner of Mexico to become acquainted with the
needs of the communities. He kept a record of these com-
munities, of their needs and his promises to them; and
these visits about the country now are an attempt to ful-
fill the promises made then. The problems are in a sense
simple: this community needs a school, that community
desires an irrigation dam, another has to have a road, still
another wants land — problems from previous neglect and
from poverty. Mexico City has its own ways of life and
its own resources. It has a long tradition of growth and
expansion. But the little villages have remained neglected
and exploited for so long that the coming of the chief
magistrate with the offer of meeting their immediate and
most obvious problems is like a gift from heaven. They
really ask for little, but the little frequently is for them
the substance of life.
THE GREAT PROBLEM IS OF COURSE THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM —
and will remain so for years to come. In this matter as in
most others, the President takes a direct approach. What
the people need is land. That is what the revolution was
about. And so far as General Cardenas is concerned the
promise of the revolution in land distribution is going to
be fulfilled. He said once, "Before I leave office I will solve
the agrarian problem."
"Why does it seem so imperative to you to give the peo-
ple the land?" I asked.
"Because," he declared, "a peon cannot be a citizen. No
one can be a citizen unless he walks on something that is
his own."
That 'is the philosophy of the matter. Mexico's rural
population has never played the role of active citizenship.
They belonged to the land and the land they tilled be-
longed to others. In fact they had neither property nor
rights. The peon was not a citizen. He was barely a man.
And the President feels that to be a citizen one must be
free — and freedom in a rural area means walking on some-
thing that is one's own.
There is on his part a deeply intuitive sense of human
values that is independent of any doctrinal concepts or
ideas. For a man who has been a general — and a successful
one — who has spent the greater part of his life in active
warfare during twenty years of revolution, who began as
a private soldier and worked his way up in the Mexican
army during years of bitter conflict and passion driven like
storms, frequently without visible direction, he has an
almost mystic sense of the value of the individual. I sup-
pose that is his outstanding characteristic. I never discov-
ered any doctrine, any over-verbalized philosophy, so
popular among Mexican intellectuals, only that insight
into human weakness and sense that the human being
could grow to fuller status if given the opportunity. Over
and over again he put it into words: the people are as
they are, because they had had no opportunity to grow, no
opportunity to be free.
President Cardenas sees it as his mission in Mexico to
make them free. That means to destroy the dominant
plantation system and convert the peon into a citizen by
giving him some land. The emphasis is upon the ejiiio,
the communal or semi-communal form of land ownership.
Where it is difficult to achieve that directly, he hopes to
come at it through cooperative credit institutions which
make possible common use of resources and tools. And
here, too, not because of doctrinal position, but because
that is the traditional way of life among the Mexican
Indians. Freedom has meant freedom for the community.
Only when the community — the rural village that is — is
free, is the individual free.
One day while traveling on horseback through Western
Coahuila on our way to Chihuahua, we stopped for break-
fast at a plantation. The owner, surprised at the unexpected
visit of the President of the republic did his best. When
we departed he accompanied us. Some two hours later
we came upon a number of burned houses and a group
of Mexican peons waiting submissively for the presidential
party to arrive. It gradually dawned on us that here was
one of those Mexican tragedies so frequent during the last
twenty years. Some weeks before our coming the land-
owner, our host at breakfast who had come with us, had
ordered the homes of some twenty families burned and
the people driven off the land on which they had lived for
many years. He had been afraid that these peons might
one day ask for land — and he thought he could save him-
self trouble. It was a dramatic scene. Here, on a rolling
plain under a clear morning sky, were the charred ruins
of houses, the homeless peons with their wives and chil-
dren, the presidential party of about twenty people, and tne
plantation owner, a young man with good education and
cultivated manners. When the story became clear, the
President asked the young man quietly, "How much land
have you?"
"Here we have 60,000 hectares. Over there in the next
county we have 95,000 hectares, and then we have 30,000
hectares in Durango and 10,000 hectares in Chihuahua."
"And you were not ashamed to burn the houses of a
few poor peons because they too wanted a little piece of
land?" There was no answer to that.
"Don't you know," continued the President, "that it is
the duty of the rich and the fortunate to help the poor?"
"Si Senor." There was something that could be answered.
"And don't you know, persisted the President, "that it is
the duty of the government to help these poor peons to
become citizens? How can we ever become a great nation
unless we treat the people with justice and make citizens
out of our large number of peons?"
To this too there was an answer. "Si Senor."
TURNING FROM THE CONFUSED AND RATHER DISTURBED LAND-
owner the President ordered the head of the Agrarian
Commission, who was with us, to leave one of the engi-
neers behind to rebuild the houses immediately, to supply
the people with tools and animals, to survey the land they
needed and give it to them as soon as possible. He then
called the military commander of the district who was also
in the party and ordered him to arm the peasants, saying,
"I want the rifles and the plows to be here together, and
that not later than ten days from this date." Then he had
the group of bewildered peons assembled and told them
426
SURVEY GRAPHIC
what he had done. "The arms I have ordered for you are
to make sure that your homes will not be burned again,"
he explained. "But you have the responsibility to keep the
peace in this neighborhood not only for yourself but for
all. You must protect everyone including the owner of the
plantation here. And I urge upon you not to permit the
establishment of drinking places in your little hamlet.
Because, if you do not stay sober you will not keep the
peace." And with that we left.
He has a way of doing things directly and simply that
is startling as well as refreshing in a country where every-
thing runs in such an involved fashion. When a compli-
cated problem exists in a community, it is his habit to call
a mass meeting and to ask her representatives from all
sides involved to state their case so that all may hear —
villages in conflict, or laborers and employers, or armed
colonos and ejidatarios as in the state of Tamaulipas. This
meeting may take a long time. I recall one time in
El Mante we spent six hours listening to group after
group. The President asks questions when things are not
clear, otherwise he never interrupts; he lets them talk till
they have talked themselves out. When no one has any-
thing further to say he rises before the assembly, sum-
marizes the problems and the various grievances and gives
his solution. If necessary the solution is written into a
decree, which he signs and reads before the meeting is
over; and the question is solved insofar as it is humanly
possible to solve it, in the open, without the long delays,
the round-about handling and recriminations so common
in the history of Mexico.
I RECALL AN INSTANCE OF A CHARGE BEING MADE AGAINST A
government official. The President had the charge read in
public to the entire community, the man was asked to ex-
plain his acts, witnesses were called, and a judgment was
rendered immediately. Here it seemed to me was justice
done in biblical fashion — under a tent, for our meeting
place was but a roof on posts. There was no refusal to ac-
cept responsibility or to face issues.
This method of direct governing is taxing on the time
and the energy of the President. But he feels he must
teach the people a lesson in honesty, in sincerity, in direct
government. He is fully conscious of the shortcomings of
government in Mexico. He knows how often an order
given remains unfulfilled so he frequently adds that he
will be back to see if it has been done. Here his really
astounding memory counts. Out of a clear sky he will de-
mand where such and such a thing that he asked for is,
or if it has been done, and by whom, at what cost, and
who is in charge now. His subordinates have learned that
their greatest protection is immediate compliance with
an order. He always carries with him on his journeys
representatives from the different government departments
and as problems come up he turns them over for imme-
diate attention to those who have legal responsibility for
them. In discussing the problem of government in Mexico
and the problem of politics, and the fact that the mass of
the people has so largely been outside of the channels of
administration he said one day, "When the villages have
their ejidos (their lands) they will be the government."
And when that day comes it may be said Mexico will
have a basis for democracy that it has always lacked.
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT HE IS MEXICO'S GREAT — PERHAPS GREAT-
est — teacher. Mexico has never known anyone like him —
so completely disinterested, so devoted to the public good,
and so determined to re-shape the basis of Mexican social
and political life, and with it the relationship of the people
to the land. In a country where political promises have
almost never been kept, where the leader of one day has
been the traitor of the next, it has been natural for the po-
ple to lose faith in the world outside, in the government,
in the loud words of the self-appointed messiahs, in hon-
esty, virtue and decency. Outside of the little village noth-
ing seemed true. Suspicion and skepticism became the
rule of life. The only thing the poor could do was to sink
inside their own skins and trust no one.
General Cardenas is slowly giving back to the mass of
people their faith in their own government and, by impli-
cation, their faith in themselves.
Swiftly down the tawny rows
A devouring monster goes,
Crashing its disturbing way
Through the quiet autumn day,
Reaching out with claws and teeth
For the cotton in the sheath —
For the cotton blowing there
In the bright October air;
Greedy in its appetite
For the manna, snowy-white,
Gathering with tooth and claw
Food to feed its hungry maw,
Leaving in its avid haste
Crashing stalks and cotton waste.
"Not perfected yet," they say,
But it goes its new-found way
Down the cotton rows today.
Cotton Pickers
by HELEN NOLL CROWELL
And beneath blue Southern skies
Many watch with anxious eyes
And idle hands, distraught, afraid
Before the thing that men have made
To take their place, their ancient toil,
Their lifetime work on Southern soil:
Back-breaking work, heart-breaking work,
A driving thing they could not shirk,
And yet a thing so much their own
That it belonged to them alone.
The fields were theirs, each hill and hollow,
The cotton rows were theirs to follow,
And there was sun and wind and laughter,
And songs, and tears, but good rest after
The long hard day, and there were coins
To pay for aching backs and loins;
And there was sense of work well done
Trudging home at set of sun,
With something of toil's dignity
To set their tired spirits free.
And now — along the tawny rows
The great devouring monster goes,
To do the work a swifter way,
Accomplishing within a day
More than many countless hands,
But Oh, the cry along the lands:
"It does our work! If we are through,
What shall we do? What shall we do?"
AUGUST 1937
427
Jury for Trial
of a Sheepherder
for Murder,
Ernest L. Blumenschein
(New Mexico)
The varied color of the American peoples and the mono-
tone of an industrial country are warp and woof of the
American fabric. One can find a fairly complete picture
of the United States in the current exhibition assembled
by New York's Municipal Art Committee: folkways,
problems, picturesqueness, natural beauty. This second
annual sh<iw of the committee is truly national — all the
states are represented, and the Canal Zone, Puerto Rico,
Hawaii, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa as well.
It gives far-away artists, some known only locally, a
chance to show their work in the nation's art center.
Since each state has sent its own contribution, the selec-
tion being made by competitions and regional exhibitions,
it has helped to stimulate interest and pride in the artists
of the section. Such a collection of more than five hun-
dred works of art, by almost as many artists, refutes the
accusation that the United States is a creative wasteland.
Market Women, by Avery F. Johnson (Virgin Islands)
Private Car, by Le Conte Stewart (Utah)
Millwrights, by Charles W. Ward
(New Jersey)
Employment Entrance, by Oakley E. Richey (Indiana)
Make Jobs or Perish:
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PROFIT SYSTEM
by J. RUSSELL SMITH
This is the story of a group of people in Richmond, Virginia, and
the way in which they have faced the facts of unemployment. In their
experience this distinguished economic geographer sees a lesson that
America must learn — or else! .
JUDGED BY THEIR ACTIONS, THOSE IN CONTROL OF AMERICAN
business seem to have said, "We can throw millions of
men out of our employ and let charity or government
take care of them." In actual practice this has been the
attitude not only of big business but of little business, of
city and country, of myself and yourself. Furthermore,
most of us say, "The government must quit bothering
business. Let the government keep out of business. We
will attend to that."
I wish to suggest that by this policy the American pub-
lic may be heedlessly paving the way for a too swift and
needless advance of socialism. In a purely accidental way,
we have developed a system that produces compulsory
unemployment in the richest country in the world. A sys-
tem so inefficient as that must reform itself, be reformed
from the outside, or perish, and the time may not be so
very long.
This "temporary" depression has been with us for seven
full years, and it would certainly be foolish to conclude
that it will disappear suddenly. Indeed, it is much more
likely that Mr. Harry Hopkins and a good many others
are right when they say that the unemployment problem
is with us to stay — at least until we get a better system for
distributing the goods we can make.
The next years of this depression promise not to be like
the recent past, when the Federal Government shovelled
out money by the billions. Witness the present (June
1937) squabble in Washington as to whether relief for
the next twelve months shall be 1500 millions or 1000
millions. Witness also the handing back of direct relief to
the states and local communities. What this means for
the unemployed is shown by a recent survey of relief con-
ditions. The American Association of Social Workers, 120
East 22 Street, New York City, published a report Feb-
ruary 18, 1937. The Association surveyed 28 selected areas
in 28 states and found that it was increasingly difficult to
finance direct relief and that there was a general reduction
in the adequacy of relief. The investigators found physi-
cians reporting malnutrition. Since one state had a mini-
mum relief per family of S7.96 per month and another
had $4.00, the wonder is that malnutrition had not passed
into starvation. Other evidence accumulates to indicate
that we are experiencing a rapid decline in the adequacy
of general relief.
Are our humanitarian instincts strong enough to give
health and decency to the family of a man who wants
work and really cannot find it? If not, just what is the
quality of civilization in this, the richest country in the
world? The people of these United States of America
need to make more use of the scientific method, which
430
is to find the facts, ami act in the light of facts.
The Richmond, Virginia, Experiment
A GROUP OF PEOPLE IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, HAS FACED
unemployment facts, and at this moment their experience
and that of different kinds of communities in Idaho, Cali-
fornia and other states, has important lessons for the
American nation and the Western world.*
In 1932 the unemployed in the city of Richmond began
to bother some of the city officials, and a recreational
agency supported by the Community Fund undertook to
keep the unemployed out of the city offices. Accordingly
two large rooms in an unused building were fitted up and
the unemployed were invited to come there to read and
play games. A call through the public press for books and
games brought in plenty of them. One day someone in
charge asked this audience of idle men to make a wish.
Said they, "We want razor blades; it is hard to keep de-
cent without a shave." So a call went out through the
papers for razor blades. They came by the thousand. An-
other call brought a sharpener for the blades. But the men
wanted to work. So the Community Fund Director called
together representatives from the Central Trades and
Labor Council and asked about putting the unemployed
to work for the unemployed, after the manner that was
then so actively in process on the Pacific coast. They were
for it, and so were the unemployed.
In December 1932, the labor representatives recom-
mended fifty unemployed artisans — plumbers, carpenters,
etc — who wished to start a cooperative self-help exchange.
They met to formulate plans for starting their enterprise.
An old painter got up and said, "Do you know what I
think? You people [referring to the Community Fund]
have been putting up both time and money. Let us put up
something too. Let each of us put up a week's work [48
hours, reduced later to 40]. Let each of us give a week's
work as membership in the organization, and when we
leave the organization we can withdraw its value."
And thus an organization was formed— The Citizens'
Service Exchange, with membership and an initiation fee
of 40 hours of work — a good tester of men.
Richmond Starts Work
THE CITIZENS' SERVICE EXCHANGE BEGAN IN JANUARY, 1933,
which was, as you will recall, before public relief had
made much of a start. The Exchange started primarily as
a salvaging institution — salvaging materials, salvaging
* Sec: Measuring the Cooperatives, by Clark Kerr, Survey Graf hie,
March. 1937; The B Line to Recovery, by Frof. Frank D. Graham, The Mid-
monthli Survey. November, 19.14; and Self Help Cooperatives in Califor-
nia, by Kcrr and Taylor, University of California Press, 1935. — J.R.S.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Citizens' Serv
while turning
humans. The first piece of work was
that of repairing an abandoned build-
ing; artisans put it in order for the
use of the Exchange. Calls were is-
sued by the Red Cross through the
public press to "share what you can
spare," especially clothes and shoes.
Sixty truckloads came.
Another went out for sewing ma-
chines; 23 came. The first work on a
consumable commodity was that of
two Negro women who started wash-
ing donated clothes in a couple of old
donated bathtubs. As soon as the
clothes were dry, some white women
went to work to repair them with the
aid of the donated sewing machines.
An unemployed cobbler found work
in repairing shoes. Then everyone
who had worked began to take pay
in repaired shoes and repaired clothes.
The unit of pay was a scrip standing
for one hour's work, or a theoretical 25
cents. Everyone was paid alike, male
and female, black and white; this plan
has continued to the present day.
The chief objectives at the beginning were to furnish
unemployed families with fuel, shelter, and clothes. Peo-
ple donated the wood on various tracts of land. Old
trucks were patched up to haul the workers out to chop
wood and to haul the wood back. Empty houses were
taken for a period of time and reconditioned to pay the
rent. The workers were paid for this work in scrip, and
the houses were rented to them for scrip. Surplus prod-
ucts from the United States Government— hides from
slaughtered cattle (1934 drought), wool, etc.— came to the
Exchange as donated raw materials. A chemical firm
loaned an expert to teach tanning, and good leather was
made for the shoe repair shop.
The Humanity of Hair
HUMAN HAIR PERMITTED THE CITIZENS' SERVICE EXCHANGE
to demonstrate its fundamental humanity. Now our hair
is one of our perennial bothers. If we are men, we are
forever brushing it, combing it, cutting it. If we are wom-
en and the hair happens to be straight, we are forever
curling it, and if it happens to be kinky, we are forever
straightening it. For these reasons hair promptly pre-
sented itself as a problem to the Citizens' Service Ex-
change. The primary object was to get people back into
private employment. An unkempt man is not a good
prospect for a job; therefore a member of the Exchange
worked for a time in order to get some better clothes,
then he went to the barber shop with scrip and got him-
self a haircut and a shave. Being more presentable was a
great help when he applied for a job. Then the women
called for assistance with their hair, and a beauty shop
was established for the white women members. The col-
ored sisters said that they needed help too, for they also
needed to be presentable, and, pronto, a young chemist,
working away in a basement called the chemical labora-
tory, was soon turning out, along with soap and other
things, hair straightener for the colored contingent. This
is of more importance than at first appears, for if straight
hair is in style for colored people, a person whose hair is
ice Print Shop: Unemployed youths are turned into printers
out all the printing needed by the cooperative organization
straight can hold up her head and get through many
doors more surely. Hair straightening, like hair curling
or hair cutting, is morale, and morale is important, not to
say vital.
Morale
PEOPLE BACK OF THE CITIZENS' SERVICE EXCHANGE ARE
sure that they have produced economic goods — material
wealth — but they are emphatic in stating that the most
important thing they have done is to maintain morale.
The Exchange does not investigate people because the
members of the Exchange worl^ for what they get; they
do not receive charity — as such.
"Yesterday I did a day's work and I took my little girl
a pair of shoes. I won't ever have to go on relief in Rich-
mond." Thus spoke a carpenter who had been up against
it.
Said a one-legged member, "You've been telling us all
along that what you want us to do is to stand on our own
feet. Well, I've only got one foot, but I can stand on that
one now."
If you want to get in trouble in the Richmond Citizens'
Service Exchange, say "relief" and you have started some-
thing unpleasant. The members are sure they are not on
"made" work. They are making things and using the
things they make. The goods go to the store, and most of
the workers spend their day's scrip in the store every eve-
ning. They carry home from the Exchange store goods
made by its members.
The members of the association have meetings twice a
month to talk over the affairs of the association; the ad-
ministration, including Mrs. Amy Guy, the efficient exec-
utive secretary, does not attend the meetings unless specif-
ically invited.
Training for Industry
MANY OF THE MEN WHO CAME TO THE EXCHANGE HAD BEEN
out of employment so long that they had lost a good deal
of their skill and their staying power. In other words, they
AUGUST 1937
431
were industrial invalids, and, just as the physical invalid
has to get back to full work gradually, so these industrial
invalids had to get back to full work gradually. Rehabili-
tation of people is a very important matter in the present
emergency of the Western world, and the Richmond Citi-
zens' Service Exchange is doing a fine job in that field.
The next discovery at Richmond was that most of the
people had no trades or professions. So the Exchange,
with its object of putting people back into industry, al-
most became an industrial school. The baker baked bread
and kept eight or ten pupils learning the trade of the
baker. "Don't you know," said a boy who had been in the
bakeshop a short time, "don't you know, I've got a job
in a bakery in Petersburg!" "What are you doing?" "I'm
greasing pans. That's the only thing 1 know how to do,
but that baker is going to teach me the whole thing, just
because I know one thing well."
The beauty shop became a training school whose grad-
uates find jobs as soon as training is completed.
A recent analysis of the WPA showed a turnover of
2j/2 per cent, whereas the Exchange boasts a turnover of
40 per cent and reports that 700 people have been trained
for jobs and got jobs. Unskilled unemployed have been
made into barbers (white and black), beauty shop opera-
tives (black and white), hair dressers, shoe repairers, do-
mestics, auto mechanics (not machinist), printers, carpen-
ters, painters, telephone operators, filing clerks, broom and
brush makers, truck drivers, gardeners.
So important has this training aspect of the work be-
come that those in charge of the emergency education
program of the United States Government* have sent
teachers to train various groups at the Exchange. The city
of Richmond, through the Adult Education Division of
its public school system, has turned over an old school
building and some teachers to the Exchange with the
request that it train the unskilled youth who had been
poured out of Richmond schools. This seems to be a fine
illustration of the value of fresh organizations, unbound
by the tradition, conservatism, and rigidity which seem
bound to creep into human institutions as time passes.
•Here is a phase of the New Deal that many have not noticed. The
National Health Inventory, the vocational projects, and the spread of adult
education have been filling important needs in a nation that has thought
much too well of itself. For example, observers in the South say that the
teaching of fractions to tenants and sharecroppers of the cotton country is
bringing about a transformation almost as significant as the sharecroppers'
union can aspire to in the immediate future.
This has done something to offset the degeneration produced by unem-
ployment and the limitations of relief as we have1 applied it.
Two blind members make door mats from discarded rope.
The man also makes chair seats, likes the solace of work
This discovery in Richmond that so large a proportion
of the population was untrained suggests the urgent need
that exists for other parts of this country to examine criti-
cally and quickly the status of the unemployed. What
basis of self-support is being given to these hundreds of
thousands of young people who are turned out of our
schools each year trained to wish but not to do?
The Dilemma
MILLIONS OF WELL FED AMERICANS WOULD BE IN TEARS AT
this moment if they had for a few hours looked in on the
dirt, hunger, nakedness, disease, and misery, physical and
spiritual, that mark the homes and lives of millions of
unemployed or half-employed Americans. At the same
time millions of business men are having genuine alarm
about the danger of communism, and nearly all liberals
have alarm at the prospect of fascism, of which the signs
are much too plentiful.
I share these alarms. The way to make a communist is
to throw a man out of a job and leave him out. The way
to force this nation into a vast socialism, or perhaps
into fascism, is just to stand still and let things go along
as they are now.
We have a new thing in the world. Government has
taken the position that it will underwrite the nation's
food supply — feed us if we can't find work. Right now the
United States Government and other governments in this
country have the biggest payroll in the world outside of
Russia.
Now, the remarkable things about this payroll are (a)
that we are very careful to see to it that, with few excep-
tions, the workers make nothing that is directly salable or
consumable, and (b) that many do not work at all. Thus
far we in the United States cannot make up our minds
as to whether to choose (1) bankruptcy by continued bor-
rowing, (2) starvation by the cessation of relief, or (3)
terrific taxation to carry relief as we have been doing it,
with its corollary of degeneration of the unemployed in
both body and spirit. There is a fourth alternative — put
the unemployed to work at really productive enter-
prises, and how much longer can we avoid it? The nation
is beginning to lie down on this new policy of eating
without work.
Perhaps some morning — who can say just when? — a
firm administration in Washington will suddenly conclude
that the only thing to do is to put these people to work-
in Government factories, on Government farms — all
manned by the appointees of the then Mr. Farley, pro-
vided the present one is not still in charge.
You tremble at the idea? So do I. I mistrust the power
of red tape to delay, deaden, choke, and stifle in any
organization that cannot be killed by its own inefficiency.
All monopolies, government or private, are dangerous.
How shall this possible advance of government into in-
dustry be stopped? Not by having tantrums, such as
occur at nearly every chamber of commerce dinner when
the speaker says, "The government must keep out of
business," and makes no practical suggestions whatever.
The way to keep government out of business is very
simple, but the way is not by talk. It is not by praying
for a return to 1929, 1914, 1876, or 1776. The way to keep
government out of business is to do a better job than
government can do. We talk a lot about competition, but
why does not the business world give the government
some competition such as Richmond is doing? To be a
432
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Exchange needs machinery, but there is healing in a hand loom; an old
person who would be classed as unemployable settles down, stops chattering,
ceases to be a problem, finds herself in the satisfaction of producing something
member of the Richmond Citizens' Service Exchange is
infinitely better than being exclusively on government re-
lief. It is certainly better for the nation to have a man in
the Citizens' Service Exchange making brooms, and full
of self-respect and with some hope, than on WPA making
the roads of 1943 with a maximum of 140 hours of work
a month at 25 cents an hour, bearing the stigma of relief,
the sense that the work is not important, with no chance
for a fulltime job or for promotion, and with no outlet
for ambition.
Does Your Town Need a Self-Help Cooperative?
IT PROBABLY DOES, BUT PERHAPS YOU ARE LIKE A FRIEND OF
mine who says, "This is a very hard job," and then goes
off about his own business. I agree that it is a hard job,
but the thing to do in this connection is to consider the
alternative. Compare it with the real alternative.
There is no use trying to start a self-help cooperative
unless there is someone of ability who cares a lot. Mrs.
Guy, the executive secretary, is that kind of person, and
she has the support of a board made up of that kind of
people. It is by the action of such local groups and prob-
ably in no other way that the various communities of this
country can make their members self-supporting.
In starting a self-help cooperative you need to know the
unemployment and relief situation from top to bottom.
That means an actual census of the unemployed and their
capacities. One of the greatest scandals of the day outside
of Russia, Spain, or Germany is that we have not had one
long ago. This country could get one in a week if it tried.
Probably Owen Young knew exactly what he was talking
about when he said that "facts are our scarcest raw ma-
terial." Why is there no census of unemployment?
After the facts are obtained a conference is needed be-
tween all the social agencies both public and private, in
the area. In many localities the Community Fund group
is a good organizing center. This work must have local
initiative. The whole community should be back of the
enterprise. If possible, we should get the churches down
to earth for a year or two. We should try to herd the econ-
omists in from that imaginary realm, "the long run,"
where they browse so contentedly, away from the world.
Show them that people get hungry in the short run.
A Better Financial Showing?
THE RICHMOND SELF-HELP COOPERATIVE DOES NOT COMPETE
with "legitimate" business. The members work for the
organization, are paid in scrip, take their scrip to the
organization's store, and buy what has been made by the
members of the organization. Since the Exchange cannot
sell to non-members, it has no financial relations with the
outside world except by gift. And since it has no means
for making raw materials or foodstuffs or equipment, it
must buy. This means that the organization is in the end
dependent upon charity — charity made efficient. In 1936
it was supported chiefly by the Richmond Community
Fund and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration,
about half and half.
At the beginning the Exchange was giving about $3
worth of relief for $1 cash received. At the present time the
ratio of relief to cash gift is much lower since the WPA
purports to take everyone who is employable, and the
self-help co-op has devoted more and more of its efforts
to training people for jobs.
WHY DOES NOT THE RICHMOND ORGANIZATION MAKE A BET-
ter financial showing? There are several answers. One is
that when they succeed, they fail; that is to say, their
objective is to get jobs for the members, and of course •
the ones for whom they get jobs are their best members.
A second reason why they are not making a better
financial showing is that they have been primarily a
salvaging institution for both materials and humans, and
technically their industry has not entered the twentieth
century. In fact, it is pretty well back in the nineteenth.
The organization caring for 500 families has only $20,000
worth of equipment ($40 per family), much of which is
second hand.
I think I am right in saying that the Richmond group
has been going, like the rest of the United States, on the
AUGUST 1937
433
idea that we were dealing with a temporary situation that
was soon to be over. What they need now is to start mass
production. The group needs to exchange with other self-
help cooperatives, and the sooner many chains of exchang-
ing exchanges are created, the better for the stomachs, the
backs, and the souls of the unemployed persons, and the
better for the taxpayers of the United States. And, also,
the better are our chances of /peeping out from under the
wheels of government.
A System That Poisons Itself
HERE is A QUESTION THAT MAY SOUND AS THOUGH I WERE
cracked, but read it and the next paragraph and then
check up and see who or what it is that is cracked. Here
is the question: Which would you prefer — to pay big
money to support a man in idleness, or pay little money
to let him worf( for himself?
The greater the variety of things produced by the self-
helps, the exchanging self-helps, the smaller will be the
amount of relief money that they will require each day
for raw materials and equipment. If we would let them
sell surpluses, they might become almost or quite self-
supporting. "But," you cry out in horror, "that would be
competing with 'legitimate' private enterprise." That is
true, but don't shut your mind as does the ostrich when,
seeing trouble, he sticks his head into the sand. Please
look steadily at these facts — look without blinking, and,
after looking, think. Here are the choices. If there is any
other choice please tell me. I really want to know.
(1) We can give the unemployed self-supporting jobs in
private business or put them at bona fide public works —
things really needed. (The country is now approaching sat-
uration of courthouses, high schools, scenic highways, and the
more standard public works. Many of them are done for
years ahead.) Or
(2) We can give the unemployed a lot of cash and let
them do nothing. Or
(3) We can give them less cash and let them buy raw
materials and work for themselves through self-help co-ops
(and maintain morale). Or
(4) We can give them still less cash (possibly even none)
and let them sell surpluses and buy things they need.
This last terrifies all of us (myself included) who are in
the profit-seeking business. It does so because profit busi-
ness can only succeed if things are scarce enough to sell,
and sell at a good price. That is what is called scarcity
economics. We have not yet had any other kind. Now
here's the real poison that our profit system distils into
its own blood. The progress of invention is continually
making better and more productive machines. This makes
it harder and harder to maintain scarcity and still keep the
thing running at a profit. That is probably the bottom
fact that is pushing us toward socialism, which is a type
of industrial organization running for service instead of
profits. I do not view with satisfaction the idea of a swift
sweep to socialism, and I believe that the best way for the
Chamber of Commerce crowd to keep out from under the
government juggernaut is to do a better job. Begin with
a self-help co-op in your own town if it needs one, and
take a good look at the base facts before you decide that
it is not needed. Look out for traitors among your starters.
Initiative or Red Tape?
YOUR SELF-HELP CO-OP WILL NOT HAVE TO TAKE ORDERS FROM
Washington. It can grow from the bottom up. I'll bet my
new hat that it is one of the most promising roads toward
industrial freedom in the United States. When I com-
mend the self-help cooperative, I am not thinking of an
enterprise hemmed in as the Richmond unit now is, with
almost no capital, almost no machinery, without even the
aim of modernized mass production, and not exchanging
goods with any similar group. Richmond started to attack
a temporary emergency. Since the situation now shows
few signs of being temporary, it is time for Richmond,
the U.S.A., and the United Kingdom, for that matter, to
take a second look and a fresh start.
"But scores of self-help co-ops have failed," says some
critic of this idea. Quite true. But while speaking of fail-
ures do not for one moment lose sight of the fact that the
present industrial system in which we all grew up, and
which runs the chambers of commerce in this and other
countries, has failed also — failed to give us jobs.
Have self-help cooperatives failed? Or is it that they
have not really been tried? Almost none have had enough
capital or equipment to keep a private enterprise going.
They have almost all been tackled as a temporary matter.
The self-help cooperative has been little more than a field
for scientific experiment. In natural science twenty-five
or fifty failures are nothing in comparison to one success.
The success shows the way.
Probably the most significant thing about the self-help
cooperatives from the industrial viewpoint is that a num-
ber of them have succeeded so well that they had to be
killed. In a number of cases they have been stopped (as-
sassinated) by the action of the owners of profit businesses
who feared the abundance that the self-helpers were pro-
ducing. This gives us compulsory unemployment in the
interest of profits — a new and peculiarly destructive kind
of slavery — more destructive than chattel slavery.
Wanted a Campaign Like the Liberty Bond Campaign
THE OBJECT OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO TRY TO PERSUADE THE
business men and women of America to turn to and
help the self-help cooperative movement as some of them
now help the Boy Scouts, the local college, the church, the
YMCA, the Lodge, the Golf Club, the Woman's Club.
It really can't succeed without the aid of women. I think
I am only recommending to the House of Have that
thing called enlightened self interest. The leaders of pri-
vate industry should have more gumption than to expect
their group to keep the nation's resources and also keep
millions unemployed and also keep our present organiza-
tion of society.
If self-help cooperatives get brains and conscience back
of them, instead of Business against them, they may per-
mit that long promised balancing of the budget, cut down
your taxes, save your neighbors from degeneration, and
perhaps they may also save your life insurance policy.
But they will have to have a push like that by which the
Liberty Bonds were put across. Will you help?
Probably the first step should be a thorough investiga-
tion of the subject by a sympathetic hard-headed group,
including persons who have succeeded in private business
and whose findings would be respected by the Chamber
of Commerce world.
There is much to be gleaned from the archives of the
federal government's late lamented Division of Self-Help
Cooperatives which perished with the ending of the Fed-
eral Emergency Relief of which it was a part. It perished
just as the need for it becomes acute and the movement is
beginning again, now that other things have failed.
434
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Hospitals and the Unions
by JOHN S. GAMES
Mr. Gambs decides, though many doctors disagree, that there are two sides to
the story of the recent strikes in three New York hospitals
A STRIKE IN A HOSPITAL SEEMS TO BE A DREADFUL THING.
People wonder how it is possible for workers engaged in
a great humanitarian task suddenly to desert helpless
patients for the uncertain rewards of industrial conflict.
Hospital authorities are generally men of generous im-
pulses; hospital workers are engaged in a service that
FOP, A
LIVING WAGE
NTS SfiFE
Some authorities deny that patients can ever be really safe during
even a brief stoppage of routine hospital maintenance
AUGUST 1937
is essential to the life, or comfort, of the seriously ill.
Yet there have been hospital strikes at St. Michael's and
St. Joseph's in Toronto. There were three in New York
last winter. Other signs of unrest among maintenance
workers in hospitals have been visible for many months.
In Wisconsin and Ohio hospitals controlled by units of
government are unionized; there are hospital labor or-
ganizations in Minneapolis and in San Francisco. In New
York, besides the three conspicuous strikes, there have
been several minor disturbances, including pickets at
St. Luke's. On June 17 the press reported that, following
a four weeks' strike of 900 hospital employes in Camden,
N. J., a bomb was hurled into a building adjacent to the
hospital that had been affected.
What's wrong? How does it happen that institutions of
mercy suddenly become the theatre of bitter warfare be-
tween unyielding employers and striking workers?
Let us begin by getting acquainted with the workers.
Hospital employes may be divided into two classes, pro-
fessional workers and maintenance workers. We are con-
cerned with the latter, for it is this group which is now
organizing aggressively in New York, and which has
conducted several strikes. When you inquire at the in-
formation desk of a hospital for the room number of
your convalescent friend, you are probably conjuring up
a picture of long halls and nurses in white on the floors
above. Under your feet, in the bowels of the hospital,
down to a depth of perhaps forty feet, men and women
go about tending fires, mending uniforms, slicing loaves
of bread, driving sheets through a mangle, roasting joints
of lamb, feeling the pulses of dynamos. There is a car-
penter shop and sometimes a machine shop. Above, in a
part of the hospital that many of the maintenance work-
ers rarely see, men and women expire; babies are born,
smart ladies sit up in bed, dressed in silk negligees, and
write thank-you letters for the roses and tulips and
gladioli that lend fragrance to their sunny rooms.
Maintenance workers are very much like the cooks,
laundresses, charwomen, and kitchen help that you will
find wherever you go. They include Negroes, Irish,
Italians, Poles. They look like other workers — like other
workers in hotels, restaurants, night-clubs. But some dif-
ferences must be pointed out. The Hospital Survey for
New York reports that an appreciable number of workers
are introduced by social agencies, and that some of them
perform their tasks under sheltered conditions. The
Survey goes on to say that the wage level in some hos-
pitals is a factor leading to considerable turnover. The
Survey implies that the excuse of philanthropy is some-
times used to put workers at a financial disadvantage as
compared with other workers; that adequate policies of
personnel administration are not generally in force; that
the values involved in the practice of living-in are not
always properly assessed, either from the point of view
435
of the employer or of the employe.
Dr. H. H. Graef, writing in the Mod-
ern Hospital, makes a general observa-
tion which may be too sweeping — for
certainly some hospital workers are
paid more than they could earn else-
where— but which nevertheless sharply
faces the problem of the poorly paid
classes of hospital workers:
It is common knowledge that hospital
employes in general are paid less for the
same kind of work than similar employees
in other lines of business or enterprise.
Certainly no one would dispute the fact
that the average hospital employee could
not, on his earnings, set aside enough to
provide security for old age.
An informal inquiry into the par-
ticulars behind these general statements
reveals a rather cloudy picture of work-
ing conditions in hospitals. The Hos-
pital Employes Union, in a communi-
cation to me, says that some hospital
workers are paid wages as low as $25
a month, with maintenance — a figure
that would be low for a farmhand in
the dairy region of western New York, where an urban
standard of living need not be maintained. The New
York Department of Hospitals sets a minimum of $35
plus maintenance for employes in the municipal institu-
tions, and that figure is likely to be increased in the
city's next budget. Although $35 plus maintenance is a
more general minimum than $25, certain institutions,
especially small hospitals, do pay as little as they can.
In the course of my inquiries I found it difficult, with a
few notable exceptions, to elicit wage scale information
from hospital authorities as individuals, or from them as
a group through the United Hospital Fund.
It should be understood, too, that hospital employes are
not included in the provisions of federal or state social
security legislation. Indeed, there was an organized op-
position to their inclusion when the federal Social
Security Act was written. Hospital authorities do point
out, however, that hospital employes have certain preroga-
tives, such as free medical attention; and that their living
conditions, when they live in, are usually better than
persons doing similar work can afford outside. This the
union denies, citing the lack of privacy, the tendency
toward supervision off the job, and the schedule of
intermittent working hours that living-in makes easily
possible. It is certainly a paradox that a charitable institu-
tion should tend to treat its employes in such a manner
as to make them potential objects of charity, keeping them
so near the subsistence line that, in any emergency, they
are likely to have to seek public or private assistance.
THE UNION ORGANIZERS, QUICK TO SEE THAT MUNDANE
statistical presentations of their side of the story, failed
to drive home their argument for revision of relation-
ships, and wages, seized upon a widely publicized oc-
currence to dramatize their activities. It is obvious that
hospital authorities should set an example in safe hous-
ing; so, when a fire in a dormitory of the Israel Zion
Hospital in Brooklyn resulted in the death of a nurse,
the cry "firetrap" was immediately raised. The building,
Pictures. Inc.
At Israel Zion the trays remained on the shelf during a sit-down strike
housing 16 nurses, was a residential structure similar to
other dwellings in the same block; it had previously
been occupied for over ten years by a physician with a
family of eleven children. Four nurses were in the house
on the Sunday when it took fire; one of them lost her
life by suffocation. That tragedy was the tinder that set
off the strike at Israel Zion.
It was suggested, and with truth, that the living con-
ditions in some hospital dormitories were not always
safe, and seldom ideal. On that point alone the main-
tenance workers won a good deal of public sympathy, in
the press and out of it.
To be sure, this unfavorable account is not the entire
story. Despite the high employe turnover reported in the
Hospital Survey, many employes have great security ol
tenure. It is a genuine asset for hospital employes to have
a preferred claim on the free beds of the institution they
work in, for themselves and for their families. Since a
hospital is, as one director told me, "in the business of
giving," there is a tendency to extend this attitude of
generosity in numerous directions. "When I make my
rounds," this director continued, "and see that Bill Smith
is making a rather thick spiral of potato peelings, I say
to myself, 'Ah! well, good old Bill! He's getting along;
he can't see straight any more' — and I let it go at that.
In a hotel he would have been fired at forty-five."
With the exception of this friendly paternalism, not
unlike that accorded to domestic servants, the hospital
worker labors under conditions resembling the condi-
tions of comparable jobs everywhere. There were drastic
wage cuts in the early thirties. Many hospital authorities
failed to see, in 1935 and 1936, that the wage levels of
depression had to be brought upward. Adjustments were
slow and nearly always made with reluctance. Hospital
resources were inadequate; limited financial support,
especially in the smaller hospitals, was also reflected in far
from ideal conditions for patients. Offering service below
cost, hospitals were not in a position to raise the price of
their product to meet increasing labor costs. The workers
436
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Acme
The linen room when laundry workers walked out at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital
whose wages were depressed to substandard levels, have,
of course, organized to promote their own interests —
but the activities of their union have speeded reconsidera-
tion and clarification of the social function of the hos-
pital, its public relations, the respective responsibility of
State, philanthropy, physician and patients for hospital
service and support. Candid articles appeared last Spring
in their professional journal, Modern Hospital — articles
which did not spare criticism of the haphazard labor-
relations policies of recent years. The tenth chapter in the
second volume of the vast Hospital Survey includes an
analysis of past mistakes and a high resolve to apply
sounder principles and higher standards to labor rela-
tions in the future.
Unrest has not been allayed, however. The strike is still
on at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital! One would think
that the turning over of a new leaf by the authorities
would be impressive to the maintenance workers and
would bring about peace. But this is not the case. The
growth of unionism, as a new force in the establishment
of working relationships, is not yet appreciated by many
hospital executives. The union movement is compara-
tively new. In August, 1935, the organized hospital work-
ers received a charter from one of the international unions
of the AF of L. Today they have perhaps 1500 members
in New York City, plus the support of the Association
of Hospital and Medical Professionals. For a union so
relatively small, they lay claim to an impressive record:
"As a result of our activity," they say, "wages have been
raised for thousands of workers; hours have been cut
for thousands of workers; the Burke Bill providing for
an eight consecutive hour day in city hospitals . . . was
sponsored by our local union; we have been instru-
mental in having another hospital local chartered in
Rochester, N. Y." Although they might well share the
credit with enlightened public and private personnel ex-
perts, it cannot be denied that the union is a real force
despite its small membership, even to hospital authori-
ties who do not recognize unionism. Hospital directors,
as an organized group, have expressed
disapproval of strikes; the articles re-
ferred to above in the Modern Hospital
and the chapter in the Hospital Survey,
ignore unionism and stress only the im-
portance of better personnel policies.
So long as employers omit considera-
tion of the union in their handsome
plans in the domain of personnel ad-
ministrations I am inclined to believe
that there will continue to be strikes for
union recognition.
The authorities have, on their side,
the exemption that charitable institu-
tions have from the provisions of fed-
eral and state legislation in the area
of collective bargaining. But they are
confronted by a determined union and
— is it grandiloquent to say? — the
spirit of the age. The line-up therefore
seems to be: on one side, authorities
who would destroy or prevent union-
ism with otherwise well-considered and
generous personnel policies; on the
other, a union whose program is, "one
hundred dollars a month minimum
wage, a maximum eight-consecutive-hour day, 48-hour
week, abolition of living-in system, four weeks' vacation
with pay." Each side has allies along the several great
social groups that are to be found in any large urban
community. Although this line-up does not mean that
strikes are unavoidable, it most certainly does mean that
hospital strikes in the future — in the near future — are
well within the range of probability.
BEFORE GOING FURTHER INTO A DISCUSSION OF THE PROBABLE
course of labor relations in hospitals it might be well to
stop for a moment to inquire into the actual circumstances
surrounding a hospital strike. There have been three
strikes in New York. It would try the reader's patience
to go into the details of any one of them; I shall, in-
stead, lift out a few important facts and conclusions
derived from a study of all three.
To understand a hospital strike we must understand a
few fundamental facts about the running of a hospital.
Although the maintenance staff is indispensible to the
operation of a hospital, some of its services may be with-
drawn for a day or two without jeopardizing the safety
of patients. This is so for two reasons. First, professional
employes are expected to supply or are able to supply
certain important services as substitutes for some of the
maintenance services. In a well-planned hospital there
are little kitchen serving rooms on each floor. Here nurses
can boil eggs, toast bread, and prepare other simple
dishes. Patients need not really suffer unless all the
services of the kitchen staff are withdrawn. The steriliza-
tion of linen for operations can be done by nurses just
off the operating room. If the maintenance workers
should refuse to send up clean linen or to sterilize it, the
deficiency can be remedied by the nurses themselves.
Any sheet, laundered or unlaundered, can be made sterile
by an intelligent nurse. (The most filthy object picked
off the sidewalk can be made safe for junior to suck if
it is boiled half an hour or so. The same principle ap-
plies to the sterilization of linen in the operating room.)
AUGUST 1937
437
I am assuming, of course, that the professional em-
ployes, the nurses, for example, even if members of a
labor union, would undertake activities of this "strike-
breaking" nature, because of their first duty to patients
who are ill.
The second reason for the existence of relative safety
in the face of a partial breakdown of services, is the
uneventful course of hospital routines. Many patients in
a hospital are convalescent rather than desperately ill;
many operations and blood transfusions may be post-
poned. I recently went over the day's operating schedule
with the director of a representative hospital in New York.
There was to be a total of twenty-three operations,
including transfusions. Twenty-one might have been
postponed several days — some of them for several weeks.
Perhaps this schedule is not typical. Certainly
it must remain for the physician rather than
the elevator man to decide whether operations
or transfusions or confinements can be post-
poned. And, even though it is true that at
any given moment few patients are in desperate
need of emergency services, the need for such
services is always present, and even among the
non-emergent group of patients vital needs
may emerge at any moment. There is a real
need of continuity of expert service in any
institution in which numbers of sick are col-
lected. In my opinion, when, as a last resort,
hospital workers institute a stoppage of service
it would be desirable for them to maintain
certain minimum services, so that patients may
never be placed in jeopardy.
To be sure, any sudden stoppage of certain
maintenance services is not calculated to im-
prove the morale of nurses and physicians. A
good director, at the stoppage of the least es-
sential service, will exhibit the enlightened
anxiety of the wise man who sees that he has
a delicate balance to maintain, with death in
one pan of the scales and a few essential
services at his command in the other. But he
does not yet have to accept disaster. There are,
of course, certain services for which there can
be no substitutes. If strikers wantonly turn off
the generators and plunge the hospital into prolonged
darkness, or fail to maintain the heating system in bitter
weather, or the refrigerating system — then we no longer
talk of inconveniences, or of maintaining a balance, but
of real, downright danger, perhaps murder.
Despite rumors and unfounded newspaper stories, no
electricity, water or heat was cut off by strikers in the
New York hospital strikes.
DANGER TO THE LIVES OF INNOCENT NON-PARTICIPANTS is
part and parcel of many kinds of strikes. Transportation
strikes expose to some danger those members of the
community who have only a marginal hold on life. Milk
for babies becomes scarce; the transportation of perish-
ables, from meats to serums, is jeopardized. In cases of
this sort — when employes refuse to work and employers
refuse to give in — the balance of power is usually held
by public opinion.
Public opinion is, to be sure, a slippery word. In every
community there are half a dozen public opinions. Some
of it is, within limits, made to order by the press, the
movie, the radio, and so on. It will repay us if we look
into the public opinions that prevailed concerning the
hospital strikes in New York. The press, not with
unanimity, to be sure, supported the case against the
union and expressed disapproval of the strikes, often by
statements that were sufficiently misleading to approach
falsehood. The News of March 28 suggested that a loyal
hospital worker who had refused to go on strike had been
chloroformed, gagged, and dumped into the bay; that
he had been thrown overboard at the battery and, un-
able to swim, had floated for twenty minutes with his
topcoat on, towards the Statue of Liberty. The implica-
tion was that the union had mobbed a loyal worker. But
the Hearst press came out a few days later to say that
this expert non-swimmer in all his clothes had, accord-
World
Kitchen help during the sit-down in the Hospital for Joint Diseases
ing to the findings of the District Attorney, attempted
suicide. The Sun, of March 22, said in a headline:
"Court Is Informed Strike In Hospital Was Disastrous."
The article under the headline contained scarcely a hint
of disaster. Indeed, it is now generally admitted that not
a single disaster to a patient can be traced to the hospital
strikes. The press seized upon the fact that used (but
sterile) linen had been employed in operations, and tried
to twist this so that it would look as if patients had been
placed in grave danger. The fact is that any physician
who would perform an operation with unsafe linen
ought to be debarred from his profession straightaway.
The press made much of the fact that early in one of
the strikes fifteen operations had been cancelled. Later
it developed that only five had been cancelled. The press
reported that a baby died of neglect. Later this was dis-
proved.
The forces opposed to unionization received valuable
political support. Magistrate David L. Malbin declared
that a strike in a quasi-public institution was similar to
an uprising against the government. Another magistrate,
438
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Mark Rudich, of Tammany, issued warrants for the
arrest of strikers and declared that maintenance work-
ers were as responsible as those who had taken the
Hippocratic oath.
With support of this kind it might be concluded that
the hospital authorities had public opinion entirely on
their side. We have evidence, however, to suggest that
they did not feel entirely secure in the degree of support
they were getting from the community. One of the hos-
pitals involved in the strike was, for all practical pur-
poses, unapproachable when inquiries were made for the
purpose of gathering material to be incorporated in this
article; this lack of frankness and desire to avoid ques-
tions are not healthy symptoms. The United Hospital
Fund, I have already said, did not cooperate in the giv-
ing out of wage figures. A more serious instance involving
the evasion of frank discussion may be cited. Mayor La
(iuardia's administration offered to help settle the Brook-
lyn Jewish Hospital strike. The hospital authorities did
nothing about this offer.
Hospital authorities must have been shocked that Jus-
tice John V. Flood with Justice Alvah Burlingame con-
curring, unlike the two magistrates quoted above, declared
before a group of strikers that the day is past when an
employer of labor may arbitrarily refuse to discuss work-
ing conditions and wages with duly authorized represen-
tatives of his employes. No doubt the hospitals were not
quite prepared to accept the fact that the police of the
La Guardia administration were not arresting sit-in strik-
ers who behaved themselves, except on warrant. This,
however, does not mean that the mayor would have al-
lowed essential services to be cut off; there is reason to
believe that he would have used the services of the Health
and Hospital Departments if strike conditions had serious-
ly threatened human life. Perhaps the authorities at the
Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where the longest and bitterest
strike was waged, were startled to find that, of the 58
workers arrested during the strike, none actually served
a term in jail. This is all the more remarkable because a
severe and little-used section of the penal code was in-
voked by the prosecution; at the end of April some of the
arrested strikers faced twelve years in jail. But in the end,
charges based on the over-severe sections of the code were
dismissed.
HAVE HURRIEDLY GONE OVER SOME OF THE ISSUES AND
some of the evidence bearing on labor relations in New
York hospitals. I think we are now ready to lay down a
few tentative conclusions relating to strikes, unions, and
hospitals.
Since a hospital is not an ordinary industrial or business
enterprise, it feels that it should be exempted from having
to deal with unionism as factory owners are expected to
deal with unionism. A substantial segment of public
opinion concurs. The benefits of social security laws and
other laws applying safeguards to labor are denied to hos-
pital workers. This is an acknowledgment, from high
sources, that hospital labor is "different." But do hospital
employers believe that hospital labor is "different" — really?
Do they not cut wages in depression, as other men do,
and delay raising them on the upward swing — as other
men try to do? As in other forms of business enterprise,
the union is denounced as a racketeering organization and
union officers as "outside agitators." Even the item of
labor espionage was not absent from the hospital strikes.
On August 22, 1936, the press, reporting the work of
Senator La Follette's sub-committee on industrial espion-
age and civil liberties, said that the Brooklyn Jewish
Hospital had hired a labor spy.
Wherever one's sympathies may lie, it must be ad-
mitted as a fact that hospital labor has grown up. Its
coming of age is marked by impatience at such counter-
proposals to unionism as good personnel administration,
workers' councils, or company unionism in its variant,
and sometimes elegant, manifestations.
From my inquiries and observations, I think hospital
labor is fitted to distinguish clearly between ritual and
function. When it is in doubt, it will cooperate with the
experts. It knows that community opinion will never for-
give the wanton shutting off of services essential to life.
Experience of the building service strikes last year indi-
cates that unions are willing to cooperate with friendly
agencies of municipal government. I am convinced the
unions will aid rather than resist the appropriate city De-
partments, Health and Hospital, who may supervise a
struck hospital in the public interest.
Although many groups in the community are ready
to condemn strikers as a matter of principle, other forces
stand ready to condemn stubborn employers. In New
York, at least, the courts, having had an opportunity to
outlaw hospital strikes by the invocation of a harsh
section of the penal code, did nothing of the sort.
To meet the problems ahead, hospital authorities will
have to learn a lot about labor relations in a short time.
One should say a word about the exceptions. In New
York City the directors of at least two hospitals are soci-
ally alert and understanding enough to have dealt with
hospital labor in twentieth-century terms. There may be
others, equally willing, who have not yet been put to the
test. I asked the director of one of these two hospitals how
he felt about having engaged in contractual relations with
a union of his employes. His feelings were mixed. Union
workers, he felt, were better and more efficient than non-
union workers; on the other hand, the building up of a
new union apparently made it necessary that leaders mag-
nify grievances in order to supply an emotional drive for
organizational activity. All in all he felt, I think, that new
unions invading new areas, possessed both the charms
and the faults of adolescence; that hospital unionism
would gradually adapt its aggressive tactics to the special
functions and problems of hospitals; that during this
period of growth and maturation there had to be patience,
tolerance, and humility on both sides.
But perhaps hospital authorities will find labor rela-
tions the least of their future problems. Private relief has
had to orient itself anew under the FERA. and WPA.
Perhaps hospitals, as well, must look to units of govern-
ment for support, and must cooperate in the building up
of new types of medical services. It is not occultism to
see a relation between the fact that the first sit-in hospital
strike in the United States took place in 1937, and that
within the same half year the doctors passed a resolution
indorsing a greater measure of public medicine at the At-
lantic City meeting of the American Medical Association.
Democracy has a way of invading many domains simul-
taneously. It is not surprising that the same year which
promises a more democratic distribution of medical ser-
vices to the consumer should also promise more demo-
cratic labor policies to those who work in the bowels of
a modern hospital.
AUGUST 1937
439
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Cluster of Grim Conundrums
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
WHAT WOULD WE NOT GIVE TO KNOW THE REAL MOTIVES
underlying the Russian agreement with the Japanese to with-
draw military forces from the banks of the Amur River and
the disputed islands along the Siberia-Manchukuo frontier,
with the implied inference that that silly border dispute shall
return to the status quo ante of peaceful negotiation ? It were
a blessed relief, like a mountain breeze in a fetid swamp, to
regard it with any substantial confidence as a symptom of
common sense and real desire to substitute sanity for force as
between Russia and Japan whose mutual suspicions out-
stand among the threats in the Far East. Nobody outside
of Russia, and few inside, know what it really means. This
border, at this particular place, is of no real consequence
to anybody; the dispute is an affair of imaginary lines. The
Amur wanders all over the place, changing its channels con-
stantly; not a foot of the territory on the shifting islands is
worth a single human life. At relatively small expense a party
of honest surveyors could fix the border permanently. There
are three thousand miles of boundary between the United
States and Canada, some of it even yet vaguely defined — no
soldier or gunboat guards it from end to end.
It is all a matter of intent, and — so far anyway as the
Japanese and their puppets of Manchukuo are concerned —
the intent is at the hair-trigger disposal of soldiers inclined
to war, the shifts of international politics — the whim of cir-
cumstance generally. Behind and greatly conditioning the in-
tent lies the dark mystery of events in Russia. It stands to
reason that the summary execution of a group of the high-
est military officers must have resulted in, whether or not the
evidence of, a serious demoralization extending from top to
bottom, including all-pervading fear as to who will be next.
Signs multiply of such a demoralization throughout the
whole fabric of Russian life; that the almost wholesale trials
and "liquidation" of alleged spies and saboteurs are symp-
toms of a panic afflicting the Stalin dictatorship. It appears
more than possible that it is afraid to risk a war with Japan,
about the loyalty of whose army there can be no doubt any-
where. Are the Russians making a virtue of their fears?
IT IS DIFFICULT AT THIS MOMENT OF WRITING TO GUESS, TO SAY
nothing of confident appraisal, the importance of the outbreak
of open hostilities between the Chinese and Japanese in the
neighborhood of Peiping. Menacing is an inadequate word to
apply to that situation. Again the virtually independent Jap-
anese army may be staging a demonstration of its own, as the
navy did at Shanghai, more or less regardless of the govern-
ment at Tokyo. Possibly the Chinese are taking advantage of
the situation on the Amur, relying upon the Russians to keep
the Japanese busy there. Reports at this moment indicate that
Japanese troops are being withdrawn from that front to rein-
force the troops in North China. At all events the morale of
the Soviet regime is an important factor in that situation.
Nor does it concern only the Japanese. Convinced of sub-
stantial weakness or unreliability in the Russian army, Hit-
ler might well consider it timely to venture upon his uncon-
cealed ambitions eastward in the Ukraine. And he and Mus-
solini would feel easier in their minds as to the importance
of Russian interference with their gamble in Spain. Russian
cooperation with France and Great Britain would seem to
have lost a considerable measure of its potential value. So the
"peaceful" behavior along the Amur may not wholly justify
the optimism which at first sight it encouraged.
On the other hand, recent political developments in Japan
appear somewhat to have weakened the army's position at
home. The new prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye,
well understands the conditions of his task and aims to unite
his country in a constructive program possible only under
conditions of peace. He knows that like the people in other
countries the Japanese are gasping under the burden of mili-
tary waste; that his country is handicapped by fear in others;
that no better than others could Japan bear the cost of war.
Everywhere in the world the patient camel's back bends with
the load. There is such a thing as the Last Straw!
THE PROPOSAL BY GREAT BRITAIN TO WALK OUT OF ITS
mandate responsibilities in Palestine, leaving the Jews and
Arabs to stew in the explosive mixture of their own irrecon-
cilable juices, adds to the anxieties of a time over-supplied
with such. The everlasting problem of the Jews moves fur-
ther into the open in a new phase. Let no one imagine that
this is a question of local concern, any more than what was at
first supposed to be a private civil war in Spain. The pos-
sible ramifications of it are endless. For background one may
go back full three thousand years to the time when the Israel-
ites themselves, around 1275 B.C., took forcible possession of
their "Land of Promise," subduing, slaughtering or chasing
out the native inhabitants and dividing it up among them-
selves. We may ignore that time-outlawed act of trespass and
charge its morality off under the head of "adverse possession,"
just as we condone similar flaws in he titles of ownership
wrested by the Normans from the Saxons in Great Britain,
and so on all over the world. Right now the practical ques-
tion of restoring to the Jews a definitely delimited Father-
land is one involving problems of the most perplexing and
dangerous sort.
This matter comes to a head with the publication of a re-
port by a British Royal Commission headed by Earl Peel,
twice Secretary of State for India, purporting on its face
to assuage the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine by a definite
partition and the setting up of independent Jewish and Arab
states. The map printed herewith by courtesy of the New
York Times exhibits the layout. It were sufficiently compli-
cated to forbid uninformed, half-informed and misinformed
bystanders to venture half-baked opinions, under emotional
reactions throwing their hats at this business; enough that we
leave the Jews and the Arabs, immediately concerned, to boil
in the turmoil of their own interests and their sentimental
excitements . . . still more as they confront implications of
the most tragic kind as regards personal welfare and pros-
pects. It must suffice here to point out some of the high spots
in the picture. The Peel Report, given substantially in full in
the New York Times and other newspapers of July 8, dis-
closes the intricacy and difficulty of the problems interlocking.
After the World War, Palestine and Mesopotamia were
turned over to Great Britain as "Class A Mandates" (terri-
tory taken from Turkey) to be administered under trustee-
ship to the League of Nations as "not yet able to stand by
themselves," primarily for the benefit of the inhabitants.
France got Syria, north of Palestine. The Peel Commission,
backed now by the present British Cabinet, proposes to sur-
render the mandate over Palestine and to substitute a new
arrangement in accordance with which three distinct areas
would be set up. One would be a Jewish state, extending
along most of the Mediterranean coast-line from the Syrian
border two-thirds of the way down toward the northeasterly
boundary of Egypt and in the north country back inland over
Galilee to the Jordan; midway the coastal region of old Sam-
440
SURVEY GRAPHIC
TEL AVIV
JAFF,
MCDITSKRAHEAN ::
SEA
-•' Jericho •-.-'
o-T
Ktf
Proposed boundaritt
Present boundaries
Railways
- Roacts
By special permission of the New York Times
Palestine of the Present and Future
aria, but none at all of old Judaea, anciently as Jewish as any.
The territory takes in the best if not the major part of the
fertile plain-country. The second, much larger in area, would
be given to the Arabs. Already they are claiming that they
would get by far the worst of it in respect of land values and
utility.
The third area Great Britain proposes to retain under a
new mandate. Relatively small, to be sure; but it would con-
tain the "holy cities" of Jerusalem — by every right of history,
tradition and sentiment the Jewish capital — and Bethlehem,
center of Christian interest as the birthplace of Christ. Inci-
dentally, as the map shows, it would set up a miniature
"Polish Corridor" for British benefit, cutting through the
southern end of the Jewish state to and including the sea-
port of Jaffa. Besides, the other important port, at Haifa, vital
to the British as naval base, and Acre just north of it, as well
as Tiberias at the proposed eastern border on the Sea of
Galilee, would be continued "temporarily" under the British.
BRITISH GOOD FAITH is, NOT UNNATURALLY, AT A DISCOUNT BY
all parties in Palestine, by reason of the four mutually in-
consistent promises haunting the situation: (1) That to the
Arabs in October, 1915, as inducement to participate in the
overthrow of Turkish rule— of a vaguely defined Arab na-
tionhood; (2) The secret agreement with the French in May,
916, prejudicing against the Arabs without their knowledge
the possible boundaries of that nationhood; (3) The notori-
ously ambiguous Balfour pledge of November, 1917, to the
Jews, of an independent state of some sort; (4) The promise
implied in acceptance of the Palestine mandate in 1922, to
raise Palestine ultimately to statehood. The Peel report frankly
junks all this, envisaging a "solution" acceptable to nobody —
unless the British themselves, and even they display no ecstasy
about it. Certainly they do not minimize the difficulties.
After all, nothing is changed. This is only a report, and
its issue pending action by the League in no way diminishes
British responsibiliy in Palestine. All it has accomplished so
far is to intensify the Jewish-Arab conflict and aggravate the
difficulty of maintaining even superficial order.
Behind the clamoring extremists, politicians, leaders of the
factions of many sorts, looms the tragic human factor — the
fate of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children,
innocent pawns in this pitiful game of nationalism in which
most of humanity these days are wasting the substance of life.
For, look you — while the proposed Arab state contains a large
number of Jews, the assigned Jewish territory includes nearly
a quarter of a million Arabs. To transfer and repatriate these
great masses of people in their new national jurisdictions pre-
sents a task whose implications, social and personal, stagger
imagination. All Palestine as at present constituted is hardly
large enough in its habitable areas to shelter the Jews perse-
cuted in various lands who might find refuge and homeland
there. All too much smaller is the narrow territory now pro-
posed for them, and 225,000 Arabs, already long-time resi-
dents there, stand in the way. For these Arabs the place where
they are is home. Quite as many Jews in other lands are per-
mitted no home at all. By countless thousands they starve
and suffer, and hope. Yet the fulfilment of their hope
means disaster to other thousands. So here in the ancient
homeland of the Israelites focuses a new and epic tragedy,
perhaps the greatest and most poignant in all their long sad
history. . . . Home in sight, yet they cannot get it without
inflicting equal tragedy upon others whose rights seem no
less right than their own.
AND, HIGH AMONG THE GRIM ABSURDITIES OF THESE TIMES: AS
I write these words the South Seas are being fine-combed
while the world waits breathless, if may be to save the lives
of one woman and one man ... by war vessels of sea and air
designed, constructed and equipped with the utmost resources
of human ingenuity for the sole purpose of wholesale destruc-
tion of men and women.
Card Game
(Of Modern Civilization)
We draw the winning cards, yet play to lose.
With knowledge, science, power in our hands,
We let brute Horror snatch them by a ruse,
Till Ruin claims the deal, and Death commands.
— STANTON A. COBLENTZ
AUGUST 1937
441
LIFE AND LETTERS
Eyes and Ears Over the World
by LEON WHIPPLE
THE DAILY NEWSPAPER IN AMERICA, by Alfred McClung Lee.
Macmillan. 797 pp. Price $4.75.
INTERPRETATIONS OF JOURNALISM, edited by Frank Luther Mott
and Ralph D. Casey. Crofts. 534 pp. Price $3.
NEWSPAPERS AND THE NEWS, by Susan M. Kingsbury, Hornell
Hart, and Associates. Putnam. 238 pp. Price $2.50.
THE SUNPAPERS OF BALTIMORE, by Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R.
Kent, H. L. Mencken, Hamilton Owens. Knopf. 430 -f- xvi pp. Price
$3.75.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
OURS IS A TALKATIVE AGE. WE TALK BY PRINT AND PICTURES,
by words over the air, by the cinema, and in a brief time we
shall be talking and seeing by television. The race has discov-
ered new gifts of social communication. The consequences are
already momentous; their significance but illy understood.
The root fact is that human folks have changed so that our
senses see and hear all over the world, at great distances, with
startling swiftness, yet without first hand experience or the
everyday checks of common sense. We are a different animal,
or a least we live in a new relation to space and time. Dis-
stances are psychologically shorter, and time faster. The social
body seems to be developing a sensory system as the individual
organism pushed out nerves to report on the nearby environ-
ment, and later to build up an inter-communication system
that made it aware of what was going on throughout its mem-
bers. We need not push the analogy far to understand that
this new miracle of ears and eyes that pierce beyond every
horizon and regiser an entire world picture daily has a pro-
found and revolutionary effect upon human life.
The confusion of our ideas on social communication may
be simplified by sticking to the notion of this novel antenna-
like hearing and seeing of the remote by word or picture
symbolism. Remember that it is second hand and mechanical.
One picture can always be interfered with, by sleight-of-hand
with words and type, by the selective photography, by broad-
casting devices. The radio is pretty direct, for we do hear
real sounds, but it is learning tricks so that by recordings we
were able to hear the huzzas and tramplings of King George's
coronation parade hours after it was over. This new "talk"
of ours can all be edited. Parts can be cut out, and then we
have censorship and are deceived as to reality as if a little
deaf or blind. The report can be staged to produce a calcu-
lated impression, the illusions of propaganda. The mere flood
of talk affects us; for constant talk bores or wears us out.
Cooley noted years ago that our accelerated newspaper read-
ing produced superficiality and strain. We pay little real
attention to this incessant news. The inveterate talker runs
out of something to say and repeats himself; and so do our
new devices. Their offerings run thin, and they even repeat
each other. The gold standard of silence would help in spots.
Now the final wonder of consciousness is that we can be
conscious of consciousness. We are just reaching a new aware-
ness of the significance of social communication. We are
studying its tools, their history and uses, the nature of public
opinion, the problem of propaganda, the need for freedom
for our social reflexes. Here are four useful books in the
single branch of journalism that both reveal the trend and
add to our knowledge.
The history of journalism has been written hitherto as the
story of great papers, great editors, and their relations to gov-
ernments. Professor Lee, who is both a journalist and a
sociologist, tells us how the newspaper has evolved as a social
instrument. This approach plus the encyclopedic range of in-
formation his scholarship has gathered in this large volume
make it one of the most valuable contributions ever added
to our comparatively scant literature of journalism. It will be
welcomed by journalists (who sadly need to know more about
their own profession), by teachers, and by the student of
social institutions. The clear divisions, bibliography, and full
index will make this a standard reference work.
The physical anatomy, functions, and professional associ-
ations of the newspaper are interpreted with fine clarity. The
economics of the press (ownership, labor relations, chains, and
advertising) are developed comprehensively for the first time.
The chronological historians have too generally neglected the
solemn fact that the character and services of our newspapers
are determined by how they make a living and who pays the
bills. The chapter on how communication and distribution
have been developed and speeded up is a fascinating story
of how society has perfected an essential tool. How the world's
news is gathered, what the editorial staff really does, and why
feature syndicates have grown apace are quesions answered
in great detail and with the last words on techniques. The
study of how society has adjusted to the press is an especial
instance of the social view that governs the mood of the
book. We miss some interpretation of press phenomena by
the psychologist, but the material offered is so rich that we
can only hope that those who talk about journalism without
knowing what it is will read this survey twice before they
talk again.
EQUALLY WELCOME is THE CONVENIENT ANTHOLOGY OF "THE
best that has been written about journalism" offered as Inter-
pretations of Journalism by Frank Mott and Ralph Casey,
who are both teachers of this odd profession. It wisely be-
gins with one hundred pages on the freedom of the press,
from Milton's Areopagitica, to Justice Hughes's opinion in
the Minnesota gag-law case. Here are the classic arguments,
ready again for use — if we should need them. Then come
selections on newspaper functions, reporting, writing, and
interpeting the news, and on the handling of public affairs,
foreign news, propaganda, on ethics and community newspa-
pers. The authors include Franklin, Bowles, Dana, Steffens,
and contemporaneous practitioners like Lippmann, John Gun-
ther, and Duranty. I have never discovered exactly how to
review an anthology, but I recommend this because the con-
tents are well chosen, of wide range, and admirably edited.
In Newspapers and The News, Kingsbury and Hart offer
an experimental analysis of newspapers measured for sensa-
tionalism, and a resume of certain studies made by others on
newspaper readers and on newspaper contents. The study is
valuable as an example of the kind of information we need
in the field of social communication rather than for any
substantially convincing conclusions reached. But it is an in-
teresting approach from the new angle of the social sciences
in their search for objective data. We do want to know what
effects printed words have on readers (the advertisers have
learned a good deal) but the intangibles are so numerous
that it will be a long while before we get enough knowledge
to speak with authority. For example, if you ask a person
what he reads in the paper, he may tell you the truth, or he
may tell you what he thinks will give a favorable impression
of his intelligence. The single news story has to be circulated
with the serial effect of other stories, and so on. But this study
defines some of the problems and opens up interesting vistas.
The natural history of a specimen newspaper can be de-
lightfully perused in this story of the first hundred years of
442
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the Baltimore Sun from its foundation as a one-cent daily by
Arunah Abell to its present place of prestige among liberal
journals. The people of Maryland and the Valley of Virginia
affectionately call it "the Sunpaper." The brilliant journalist
authors reveal their paper as a product of men and an organ
of policy rather than as an instrument of society, hut the tale
illustrates many of the principles of journalism. The Sun's
success has been based on the full and honest coverage of the
news, and its fair and vigorous editing that brought progress
through civil war, political imbroglios, fire, and changes of
owners. It has enjoyed the devotion of many able and color-
ful journalists, and much of the story is a kind of album or
honor roll of these servants. The story will be of greater
interest to Sun-men and Baltimore folks than to the student,
but it is a mighty pleasant book.
CLEARLY WE BEGIN TO CHART A COURSE IN THE FIELD OF SOCIAL
communication; we are busy taking bearings. It is a good
sign, this serious study of the puzzles concealed in this mys-
terious communal "talk" of ours.
Spain in Flames by HELEN SULLIVAN MIMS
SPAIN IN ARMS 1937, by Anna Louise Strong. Holt. 85 pp. Price $1.
BEHIND THE SPANISH BARRICADES, by John Langdon-Davies.
McBride. 275 pp. Price $2.73.
INVERTEBRATE SPAIN, by Jose Ortega y Gasset. Norton. 212 pp.
Price $2.75.
SPANISH PRELUDE, by Jenny Ballou. Houghton Mifflin. 306 pp. Price
$2.50
SEVEN RED SUNDAYS, by Ramon J. Sender. Liveright. 439 pp. Price
$2.50.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THESE BOOKS SEEM TO FALL NATURALLY INTO THREE GROUPS.
Spain in Arms and Behind the Spanish Barricades, the only
two in the list dealing directly with the events of the present
civil war, may be bracketed together, different as they are
in approach and style. Both grew out of journalistic sur-
veys made in the heat of the Spanish war and written up in
the intervals of lecture tours at home. Without pretending
to perform the historian's function of systematic analysis,
they attempt the more urgent task of offering to public opin-
ion an honest statement of the fundamentals of the conflict.
They are speaking to the same audience. The Englishman,
Mr. Langdon-Davies, calls it the Anti-Fascist International
and defines it as "Russia, nine tenths of France, one half of
England, and some smaller and more civilized countries, such
as the Scandinavian." "The People's Front of the World" is
Miss Strong's term for the same invisible alliance of demo-
cratic forces; as an American, however, she extends its ambit
to her compatriots, whom Mr. Langdon-Davies, thinking of
the United States as permanently non-interventionist, politely
omits from both the fascist and anti-fascist groups. One of
Miss Strong's main purposes in fact is to make the potential
People's Front of America aware of the parallel between its
own potential destiny and that of the Spanish masses. The
overtones of Mr. Langdon-Davies' plea sound feeble and de-
spairing in comparison with the militant quality of Miss
Strong's book. The English journalist is fundamentally
a nineteenth century democrat, pushed leftward like the
democrats of Azana's stamp by the fascist threat to democratic
institutions. He shows himself as loyal to the People's Front
as Miss Strong. Yet he lacks Miss Strong's experience in the
methods and ideas of its more leftist elements and he lacks
the faith that springs from such experience. There is another
and more obvious reason for the difference in tone between
the two books. Behind the Spanish Barricades went to press
in the dark days of last fall after the surrender of Toledo and
before the tide turned at Madrid. Miss Strong was writing in
the early months of 1937, after the arrival of airplanes, after
the formation of the Fifth Regiment and the International
Brigades, after the emergence of a real military organization
on the loyalist side. She had gone to the nerve centers of the
new organization and talked with its responsible leaders —
with Caballero Delvayo, Companys, among the statesmen,
with Carlos Contreras and Lister of the Fifth Regiment, with
Ralph Fox and Andre Malraux of the International Brigades.
Because she concentrated on the central apparatus of defense
she perhaps underestimated the strength of the centrifugal
forces that were more likely to confront Langdon-Davies on
his random motorcycle tour from village to village. For that
reason the two books complement each other. Behind the
Spanish Barricades is valuable for its glimpses of the root
forces upon which the machine of anti-fascist war has been
superimposed. It is Miss Strong, however, who has really
caught and transmitted the positive side of the civil war —
not the tragedy or the pathos, but the release of energy in
the common people when they are fighting for a cause in
which they believe.
To turn from the Spain described by Miss Strong to the
Invertebrate Spain of Ortega y Gasset or the Spanish Prelude
of Miss Ballou is to turn from the conflict of real forces to the
dream world of detached intellectualism. Senor Ortega's book
— a collection of essays first published in Spanish in 1922 —
has been translated, along with other of his essays dating
from the period of the dictatorship, in the hope that it might
illuminate the background of the civil war. To a certain ex-
tent the book does fulfil this purpose. There was indeed, when
Ortega was writing, an invertebrate Spain, a Spain that lived
on with the organs and limbs, but without the galvanizing
purpose which had enabled her in the sixteenth century to
colonize a new world. But these ingrown organs — the mon-
archy, the church, the caste of nobles, the army — comprised
only part of Spain; in fact, only that small section which is
today supporting the Moors and the Germans and the Italians
against the populace of the nation. All that part of Spain
which Ortega includes in his contemptuous word "masses"
constituted, according to his theory, a purely negative force,
incapable of social cohesion. Thus, with many variations on
the theme made familiar to American readers by Ortega's
Revolt of the Masses, the eminent philosopher sneers out of
court the ancient Spanish tradition of local democracy and
spontaneous association never completely destroyed by the
network of monarchical institutions; along with the more
recent efforts of democrats and labor groups to establish a
new national life. By implication his sneer embraces also the
heroic battle at present being staged by a nation which has
confounded the fascist dictators by its "vertebracy." Like any
son of the generation of '98 he has spent his time wondering
why the old Spain went to pieces while all about him a new
Spain was struggling to be born. And his most profound ex-
planation for the hypothetical inability of Spain to form a
nation is that Spain never knew the blessing of a real feudal
age and never harvested a Teutonic crop of feudal lords.
That misfortune being irremediable, his only hope seems
to lie in the miraculous appearance of a new aristocracy, which
he conceives with an absence of precision and content that
seems to give point to his own notion of the Spanish genius.
Little wonder that when the real conflict of forces began in
Spain both sides allowed Ortega to retire into his ivory tower.
For all the poetic beauty of its writing, and its aesthetic appre-
ciation of Spain — Ortega has, as the Spaniards say, el amor
fisico for his country — the book really explains very little
except the inability of the Spanish people to find guidance in
some of their better known intellectual ornaments.
AUGUST 1937
443
Miss Ballou's Spanish Prelude is predominantly a descrip-
tion of the Spanish counterparts of the lost generation who sat
in cafes during the dictatorship and tried to reflect Ortega's
glory at a time when he— and Unamuno — still presided in the
Spanish intellectual firmament. During her four years' sojourn
in Spain, which ended just before the fall of the dictatorship,
Miss Ballou associated with the originals of the characters she
analyzes as the "vanguardists"; sat with them in their cafes,
bickered with them at the famous Women's Club of Madrid.
The book that emerges is partly a penetrating picture of the
rootlessness and ineptitude of these solipsistic revolutionaries,
partly a cluster of character studies of selected Madrid types
ranging from provincial criadas to demi-mondaines like
Maria and "future counts" like Alberto; and partly a record
of her own private stream of consciousness, much of which
strikes the reviewer as an annoying interruption to an inter-
esting tale. Without making any excursions into the more
vital areas of Madrid where the real revolution was being
prepared, Miss Ballou did sense the "orchestration of rooted
and inevitable forces." But these she merely alludes to in
passing, so that her subject is not really prerevolutionary
Spain, but only the outer curtain that hid the stage from the
spectators.
In this list of books Seven Red Sundays stands in a class
by itself. A novel of anarcho-syndicalist "action" during one
of the chronic general strikes of the republican era, it plunges
into those layers of Madrid society whose existence is un-
suspected by foreign visitors and ignored by cafe revolution-
aries. The tale it tells is not the old one of the injustices and
the degradation of the working class; the former, the Spanish
anarcho-syndicalists take for granted, and the latter they re-
fuse to accept. For these people of the Madrid workers' quar-
ters feel the meaning of human dignity as none of Ortega's
lamented feudal lords, in their lamented castles, ever felt it.
It is the human values of anarcho-syndicalism that Sender
wishes to make his readers understand, not the "superficial
political significance." He sees as well as anyone the obvious
political contradictions of the anarcho-syndicalist creed; but
unlike most observers he does not drop the subject there,
with a quip at the folly of visionaries. Whether or not
Sender thinks these men could ever make a successful revo-
lution is not clear. But clearly he thinks that they will never
cease to be men, just as they will never cease to be revolu-
tionaries. As with all great novels the meaning of Seven Red
Sundays cannot be summarized in a few words. This is par-
ticularly true because Sender, as a conscious anti-intellectual,
has sacrificed none of the rich variety of his subject to the de-
mands of a logical pattern. But, as I interpret it, with appro-
priate reservations for the inadequacy of any intellectual for-
mulation of its meaning, the book is a study in different
degrees of nihilism, from the partial nihilism of the old fash-
ioned anarchist to the complete nihilism of Star, who is free
from even those spiritual values that the nineteenth century
called nihilism and for whom nothing exists but the revolu-
tion. It is more subtle than that; for while the complete
revolutionary has sloughed off, along with intellectualism, the
more endearing heroic and romantic values, he excludes them
only insofar as they afford the individual a refuge from the
reality of action. To the extent that he can transmute them
into "the spontaneous logic of the deed," they escape the
taint of bourgeois trappings and become appropriate to the
proletarian ascetic. Whatever else may be said of such a
creed, it at least gives to the men who practise it the quality
of integration. During the last eight months Madrid has been
defended on the basis of political principles and military meth-
ods quite alien to these men. But if anyone wishes to learn
the secret of the human force that has made that defense
|X>ssible, he cannot do better than to read this book.
Civilization Up to Now
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DYNAMICS, by Pitirim A. Sorokin. Amer-
ican Book Company. Three volumes: Vol. I Fluctuation of Forms of Art
(745 pp.). Vol. II Fluctuation of Systems of Truth, Ethics and Law
(727 pp.). Vol. Ill Fluctuation of Social Relationships, War and
Revolution (636 pp.). Price $6 per volume; $15 per set of three vol-
umes, postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IN THREE VOLUMES, A REALLY MONUMENTAL WORK OF
altogether about 2100 pages, Professor Sorokin of Harvard
University presents to us the results of many years of socio-
logical research, and a fourth volume is promised to us as a
conclusion of this certainly monumental undertaking. The
first of the three volumes deals with the fluctuations of forms
of art, the second with the fluctuations of systems of truth,
ethics, and law, the third with the fluctuations of social re-
lationships, war, and revolution. It is of course impossible,
within a short review, to do justice to a work of such scope.
What Professor Sorokin tries to do is to analyze two thousand
five hundred years of history and, similarly to Hegel or
Spengler, to interpret them in such a way that the fluctua-
tions of history seem to be dominated by one law which
will also allow us to foresee the future trend of history. To
do that Professor Sorokin introduces a number of new con-
cepts, of which the most important are the division of all
epochs of civilization into those of a Sensate culture and
of an Ideational culture. Common denominators like these
two concepts for such complex phenomena as civilizations,
must necessarily contain much which is subjective and ar-
bitrary, and may easily become fraught with emotions and
personal preferences.
According to Professor Sorokin, Western civilization has
been dominated during the last five centuries by a Sensate
culture. This culture is breaking down in the present crisis,
and a new Ideational culture is going to dawn. "Not only
the economic and political systems, but every important as-
pect of the life, organization, and culture ol the Western
society is included in the (present-day) crisis. Its body and
mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which
is not sore, nor any nervous fiber which functions soundly."
There is no hope, according to Professor Sorokin, in our
present-day civilization. In the preceding pages he has given
expression to his essentially negative evaluation of Sensate
cultures, their rational science, their faith in progress, in hu-
man reason, in the effort to change the social and material
world around us. He prefers the Ideational culture periods
with their "integrated minds" and their lofty disinterested-
ness in the outside world as they were represented, accord
ing to Professor Sorokin, for the last time in the civilization
of the Middle Ages before the Renaissance. To some reader
the question may come whether Professor Sorokin not only
seems to simplify the complexity of the historical process,
but also to idealize and beautify the periods of Ideational
culture and to underrate those of Sensate culture.
Professor Sorokin is, as practically everybody today is, pes-
simistic about our immediate future. We shall pass through,
or rather we are in the midst of, a period "grim, cruel, bloody,
and painful." But at the end of the crisis will come a new
glorious Ideational culture. Crisis "merely means a sharp and
painful turn in the life process of the society." Professor
Sorokin's theory and hope are in accordance with many
voices which we hear today and which, from different points
of view and with different aims in mind, all agree in the
condemnation of modern civilization which Professor Sorokin
sums up in the following words: "The Sensate culture did
its best in the way of degrading man to the level of a mere
444
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The essential booh
JUST PUBLISHED
for an understanding of SYPHILIS in America
and the nationwide campaign to stamp it out!
SHADOW ON THE LAND
SYPHILIS
By THOMAS PARRAN, M.D.
SURGEON GENERAL, UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
EVERYONE who read Dr. Parran's notable article, The
Next Great Plague to Go, in the Survey Graphic of
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to unveil the tremendously interesting facts in a book which
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Dr. Parran tells the simple, straight-forward story of syphilis
and of its implications for the individual and the nation.
The appalling panorama has never before been presented in
all of its aspects, with emphasis on contemporary public
health and programs for ridding America of this great
plague. Here is, indeed, a book which no one in the educa-
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miss. Dr. Parran is asking you to enlist for the duration
of the war, and Shadow on the Land is your manual of arms.
The book is illustrated by Rudolf Modley, whose method
of vivifying statistics adds force and directness to Dr.
Parran's engrossing presentation of the most important
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on the Land now, or write the publishers for special terms
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330 Pages. Illustrated. $2.50.
REYNAL & HITCHCOCK, Inc.
Publishers
386 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
reflex mechanism, a mere organ motivated by sex, a mere
semi-mechanical, semi-physiological organism, devoid of any
divine spark, of any absolute value, of anything noble and
sacred." Some may think this picture of modern civilization
not entirely adequate. They may think that man has to work
out his way of salvation within this modern civilization. But
they may agree with Professor Sorokin in his hopeful
description of the new man which is to come in the new
Ideational culture. "The most urgent need of our time is the
man who can control himself and his lusts, who is compas-
sionate to all his fellowmen, who can see and seek for the
eternal values of culture and society, and who deeply feels
his unique responsibility in this universe." Only that some
believe that we find this kind of man more common since
the Renaissance than in the Middle ' Ages.
Professor Sorokin's large and encyclopedic volumes will
certainly repay the reader for the effort involved in study-
ing these pages, crammed with the results of years of patient
and thoughtful research. Professor Sorokin writes in a very
readable and graceful style. Even those who disagree with his
valuations and prognostics will be profoundly impressed by
the depth and earnestness of his searching, by the range ot
his scholarship and by the brilliance of many of his illuminat-
ing sentences.
Smith College HANS KOHN
Andre Siegfried's Canada
CANADA, by Andre Siegfried. Harcourt. lirace. 341 pp. Price $3 post-
paid of Surrey Graphic.
THIS BOOK IS DIVIDED INTO FOUR PARTS. IN THE LAST (THE
Political Aspect), and in the chapters on the French-Canadians,
M. Siegfried has a good deal to say that is shrewd, true and
fin answering advertisements
important, though his admiration for the French-Canadians
is sometimes uncritical. The rest of the book is superficial.
Almost all of it suffers from the sort of personification which,
for example, describes the capital imports from Britain,
1904-1914, as "simply the support that a young country has
every right to expect from its mother."
The poorest parts of the book are those which deal with
economics. M. Siegfried's theoretical equipment is obviously
inadequate, his knowledge of Canadian economic literature
and statistics equally so. He calls the St. Lawrence valley
"overpopulated" without defining that slippery term. His
talk of the great empty spaces and the "immeasurable vol-
ume" of Canada's resources shows complete unawareness of
the work of McGibbon, Jenness, Hurd, Whiteley and others,
to say nothing of the relevant parts of the Canada Year Book.
He evidently does not know that since the war Canada has
exported just about as much capital as she has imported. And
why does he rely on his imagination for an estimate of tour-
ist traffic? The Canada Year Book gives figures.
Not less damaging to the book is M. Siegfried's class bias.
He remarks piously that, "Depressions are not eternal . . .
and in spite of man's imprudent remedies which usually
retard recovery, they do pass in the end when Nature liqui-
dates them in her own way." His ideas of the western farmer
were evidently picked up from eastern financiers, for he re-
peats the preposterous tale of the grain growers' life requiring
"only a few periods of intense work . . . leaving them between
whiles plenty of liberty to run around in their motor cars or
take an express train to Florida or California." He displays a
delightful naivete about the climatic and technical conditions
of prairie farming, and the discussion of whether there has
been "overproduction" of wheat ignores the question of
prices!
As for labor, listen to this: "The Canadian workman . . .
asf mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
445
arrives at the factory in his car, wears gauntlets at work, is
well equipped and well housed. . . . Often he is a member
of the American Federation of Labor." At the very most, only
12 to 15 percent of Canadian workers are members of any
unions at all, and less than half of these are in AF of L
unions. (Official Report on Labor Organization, 1935.)
This review may seem harsh. But M. Siegfried's reputation,
and the pretentiousness of this book, justify strict standards
of criticism.
Montreal, Canada EUGENE FORSEY
The People and the Constitution
THE POWER TO GOVERN, by Walton H. Hamilton and Douglass
Adair. Norton. 254 pp. Price $2.50.
THE SUPREME COURT AND THE NATIONAL WILL, by Dean
Alfange. Doubleday, Doran. 297 pp. Price $2.50.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE JUDICIAL DRAMA OF THE LAST MONTHS HAS BEEN THEATRE
of propaganda enacted before an audience of violent par-
tisans. Much that is unimportant as well as uninformed
has been written and produced upon the stage so that the
productions will last but a scant season. There are a few
important writings which will remain after the season and
the controversy have passed away. High among these ranks
the volume of Messrs. Hamilton and Adair.
The authors join with Mr. Brant and Mr. Wallace in
their books, which appeared somewhat earlier, in remind-
ing us that the founding fathers realized they could not
foresee the course of human events in the years ahead of them
and therefore intended to establish in the broadest of terms
a living government designed to endure throughout genera-
tions to come. The book makes the world of those fathers
live before us, vividly and clearly. That world was deep in
mercantilist doctrine so that the Constitution formulated
in it was the embodiment of the doctrines of national con-
trol and governmental interference instead of the expression
of economic individualism. Through the years dominated by
laissez-faire, the wheel has swung full circle to a world
where unaided industry lacks the capacity for self-govern-
ment and where the choice is between governmental con-
trol or chaos. Therefore we are back to the broad definition
of commerce of the fathers, and the constitution then offers a
precedent for the constitution of today.
The thesis is expressed so clearly and with such beauty
of style that we are once more reminded that scholarship
need not be as dry-as-dust and that law and political science
and literature may at times be synonymous.
THE JUDICIAL CONTROVERSY HAS NOT BROUGHT FORTH ONLY
books of propaganda, howsoever good or howsoever bad. Dean
Alfange writes dispassionately and clearly for the non-
professional reader who would like to know more of the
historic place of the Supreme Court and of judicial review in
the traditional American system of government. To those be-
wildered by partisanship and in need of aid in making up their
minds on some of the questions involved in the judicial discus-
sion of the hour, the present volume is invaluable. Mr. Al-
fange, born in Greece and a graduate of Columbia Law School,
now practicing in the United States, analyzes with clarity and
ability the relevant decisions and dissenting opinions under
each of the great powers conferred by the Constitution on
Congress, whether the powers concern taxation or com-
merce. He has further interpreted these decisions in the
light of the "national will" manifested at the time the deci-
sions were reached.
So well has he done his work that he won the first
Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Award of $2500 offered by
Doubleday, Doran and Company and awarded by a com-
mittee consisting of President Dodds of Princeton, Dr.
Moulton of Brookings, Dr. Canby of the Saturday Review,
Dean Emeritus Pound of the Harvard Law School and Col.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. The committee has chosen well,
for despite the fact that the book is purely expository, as the
author explains in his preface, it is by no means a milk-
and-water product of a writer without a point of view.
Mr. Alfange shows clearly that while the Supreme Court
is free from blind partisanship, nevertheless political con-
viction plays an important part in determining its decisions.
Like the Hamilton and Adair volume, his book was com-
pleted before the memorable Wagner Labor Relations Act
decisions which but reinforce his statement, but adds an
epilogue concerning them. By those decisions, the Supreme
Court has broadened the meaning of the commerce clause
as the fathers and as Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Adair and many
others might wish it, and indicate that the Court may be
responsive to the national if not the presidential will. They
also show that the Constitution may be interpreted to be
"not of an age but for all time."
Barnard College JANE PERRY CLARK
New Schoolmen View the World
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY, edited by Max Ascoli
and Fritz Lehmann. With a Foreword by Alvin Johnson, \orton. 336 pp.
Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
HERE is A VERSATILE AND PENETRATING SERIES OF ESSAYS ON
the pressing problems of democracy. This admirable collec-
tion will make known to a much wider public the work of
the distinguished members of the Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research.
The initial essay by Colm poses in arresting fashion the
question, "Is economic planning compatible with democracy?"
The papers which follow can be divided (to suit the con-
venience of the reviewer) into three parts. One group has to
do with the relationship of private association to democracy,
notably associations of labor and business. The chapter by
Brandt on agricultural cooperation is a particularly good ex-
ample of how to condense a vast range of experience into
sharp and timely form.
The second group is taken up with the institutions of gov-
ernment and party. Two of the essays are by Ascoli, and they
betray not only the subtle quality of his thought but the
finish of his style, to which the readability of the entire vol-
ume is in some degree to be attributed.
The final group of essays has to do with the less formalized
aspects of the world in which public and private associations
live and move. Lehmann (in a paper which is out of se-
quence from the standpoint of this reviewer) presents origi-
nal data on the distribution of wealth in the United States
and raises a number of searching questions. The essay on
social stratification by Speier maintains a particularly high
level of original analysis.
The members of the Graduate Faculty share a rich back-
ground of European, principally German, culture. It is grati-
fying to observe how they have maintained the integrity of
their social scientific tradition and how, at the same time, they
have shown a keen sense of responsibility for discovering
those details about the American situation which would
enable them to apply, expand and revise the legacy of their
European years.
With this book it is fair to say that the University in Exile
is no more; the Graduate Faculty has found a local habitation
in the intellectual and public life of America. This is no ex-
ample of that sterile brand of "Americanization" which con-
sists in finding an ancestor in the rigging of the Mayflower
or learning how to play end man in a minstrel show. This is
"Americanization" which preserves the integrity of the recent
arrival and brings him into effective contact by addition, not
subtraction.
University of Chicago HAROLD D. LASSWELL
446
SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
III— At the Vocational Rehabilita-
tion Service
by HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM
OUT OF AMERICA'S AGONIES OF DESTRUCTION, DEATHS AND
disabilities in the World War grew a new and enlightened
social consciousness for all those who battle life under a
handicap. Once this country was awakened to the idea that
it was only common justice to aid a soldier, sailor or marine
who loses an arm, a leg or his sight while serving his coun-
try, it is just a few short steps to providing the same service
to an individual who was disabled through accident or at
birth.
The success of this work to reestablish the disabled was a
powerful argument for a thorough-going program of social
security for all American citizens. This work had blazed the
trail for the important Social Security Act of 1935.
When the United States joined the Allies, officials knew
that Americans would be disabled as part of the price for
winning the World War. It was generally recognized that
the government had a responsibility toward reestablishing
these men in self-supporting vocations if possible. That would
be better for the morale of the men — and cheaper for the
taxpayers. The Federal Bureau for Vocational Education
made a survey of what foreign countries were doing to re-
habilitate disabled soldiers and sailors.
On the basis of this data and information on how public
and private agencies were helping the handicapped to find a
useful place in society, the Smith-Sears bill for the vocational
rehabilitation of disabled soldiers, sailors and marines was
passed unanimously by both houses of Congress. President
Wilson signed it on June 27, 1918.
Even when this wartime measure was before Congress,
citizens who had overcome handicaps asked Congressmen
to include the industrially disabled as well as injured war-
riors. Although the Smith-Sears bill provided only for fighters
in the war to "make the world safe for democracy," the plea
had not been in vain.
In September, 1918, three months later, Senator Hoke
Smith of Georgia introduced a bill to promote rehabilitation
of disabled civilians. As chairman of the Senate committee
on the war measure, he had listened to the appeals for gov-
ernment to aid these victims of a machine age and he had
been deeply moved by their testimony. Congress failed to
act in the bustle of wartime activities, but the measure was
reintroduced by Senator Smith and Representative Simeon
Fess of Ohio the following session and became a law on June
2, 1920. It defined vocational rehabilitation as "the render-
ing of a physically disabled person fit to engage in a remun-
erative occupation."
When the federal act became effective, twelve states had
passed measures providing for vocational rehabilitation of the
disabled civilians, but only six of them — Massachusetts, New
Jersey, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania and Oregon —
actually had programs under way. Now forty-seven states
participate in this cooperative venture and match federal
funds for this work, dollar for dollar.
Now the Social Security Act has established federal aid
to the states for vocational rehabilitation as a permanent, an-
nual charge against the treasury. At long last, Americans
have realistically begun to accept their responsibility for re-
fitting those damaged in our machine civilization into self-
sustaining, useful citizens.
Frequently in the development of a social movement, one
individual throws his soul into the work and becomes the focal
point for the idea, although he is not the founder. Such a per-
son is John Aubel Kratz, chief of the Vocational Rehabilita-
tion Service in the United States Office of Education.
When THE LITERARY DIGEST says that
JOHN L.
LEWIS
"considers Morris Ernst's The Ultimate
Power is one of his reading 'musts,' " it
reflects the feeling of liberal readers and
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THE
ULTIMATE
POWER
by Morris L. Ernst
At all booksellers $3.00
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(In answering advertisements please
447
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC:^
He was a specialist in commercial education during the
days when Congress was arguing whether to establish this
service for the industrially disabled. When the service was
founded in 1920, he was appointed one of the regional agents.
After one year's service, he was named chief and he has been
responsible for training the tender shoot of an infant agency
into the full grown tree of the service which has a record
of helping approximately 100,000 disabled persons to return
to self-supporting jobs.
Kratz, who still has the air of a school teacher despite his
eighteen years with the Vocational Rehabilitation Service,
stresses the economic rather than the humanitarian side of
his work. He views it as part of the country's broader pro-
gram of national efficiency and conservation of national re-
sources. He explains that vocational rehabilitation deals with
"conservation of the nation's manpower" and seeks to give
the physically handicapped an adequate opportunity to share
in the work of the nation in places for which they are best
fitted and most useful.
"The justification of vocational rehabilitation is based on
its economic returns to society," Kratz believes. It is pri-
marily economic, therefore, and only secondarily social and
humanitarian.
Kratz explains that the average cost of reestablishing a dis-
abled person is $300 whereas it costs from $300 to $500 yearly
to maintain an individual in idleness in an institution such
as a poor farm or old people's home. Thus, he said, for what
it costs to keep these handicapped persons in idleness for a
single year the state agencies are able to train them for a job
and place them where they will make a steady living. The
rehabilitation work is not considered finished when a person
completes his training; he has to be placed in a job and
hold it.
To check up on the economic value of its work, the service
made a survey of 1,000 cases of persons rehabilitated from
1920 to 1924. The state and federal governments invested an
average of $291 per case, a total of $291,000. The total annual
earning capacity of the group prior to rehabilitation was
$332,132. Immediately after rehabilitation, their earning
capacity had increased to $1,035,780, or an average annual
income of slightly more than $1,000. A 1927 checkup showed
their earnings had increased to $1,243,301 a year while an-
other survey in 1931, when the depression was curtailing all
earnings, snowed these 1,000 rehabilitated individuals were
earning $929,702 or nearly three times what they could earn
during a non-depression year without training.
WHILE GENERAL STATISTICS ARE INTERESTING, KRATZ CITES CASE
records with even more enthusiasm.
There is the story of Violet B., a competent stenographer
who lost her job because an attack of spinal meningitis left
her totally deaf. Unable to return to her former employment,
she was trained as a laboratory technician at a total cost to
state and federal governments of $99.40. She is employed in
an eye, ear, nose and throat hospital where her deafness is not
a special handicap, and earns $80 a month. Instead of being
an embittered individual without an interest in life or a job,
she is a cheerful worker with a ready smile who has found
a useful place in society again.
Robert M. lost his left hand and leg in an industrial acci-
dent. His future productivity seemed hopeless. Return to his
former job was out of the question. When the state rehabili-
tation service investigated his case, as happens in practically
all cases reported under workmen's compensation legisla-
tion, it was found possible to capitalize on his mechanical in-
genuity. He was set up in his own shop to make toys and now
makes a good living selling trinkets to interested neighbors
and retail merchants.
The list goes on and on for 100,000 cases of disabled in-
dividuals who have been struck down by the Fates but yet
have been able to find new jobs where they became self-sup-
porting. Kratz and his associates generally are not interesed
in the "home-bound" or those who require sheltered jobs.
These case histories of "graduates" of the Vocational Re-
habilitation Service remind one of this quotation found in a
booklet recently published on its work:
Milton, the blind, who looked on paradise,
Beethoven, the deaf, who heard vast harmonies,
Byron, the lame, who climbed toward Alpine skies —
Who pleads a handicap, remembering these?
Southwestern Art Survives the Depression by EVELYN MILLER CROWELL
A RECENT VISIT TO MY NATIVE CITY, DALLAS, TEXAS, GAVE
me an opportunity to report on the status of a group of
artists whose work I had followed during the winter of 1931-
32 when I served as art and music editor of the Dallas Times
Herald. It took a death in the family and the arrival of the
depression to make me a critic, but it seems only fair to
admit now that this job, vhich I looked upon when I took
it as a stop-gap between more serious writing, turned out to
be one of the most stimulating experiences of my life.
Having lived in New York for some years, I had over-
looked the fact that Texas in general and Dallas in particular
were enjoying a cultural boom. For purposes of brevity I
will pass over what was happening in other fields and con-
centrate on the art activity I found. During the eight
months of my reporting I covered eighty-three exhibitions.
These included everything from loan exhibitions by National
Academicians to travelling group shows of students' work
sponsored by various art organizations. However the most
interesting of all to me were the one-man and group shows
by local artists.
To give some idea of the number of local artists, there
were 126 exhibitors in the Fifth Annual Allied Art Show,
held in Dallas in April 1932, one of the requirements for
which is that every exhibitor be a resident of Dallas County,
and the 126 whose work was accepted represented only a
third of those who submitted work to the jury committee.
Not only was the work of Dallas artists exhibited in the local
art galleries, art schools, and the showrooms of art dealers,
but exhibitions were sponsored by social and civic clubs and
local work was displayed in the foyers of the two local little
theatres during the week's run of each of their plays. And
not only were Dallasites painting pictures and looking at
them, but they were buying them — even as late as 1931-32.
One of the leading art dealers told me that during the real
boom years this southwestern city of 300,000 population was
buying paintings at the rate of $200,000 a year. Of course the
big prices went to those with international reputations — a
George Innes for $35,000, a George Romney for $18,000 and
a Max Bohn, for $15,000 — but an increasing number of
Dallas art buyers were specializing in hometown products,
paying as much as $1500 for them.
I wish that space permitted me to dwell in greater detail
on this creative ferment in a section which was unexplored
wilderness less than a hundred years ago. Indigenous is the
keyword. To be a success in the Southwest nowadays you
must be authentically southwestern. The grandsons of pio-
neers are showing a salutary desire to grow from the soil.
And while there is a tendency to lay on local color with
lavish hands, the methods of presentation lend wide variety.
The local battle over conservatism versus modernism in art
reached such proportions while I was there that the news-
papers were running editorials for and against, artists and
448
laymen were filling the Letters to the Editor columns with
their respective opinions, and every social gathering brought
forth violent arguments on the subject. Thus in the local
exhibitions you may see one of the beautiful pastels in which
the veteran Frank Reaugh has depicted a West which has
already passed, side by side with a raw splash of color that
is the new industrial Dallas as seen by one of the youngsters
just out of art school.
A Negro art exhibition was held at the Dallas Colored
YWCA, under the auspices of the Dallas Federation of
Colored Women's Clubs, in the spring of 1932. The ma-
jority of the exhibitors had had little instruction and here
the work was extremely conservative, as the work of begin-
ners often is. The greatest promise was to be found in the
charcoal sketches of a young Negro by the name of Henry
Lee Howard who had received just two months' instruction
in Chicago from an artist whose studio he cleaned. The boy
was unable to be present to receive his prize because he
worked in a "hot dog" stand and couldn't get away in the
evenings.
I LEFT DALLAS IN THE SUMMER OF 1932. WHEN I WENT BACK
for a visit in 1936 one of my first queries was as to the fate
ot the artists in whom I had become so much interested, espe-
cially the younger ones who were just getting started when
the worst days of the depression closed down on them. Much
to my delight, I found most of them still there and all of
them still — artists. While it must be admitted that the ma-
jority of them have been unable to eat off of their art during
these years, they have at least managed to go on with their
painting, sculpturing and etching. Quite a few were in-
cluded in the Federal Art and WPA projects. Others received
commissions for murals for the Centennial Exposition held
in Dallas last summer. Some are teaching in the local art
schools which have, amazingly enough, increased in number,
or have built up their own art classes. One is an art editor
for a local paper, one is a draftsman for a power and light
company, several have gone in for commercial art, and one is
employed at the beautiful new Dallas Museum of Fine Arts,
a wing of which is to house the Dallas Art Institute, a non-
profit-seeking civic enterprise which has managed to weather
the depression. Incidentally, the building was designed by
two of the leading local architects — Ralph Bryan and Roscoe
Dewitt — and the striking bronze doors with their motif of
cactus and thistle are the work of a young Dallas sculptor,
Dorothy Austin.
It was reassuring to find so many Dallas artists represented
on the walls of the new museum. Local artists have reached
those walls by way of annual purchase prizes offered by local
art patrons, the awards being made by jury committees of na-
tionally known art critics. And while some of the older
and more conservative Dallas artists — Frank Reaugh, Ed-
ward Eisenlohr, Martha Simpkins, Frank Klepper, and Olin
Travis — have large local followings the purchase prizes for
the past few years have gone to the younger and more mod-
ern artists. These include the portraits by Alexandre Hogue
and Jerry Bywaters, the landscapes by Harry Carnohan,
Everett Spruce and Charles T. Bowling, the lithograph draw-
ings by William Lester and the circus horses by Otis Dozier.
J. O. Mahoney, Jr., who won the 1932 Prix de Rome and who
in the preceding four years had won the Beaux Arts prizes,
more than any other student had ever captured, is back in
Dallas teaching. Allie Tenant, winner of the first prize for
sculpture in the 1932 Southern States Art League and various
other prizes for sculpture, is responsible for the bronze Indian
in front of the State Building at the Centennial Exposition,
which visitors are likely to remember.
The Dallas Negroes have held their Allied Art Show every
year throughout the depression. One of the sponsors told
me sadly that they had not made the progress for which they
had hoped because so many of their people were absolutely
unable to buy artists' materials.
ate
of
to-
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449
(Continued from page 413) pendent. Industrial processes
and relations are sympathetic and sensitive. A dislocation or
shutdown in a major industry affects almost at once the jobs
of thousands of workers in supplementary industries hun-
dreds of miles away. Government cannot view such a situa-
tion in the role of a mere observer. Sooner or later circum-
stances compel it to take an active part, for modern life is
industrial life, and when that stops the very existence of social
institutions is threatened.
The Danger of Compulsion
IT IS SOMETIMES PROPOSED THAT INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES WHICH
lead to strikes, lock-outs, picketing, and similar types of con-
flict, are simply manifestations of the law of the jungle — in
modern society. We long ago ceased to endorse that method
in disputes between individuals. The duel as a means of set-
tling grievances of a personal or economic character is pro-
scribed in all civilized jurisdictions. We take our problems to
a court of law and abide by the findings of a judge and
jury. Why not do likewise in industrial relations?
Many serious-minded persons are urging us to prohibit
strikes and lockouts. In a word, they declare that where agree-
ment is impossible, the contestants should be required to
take their case to court and abide by the findings of that
tribunal. Any method short of this, we are told, exposes the
public and the consumer to unnecessary and unjust depriva-
tion of peace and comfort and introduces a potent threat to
the safety of the social system.
While th« justifications given for this proposal are persu-
asive, it has limitations so grave that I am unable to endorse
it. Other nations which have tried compulsory arbitration of
industrial disputes have not found it successful. In our own
country, the experiment in the State of Kansas between 1920
and 1925 ought to convince us of the futility of reliance upon
the police or the edict of a court to enforce industrial peace.
My objection to compulsory arbitration is that it is neither
feasible nor practical to enforce a court order which runs
counter to the opinions or sense of fairness of great masses
of people. Court orders do not produce goods. They do not
mine coal nor run trains. When they are unenforceable be-
cause of the physical impossibility of imposing penalties on all
who participate in violating a court order, the flames of con-
flict are fanned and respect for authority is broken down.
In addition, the very nature of the process of compulsory
arbitration may actually retard the development of voluntary
procedures. Either side, failing to gain its end through nego-
tiation or conciliation, would be tempted to delay agreement
in the hope that a court of law would issue an order in
accordance with its point of view. When logically pursued,
compulsory arbitration of labor disputes would seriously re-
strict many basic constitutional guarantees. The right to quit
work for any reason at all, the right of free speech and the
right of assembly might easily be curtailed, since the exercise
of those rights might conflict with a court order holding
strikes illegal.
Finally, it is extremely probable that this method of dealing
with industrial disputes would place our political institutions
under an intolerable strain. Labor and capital, having placed
their fate in the hands of courts and judges, would become
active contestants for the control of government in order to
appoint the members of the judiciary.
The Duty of Government to the Oppressed
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IS PRIMARILY THE
problem of wages, speed, hours of labor, opportunity to ex-
press creative craftsmanship, fear of job insecurity, industrial
ill health, a fair chance of promotion based on merit, protec-
tion against petty and unreasoning tyranny, mutual self-
respect, and defense against the detestable institution of in-
dustrial espionage. It is the problem of allowing men to live
with the dignity they, as human beings, deserve.
We cannot permit ourselves to be deluded into thinking
this problem consists simply of strikes. Strikes are only an
index of the status of industrial relations. Essentially, it is a
problem of the daily adjustment of a person to his occupa-
tional environment, for when such adjustment takes place
imperfectly unrest is sure to follow. It is the accumulation of
hundreds of unventilated grievances, each one of little mo-
ment in itself, but all together sufficient to create a pool of
pent-up emotions.
It is evident that industry must learn to know men as
intimately as it knows materials. But the fear of social explo-
sion is not the chief reason why employers should know men
as well as materials. Democracy — the sacredness of human
life and liberty — will not long flourish aided only by the bliss-
ful self-satisfaction of us who enjoy its benefits. Democracy
will not stand alone. It will not stand merely with the passive
support of our self-content. On the contrary, it must be con-
stantly safeguarded, carefully reinforced, and stoutly imple-
mented against those forces which, unchecked, would in time
accomplish its dissolution.
Wherever enlightened men and women ponder the prob-
lems of the nation, the forces which threaten our democratic
system are frequently the subjects of discussion. Some fear
the influence of foreign doctrines and dogmas; others "view
with alarm" our deviations, real or fancied, from the true
system of democratic government. But none, I am convinced,
will deny the constant menace — the threat of internal decay
— which inheres in discontent born of economic injustices and
gross inequality. For where there is deprivation of the necessi-
ties of life, where there is exploitation of the downtrodden,
there unmistakably lie the seeds of disruption and re-
bellion.
Thus it becomes the duty of government to set minimum
standards for workers. Happily, we are through, by and large,
with the degradation in which industrial workers labored
during the bleak years before the turn of the century. We
no longer have shop girls slaving behind counters from 7:45
in the morning until 1 1 o'clock at night, snatching a moment
during the wearying day to eat a frugal meal, for the pathetic
remuneration of three dollars a week. We arc done with the
era when men sweated from five in the morning until seven
in the evening under physical conditions that today would be
looked upon with revulsion. Briefly, we have left behind us
the day when the lives of workers, their wages and housing,
the degree of risk in their work, the menace to their health,
the pace of production, the length of the working day, and
discipline in the factory, were virtually subject to the arbitrary
and autocratic control of the employer. By degrees we have
been able to exterminate the most glaring of these abuses.
The force of public opinion, the protest of the workers them-
selves, the intervention of government through the medium
of legislation, and improvements within industry, have com-
bined in this process of amelioration.
We cannot stop at this point. Of course, we would rejoice
one and all in the realization that every working man was
permanently insured against the squalor of the sweatshop, the
fear of insecurity in his old age, and the menace of occupa-
tional disease; that working women were accorded every pro-
tection which humanity dictates they be given — and that chil-
dren were guaranteed the right to live the happy, normal lives
children should lead. But surely we cannot be so naive, if not
so blind, as to believe that these goals have now been attained
to the limit of our ability to achieve them. We cannot, singly
or as a people, coast along on what has been done.
In my home State of Michigan, according to a report of
the Women's Bureau of the federal Department of Labor,
during a representative week in the fall of 1934, half of the
women employed in eighteen out of twenty-two types of
manufacturing industries earned less than $14; half of those
employed in limited-price stores earned less than $12.35; and
half of the women laundry employes earned less than $9.90.
The prevailing hours for these three industries were from
thirty-five to forty a week in the manufacturing group, from
450
forty to forty-eight in the limited-price stores, and from forty
to over forty-eight in the laundries.
It is not my intention, in presenting these few facts, to be
sensational or to mislead by making no mention of the higher
and eminently more satisfactory wage and hour conditions
which exist in numerous other branches of American indus-
try. In passing, however, I should like to point out that a raise
in pay is not automatically a net advantage to the worker. If
it is accompanied by a speeding up of production, the mone-
tary gain may be to a large extent nullified, for additional
funds will avail the laborer little or nothing if his health is
impaired to the extent of shortening the span of his life.
Government's stake in this large job of implementing
democracy is most significant because government can speak
not only for labor, but for industry, and for the public.
Setting Industrial Standards
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, THE EFFORTS OF THE CONSUMERS
League and other organizations which have sought to bolster
the principles of democracy with positive support, have met
with repeated rebuffs from the courts of the land. But the
U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Washington minimum
wage case has given rise to new hope. The door seems open
to state wage and hour laws for men, as well as for women.
The extreme necessity for laws protecting the latter needs no
elaboration, but we must not overlook the almost equal neces-
sity of protection for men. Certainly we cannot fall back on
the rhetorical absurdity that to give men the protection of
minimum wage and maximum hour guarantees is to deprive
them of their right of contract. As Justice Stone remarked so
pointedly in dissenting from the decision outlawing the New
York wage law, there is, indeed, "grim irony in speaking of
the freedom of contract of those who, because of their eco-
nomic necessity, give their services for less than is needful to
keep body and soul together."
Of scarcely less significance is the intelligent regulation of
child labor. Our youth must be assured of the right to grow
up as children should and not as prematurely aged slaves of
modern industry.
Government must further assure the working man and
woman of their rights as human beings by obtaining foi
them the protection of occupational disease laws. At the same
time, industry must recognize that it cannot in justice discard
a workman as an empty shell once he has given his strength
and obtained in its stead a destructive malady.
A major phase of a legislative program in behalf of the
working man and his family must be the acquisition of the
untold benefit of security against unemployment and old age.
Government must do this not as a measure of paternalistic
charity, but as an investment in human contentment as well
as insurance for the preservation of democracy.
A legislative program, the goal of which is the full consoli-
dation of the rights of the working people, would be sadly
incomplete without a guarantee to labor of the right to act
for itself in the event that the protections devised by govern-
ment prove inadequate. Collective bargaining must be a fun-
damental of such a guarantee. The right to strike must be
kept intact, but reason dictates that some provision be made
for the investigation of situations likely to lead to strikes,
with a view to the negotiation of differences. And since the
property rights of employers are carefully delineated by law,
it might be just and fair to make some effort toward incor-
porating into law the worker's property right in his job.
Admittedly, the legality of such rights is by no means clearly
defined. At present, they rest upon our human sense of justice
and necessity rather than upon law.
In other words, when government exercises its prerogative
of legislation in these ways, it accomplishes a manifold result.
It enhances the beauty of human life, it solidifies the founda-
tions of our democratic system, and it erects strong barriers
against the dangers of extremism. It emphasizes the success
of the common man in his business of living; and upon that
(In answering advertisements please
451
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on the corner
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A full-length novel, published in pocket magazine size
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Order from
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SUBSCRIBE HERE
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WORKERS WANTED
HSBJ
WANTED : An experienced supervisor in a child-
placing agency in New York City. Considera-
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experience in the family or child guidance
fields. 7447 Survey.
Your Own Agency
This is the counseling and placement agency
sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
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Organization for Public Health Nursing,
National, Non-Profit making.
Jel~t Ii«*/^o^C/L«*ce-
(Agency)
122 East 22nd Street, 7th floor. New York
(VANTED: Medical Social Worker, graduate of
accredited school and with some experience,
capable of inaugurating medical social service
in city of something over 100,0000 population.
Salary, $150 per month. Canton Welfare Fed-
eration, Canton. Ohio.
SITUATION WANTED
LRTS AND CRAFTS INSTRUCTOR, 14 years ex-
perience in teaching metal, leather, wood, clay
modelling and other crafts. Own equipment.
Seeks position in Institution, Community Cen-
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GERTRUDE R. STEIN, INC.
Vocational Service Agency
11 East 44th Street NEW YORK
MUrray Hill 2-4784
A professional employment bureau specializing
in social service, institutional, dietetic, medical,
publicity, advertising and secretarial positions.
MISCELLANEOUS
ielieving some men and women are burdened,
anxious, needing help in meeting perplexing
personal problems, a retired physician offers
friendly counsel for those who desire it No
fees. 7419 Survey.
FOR RENT
LITERARY SERVICE
^amp, shaded by trees, perched on a rock, over-
looking Holland Pond, acres of land. Living
room with large stone fireplace, sleeping
porch, kitchen. Furnished for five people.
No conveniences. Boating, bathing, fishing.
$60.00 month, beginning Aug. 1, boat included
A. W. Hitchcock, R. D. 1, Southbridge, Mass'
Tel.: Hri field 9-11.
Special articles, theses, speeches, papers. Re-
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twenty years' experience serving busy pro-
fessional persons. Prompt service extended.
AUTHORS RESEARCH BUREAU, 516
Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y.
to EMPLOYERS
Who Are Planning to Increase Their Staffs
We Supply:
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Dietitians
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One East 42nd Street New York City
Agency Tel.: MU 2-7575 Gertrude D. Holmes, Director
THE BOOK SHELF
A DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY
An American Adventure in Cooperation with
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An amazing story of industrial peonage leading
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Written in response to nation-wide interest.
63 pages, paper, 15(?.
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347 Madison Avenue New York
"Let the Nation Employ Itself" .
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PROHIBITING POVERTY
By
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$1.00 — Paper 50c
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The American Journal of Nursing shows the part
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success, in the long run, depends the prosperity of industry.
The Role of Government
GOVERNMENT, AFTER ALL, is A FRAGILE AND TENUOUS THING
which is easily damaged. In its ideal form, it is never haughty
and arrogant, for when it assumes those characteristics, it be-
comes a hateful thing without real value and without a
worthwhile cause. Human beings writhe under the restraint
and repression which it imposes upon them. They feel intel-
lectually and spiritually stifled. Slowly but surely they give
voice to the most intense kind of protest. In the pages of his-
tory one may read the tragedies of the many governments
which have been crushed in the storm of hatred conceived by
their own arrogance.
Yet such things need never happen. When government
exercises its rightful function, it has no traffic with arrogance
and oppression and has nothing to fear from those to whom it
ministers. Ideally, it emphasizes the beauty and splendor of
(In answering advertisements
human life in that it exists, in actuality, for the sole purpose
of helping men attain the highest possible state of well-being.
It is strongest when it is kindly, helpful, and fundamentally
concerned with stimulating and protecting human values.
Men created government for their own good and protection,
and so long as it functions according to man's need for it, just
so long will it function efficiently.
NOW, AS NEVER BEFORE, THE HAPPINESS OF OUR FUTURE DEPENDS
upon the efficient functioning of democratic government. If
peace is to rule our industrial relationships it must be sought
for and accomplished with concerted purpose and protected
with concerted allegiance. Employers and employes alike —
and the public and government as well — must realize that in-
dustrial peace is not only possible but practicable. From my
own experience, especially in these recent months in Michi-
gan, I am convinced that we can make the appropriate adjust-
ments in our human and institutional relationships.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
452
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Academic Year 1937 - 1938
ADVANCED CURRICULUM
Supervision of Social Case Work
Teaching of Social Case Work
Psychological Treatment of Children
GRADUATE DEPARTMENT
Social Case Work
Social Research
Social Work Administration
EXTENSION DEPARTMENT
Courses in Residence
Extramural Courses
Fall semester begins September 29. Catalog on request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to the
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from a
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL
hessian hills school
progressive • coeducational • day and resident • nursery thru
ninth grade • curriculum includes work in studios, laboratory
and shop • frequent trips - hiking, tennis, swimming, skating •
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croton-on-hndson, n. y. — I hr. from it. y. c. — let: croton 514, or write for catalog.
SATISFACTION!
The replies from the Survey ads are increasingly
gratifying and I am very glad of the business that has
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nice contacts.
— A Travel Advertiser.
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
1937 - 1938
"PROFESSIONAL training, combining courses
•J- and field work in public or private agencies,
is offered in the following fields:
Public Welfare
Group Work
Placement
Probation and Parole
Community Organization
Publicity
Institution Management
Family Case Work
Medical Social Work
Child Welfare
Psychiatric Social Work
Social Research
Administration
Visiting Teaching
/CORRELATED evening courses are planned for
^^ employed social workers.
A catalogue will be sent upon request.
122 East 22nd Street
New York, N. Y.
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
A Graduate Professional School Offering Courses
Leading to the Degree of Master of Social Science.
ACADEMIC YEAR OPENS JULY, 1938
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for June, 1937
The Home Situations of the Children in a Preprimary
School: A Study for Visiting Teachers
Virginia Wallis Bowers
Factors Influencing the Amenability of Mothers and Chil-
dren to Treatment in a Child Guidance Clinic
Pearl Kotzen Lodgen
The Work of a Family Agency with Clients Receiving
Public Relief Lois Shattuck Parsons
Published Quarterly 75 cents a copy; $2.00 a year
I'or farther information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
PRINTED BY
BLANCH ARD PRESS
NEW YORK
^•^
For the First Time . . . The WHOLE STORY OF Our Nation . . .
7/5 Struggles and Triumphs • Its Builders and Heroes
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NEW AMERICAN
ason/yW. E.
could write it!
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SEPTEMBER 1937
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
Children of the Spanish War
ANNA LOUISE STRONG
FOR- Governor Murphy's Labor Policy -AGAINST
A CROSS-FIRE OF DISCUSSION
Senator Elbert D. Thomas Gov. M. Clifford Townsend Congressman Maury Maverick
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H. L. Mencken
Roger Baldwin
George E. Sokolsky
S. H. Dalrymple
David Lawrence
John R. Commons
Broadus Mitchell
John Chamberlain
Norman Thomas
Garet Garett
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90-1H4
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ratings as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not Acceptable."
Photographic Films
Exposure Meters, Range Finders,
Filters, Tripods and Synchronizers
Six separate reports prepared by photo-
graphic experts compare the quality
and the value of leading brands of the
six types of photographic equipment
listed above. Ratings are given in some
cases under the headings, "Best Buys,"
"Also Acceptable," and "Not Accep-
table." Reports in previous issues (still
available — see coupon below) gave com-
parisons of over 60 makes of miniature
and non-miniature cameras.
Artificial Fish Baits
Which Have the Most Consistent
Luring Power?
There are more than 36,000 artificial
baits on the market today. Which are
the most consistent fish getters? This
report, prepared by expert fishermen,
lists by brand name over 70 baits and
fly patterns considered as having the
most consistent luring power.
Electric Clocks
Slipshod Construction, Skimping
on Materials . . .
Nineteen models, including General
Electric, Seth Thomas and Telechron
clocks, were tested. Five are "Best
Buys," ten are "Acceptable," four are
"Not Acceptable." The last four showed
evidence of slipshod construction, skimp-
ing on materials and careless or
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Mechanical Refrigerators
Ratings of 1937 Models
Twenty-one models of the 1937 makes of
mechanical refrigerators are rated as
"Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and
"Not Acceptable." Included in the rat-
ings are the Norge, General Electric,
Frigidaire, Kelvinator and Westinghouse.
Prospective purchasers of refrigerators
can make substantial savings — on oper-
ating costs as well as on the original
purchase price — by following the ad-
vice given in this report.
Ice Cream
Bulk or Package?
Between a pint of ice cream in bulk and
a pint of packaged ice cream there is on
the average a difference of six ounces in
weight, this survey of 23 samples of
ice cream shows. Samples were tested
for bacterial contamination, butterfat
content, flavor and texture, and compara-
tive economy on a weight basis.
Constipation
The fourth of a series of articles on
the causes and treatment of this
common ailment. This one begins the
discussion of good and bad methods of
treatment.
Inner Tubes
Only Three Are "Best Buys"
Tested for thickness, volume and weight
of rubber, tensile strength and elas-
ticity, resistance to ageing and other
factors, 23 brands of inner tubes — in-
cluding such brands as Lee, Seiberling,
Mohawk, Firestone, Goodrich and Good-
year— are rated twice : first for quality,
then for quality and price. Only 3
brands are listed as "Best Buys." Tubes
and tires sold under same brand name
are not necessarily equal in quality.
Raincoats
Price Shows Little Relation to
Quality
Nine men's and nine women's coats
ranging in price from 59c to $13.75
were tested. Price showed little rela-
tion to quality. Testing machines were
unable to register low enough to gauge
the resistance to tearing of the women's
coats.
Household Oils
The Most Widely- Advertised Was
One of the Poorest
Seven brands are rated, the most
widely-advertised one ranking as one of
the poorest and most expensive.
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SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES. Inc. Publication office, 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn,
N Y Executive office. 112 East 19 Street, New York. Price: this issue (September 1937; Vol. XXVI, No. 9) 30 cts. ; *3 a year; foreign
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A MILLION PEOPLE III IN TELEPHONE CITY
owns
System securities.
A fair deal for the public, the employee, and the men and women
who have put their money in the industry is just good business
454
The Gist of It
THE PLIGHT OF THE CHILDREN OF THE
Spanish war, and especially of those whom
she saw behind the Loyalist front, is de-
scribed first hand by Anna Louise Strong.
(Page 459.) As the move for a broad organ-
ization for child help in Spain develops in
America, Miss Strong's article is more than
SEPTEMBER 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 9
as exhibit expert of the Children's Bureau
in Washington before our entrance into the
World War, has furnished background for
her view of the work for children in Spain.
p" -1A2 p2r /*£• W3S Wip th£ ,American
Friends Relief Mission in Russia. Organizer
of the first English newspaper in Moscow
in 1930, reporter, author and lecturer, Miss
Strong has for two decades reported Euro-
pean war, revolution, reconstruction — and
now again war— in terms of its human
To AID THE HAPLESS CHILDREN OF A WAR-
torn country now and in the dire winter
months ahead, to meet their long-time needs
whenever the civil conflict shall end is a
huge task that calls for generous and prompt
response from all Americans, says Clarence
E. Pickett, executive secretary of the Amer-
ican Friends Service Committee, one of the
organizations at work without partisan bias
in Spain. (Page 463.)
A SYMPOSIUM IS SOMETIMES A LAZY EDI-
tonal escape on a thorny question, but that
is not true of the cross-section of opinion
inspired by Governor Frank Murphy's ar-
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Lucius R. EASTMAN, president; JULIAN W.
MACK, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
GAVIT, vice-presidents; ANN REED BRENNER,
secretary.
PAUL KELLOGG, editor.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, managing editor.
MARY Ross, BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED
BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT, LOULA D. LAS-
KER, FLORENCE LOEB KELLOGG, GERTRUDE
SPRINGER, LEON WHIPPLE, associate editors;
RUTH A. LERRIGO, HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, as-
sistant editors.
EDWARD T. DEVINE, GRAHAM TAYLOR, HAVEN
F.MERSON, M.D., JOANNA C. COLCORD, RUSSELL
H. KURTZ, GUSTAV STOLPER, contributing edi-
tors.
MOLLIE CONDON, GEORGE F. HAVELL, circu-
lation managers; MARY R. ANDERSON, adver-
tising manager.
Misery and Safety ............................................... FRONTISPIECE
/-.t -u rue •
Children ot the Spanish War ANNA LOUISE STRONG 459
Governor Murphy's Labor Policy— For and Against .............. 464
GOVERNOR TOWNSEND • MAURY MAVERICK • CARET CARRETT • NORMAN
THOMAS • JOHN R. COMMONS • H. L. MENCKEN AND OTHERS
And Now, a Co-op Hospital.. . AVIS D. CARLSON 470
Blueprinting the Machine Age ......... . .BEULAH AMIDON 474
The Day's Work ........................... ETCHINGS BY JAMES E. ALLEN 476
A Donor s Dilemma BARCLAY ACHESON 478
Storm Over India ....................................... ERNEST o. HAUSER 481
HOLIER KRIEGHBAUM 485
Servants of the People
IV_At the Soil Conservation Service
Through Neighbor's Doorways
A Woman Without a Country. . JOHN PALMER GAVIT 486
Modley Pictorializes the U.S ............................................. 488
Life and Letters: The Sovereignty of Principle .............. LEON WHIPPLE 490
Shorewood, Where Adults Are Students .................. WILLIAM E. DALEY 498
A Ourselves 500
© Survey Associates, Inc.
ticle, The Shaping of a Labor Policy, in
our August issue. Advance copies were sent
to spokesmen for labor, industry and the
public, and comment invited. The replies
box the compass of points of view and to-
gether make a distinctive contribution to
the understanding of industrial relations
in the United States today. (Page 464.)
A WELL KNOWN REPORTER OF SOCIAL DE-
velopments for American magazines, Avis
D. Carlson, who lives in Wichita, Kan.,
visited Elk City on a special Survey Graphic
assignment to write about the cooperative
hospital there. (Page 470.) Pioneering in the
field of cooperative medical services, this
enterprise has become the center of a con-
troversy in the not altogether academic field
of conventional medical ethics. Mrs. Carl-
son tells the story, not only in terms of the
professional quarrel which surrounds it, but
in terms of the farmers and workers wh->
loyally support the institution as it was
organized and is directed by Dr. Michael A.
Shadid.
CAN WE PREDICT WHAT NEW MACHINES
and new processes are about to move out of
the laboratory into your life and ours?
More, can- we to some degree plan our
technical advance and 'forestall technological
unemployment without blocking the wheels
of progress? These and related problems of
the power age are canvassed in the first
of a series of comprehensive reports by
the National Resources Committee, reviewed
on page 474 by Beulah Amidon, associate
editor of Survey Graphic.
JAMES E. ALLEN, THREE OF WHOSE STRIKING
etchings are reproduced on pages 476 and
477, is well known both for his prints and
his illustrations. His work has won a series
of prizes in print shows of the past few years
and appears in the collections of the Brook-
lyn Museum, the Pennsylvania Museum of
Art and the New York Public Library. Mr.
Allen has made many studies of industrial
scenes, particularly of men in the steel
industry and in building construction. But
the people of the sea and the man behind
the plow also fire this artist's imagination.
WHY CONTRIBUTE TO PRIVATE PHILAN-
thropic ventures — especially when public
services are expanding and taxes are high?
On page 478, Barclay Acheson tells why
he reads appeals for funds as critically as
he examines his tax bill, and why he be-
lieves it is a privilege to be generous.
ERNEST O. HAUSER is A MEMBER OF THE
staff of the Institute of Pacific Relations in
New York. He has been to the Far East,
India and other parts of the British Empire
as a correspondent for a group of European
newspapers. In the United States he has writ-
ten articles for a number of magazines and
he is the author of a Foreign Policy Asso-
ciation report of May 1937, Japan's South-
ward Expansion, dealing with economic and
(Continued on page 500)
455
If intelligence is to serve us in this age of confusioi
able guide for peaceful evolution Solomo
BERKELEY
WASHINGTON
EVANSTON
PASADENA
LINCOLN
CAMBRIDGE
NEWTON
ALBANY
SAN DIESO
NEW HAVEN
PORTLAND. ME.
RICHMOND
TOPEKA
ST. PAUL
HARRISBURG
SPRINGFIELD. ILL
HARTFORD
WILKES-BARRE
MINNEAPOLIS
PROVIDENCE
NASHVILLE
LANSING
COLUMBUS
MONTGOMERY
SACRAMENTO
ROCHESTER
CINCINNATI
OAK PARK
DES MOINES
ERIE
JACKSONVILLE
TRENTON
SAN FRANCISCO
PITTSBURGH
JOHNSTOWN
KNOXVILLE
MT. VERNON
SCHENECTADY
DULUTH
LOS ANGELES
DAYTON
BOSTON
DENVER
LONG BEACH
OMAHA
LITTLE ROCK
LANCASTER
PORTLAND. ORE.
INDIANAPOLIS
WILMINGTON
CHICAGO
SYRACUSE
SALT LAKE CITY
CLEVELAND
ATLANTA
BRIDGEPORT
ROCKFORD
SOUTH BEND
YONKERS
READING
TAMPA
EAST ORANGE
ALLENTOWN
TACOMA
NEW YORK
CHARLESTON. W.VA
WICHITA
ELIZABETH
SEATTLE
MIAMI
TROY
SPOKANE
WORCESTER
SPRINGFIELD, MASS.
PHILADELPHIA
Try This
Social Intelligence Test
On Your Town
WHERE THE SURVEY IS READ
Run down the column at tKe left (read up at the right)
and see where your city stands. Is its line long enough?
Or will it bear stretching?
Each line shows, not our actual circulation, but the pro-
portion of Survey subscribers to population. To our way
of thinking they are good lines, for they are elastic.
Where The Survey is read, there you will find citizens
who believe in the fundamental right of all the people
in their community to "live with dignity as human
beings"; who know that adverse conditions can be
changed by concentrated responsibility and concerted
effort; and who, through The Survey, learn from month
to month what other rrien and women in other commu-
nities are doing to bring this about.
Where The Survey is read, there you will find some-
thing which, for want of a better term, let's call social
intelligence.
For example, take the field of social work. Is there need
in your city for better understanding of social measures;
for a wider base of support for social agencies; and for
more effective personnel and administration, public and
private? Consider how important an element the num-
ber of Survey readers in your community can be, in
meeting these needs and putting social intelligence to
work.
1O1O QIIDWCY ACCnriATCC
D ... I:.L- „£ CIIDWCY ri
irtainly The Survey must be considered an indispens-
iwenstein, president, National Conference of Social Work
WILL YOU HELP US TO STRETCH THESE LINES?
More than most magazines, The Survey grows through the good will of its
readers. The soundest circulation gains we have ever made have come where
Survey friends introduced The Survey to their friends. In some instances
these friends of theirs were social workers who needed to keep abreast of
advances in their profession. Or they were board members, volunteers,
citizens, who without personal recommendation might think it "just
another magazine," or had never heard that it was ready to serve them as
an indispensable guide in "this age of confusion." Will you put The Survey
before just such friends of yours?
HOW TO GO ABOUT IT
Make a list of half a dozen, or a dozen, — people you know who are
"natural" Survey readers. Put it to them as strongly and as personally
as you can. Make them understand that this subscription of theirs is
wanted in your town no less than in our office ; that you have singled
them out as just the sort to lengthen the line of social intelligence
locally.
Come away each time with an order for a $2 trial subscription. For
this sum, as part of our extension program in this anniversary year,
we will send to each NEW reader recruited by you: either 7 months
of both our magazines, Survey Graphic and The Midmonthly Survey
(this will save a dollar) or 12 months of either periodical (again a
dollar saved) .
Set a goal for yourself at the start of at least three such subscriptions.
Send us their names and addresses, together with the $6.00 — and as
some token of our appreciation we will enter a Free Anniversary Gift
Subscription to some fourth person of your choice. For every three
additional new subcribers you send we shall in turn accord you an
additional gift subscription.
WHAT TO AIM FOR IN YOUR TOWN
If every reader of The Survey should send in three new names, our
circulation would jump to over 100,000. Berkeley's line would shoot
across both pages and beyond. That's day dreaming perhaps, but there
is no reason why Somerville, Mass., for instance, should not extend
to the length of Roanoke, Va. ; why Philadelphia should not stretch
to that of Washington, D. C. and Evanston, 111.
Being realistic, we have set quotas city by city ; also for smaller towns
which do not appear in the list. Drop a post card to The Survey,
112 E. 19th St., New York, and we will tell you what the quota is
for your town, in stretching its line of social intelligence. Perhaps you
can get others to help give it a tug.
SOMERVILLE
LOWELL
FALL RIVER
EAST ST. LOUIS
BAYONNE
LYNN
JERSEY CITY
PASSAIC
TOLEDO
TULSA
SAN ANTONIO
ATLANTIC CITY
COVINGTON
PAWTUCKET
EL PASO
QUINCY
ALTOONA
MOBILE
HAMMOND
MEMPHIS
CANTON
NEW BEDFORD
HUNTINGTON
FORT WORTH
PATERSON
NORFOLK
NEW ORLEANS
LAWRENCE
SAVANNAH
MANCHESTER
BROCKTON
HOUSTON
SHREVEPORT
NIAGARA FALLS
WINSTON-SALEM
NEWARK
EVANSVILLE
BIRMINGHAM
CAMDEN
ROANOKE
ST. JOSEPH
GARY
CHATTANOOGA
BALTIMORE
YOUNGSTOWN
DALLAS
UTICA
CHARLESTON. S. C.
WHEELING
SPRINGFIELD. O.
FlINF
DAVENPORT
BUFFALO
SIOUX CITY
NEW BRITAIN
GRAND RAPIDS
AKRON
OAKLAND
PONTIAC
SCRANTON
PEORIA
LAKEWOOD
FORT WAYNE
DETROIT
OKLAHOMA CITY
ST. LOUIS
LOUISVILLE
WATERBURY
KANSAS CITY
CHARLOTTE
BINGHAMTON
MILWAUKEE
KANSAS CITY
TERRE HAUTE
A SAGINAW
JE MIDMONTHLY SURVEY 95th ANNIVERSARY YEAR 1937
•
,
MISERY — a halt on the flight from Malaga
SAFETY — in children's colonies such as this one in Madrid
SEPTEMBER 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 9
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Children of the Spanish War
by ANNA LOUISE STRONG
Back of news from the front, back of the need for medical aid, comes this
call for food — like Belgium in wartime, Russia in famine, Germany after the
War. In those days America helped on a large scale from her abundance;
will she help today?
AT LEAST A MILLION CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN DISLODGED FROM
their homes and sent adrift by the war in Republican
Spain. By some the figure is placed as high as a million
and a half. Since the great majority of these are women,
old men and children — the able-bodied men having largely
remained to defend the front — and since families in the
invaded parts of Spain are proverbially large, it Is proba-
ble that nearly half the number are children.
These figures, admittedly sketchy, apply only to that
part of Spain under the Valencia, or People's Front gov-
ernment. The government forces have consisted of vast
numbers of untrained civilians, with a disproportionately
high casualty list, and disproportionately large families
left behind. With Franco's military advances and his
bombing of the centers of population, people have pre-
ferred to risk life with empty hands in strange cities rather
than fall into his power.
Comparatively few have fled into foreign countries.
They hadn't the means, and in most cases they did not
want to go. Moreover, foreign countries were not willing
to receive them. Honorable exception must be found in
the voting by the French government of thirty million
francs to care for Basque refugees in southern France
where some 25,000 refugee children are today to be found,
in the sheltering of some 4000 children by private relief
agencies in England, of 2000 by Soviet Russia and 500 by
Mexico. But on the whole the Spanish refugees have
transferred themselves to other parts of Spain itself, and
the problems they create have descended chiefly upon the
Spanish people of the uninvaded areas, Catalonia, Valencia
and the Mediterranean coast provinces generally.
The heroic efforts made by a people already staggering
under the burden of civil war complicated by foreign in-
vasion, their willingness even under these conditions to
receive, nay to welcome, one or two hundred thousand
penniless Basque refugees of an alien tongue but of the
same flag, are fine commentaries on the spirit of Republi-
can Spain. Nor are their relief activities hard of access to
foreign visitors. They welcome investigation and comment.
It is chiefly the American, British and French authorities
who make access to Republican Spain difficult; one must
have a permit from the U. S. State Department, a letter
from the American Embassy in Paris to the French Pre-
fect of Police and, finally, the permission of the latter
before the Spaniards are even permitted to receive one's
application for a visa. The Spaniards themselves give, en-
trance easily and all of their relief offices are obligingly
open.
I walked across the border from Bourg-Madame to Puig-
cerda in the Pyrenees — a distance of a few blocks — and
found myself in a children's colony where a resident Eng-
lish Quaker lives. From this time on I was passing easily
back and forth, talking; to a Swiss director of a children's
sanitarium, an American dispenser of hot chocolate to
refugee children, Canadian and British truck drivers evac-
uating Madrid children, all of them on quite cooperative
terms. International relief from all countries and from
political persuasions varying from the Friends Service to
the Red Aid, is already at \vork in Spain.
THIS INTERNATIONAL RELIEF, HJWEVER, IS AS YET ONLY A
gracious gesture; 99 percent of all that is being done is
carried on by the Spaniards themselves. Three government
ministries, labor, education and justice, have all taken a
hand in caring for refugees, especially for children. Scores
of private agencies have flccl'ed to aid. The best of these
is the Ayuda Infantil (Children's Aid) of Catalonia, a
remarkably efficient organization caring for upwards of
4000 children in very well run colonies. As one traverses
Spain from city to village, it seems as if every well-inten-
tioned group of men and women has taken a hand at
starting some sort of children's colony.
The brunt of the refugee problem falls on the Secretariat
for Evacuation and Assistance of Refugees, which is under
the Ministry of Labor. (It was formerly under health but
was transferred in the Negrin government, where health
and education are combined in one ministry, leaving all
relief problems under labor.) Scores of street signs in Va-
459
lencia point the way to its offices so that refugees may
know where to go. On its ground floor is a card catalogue
of the refugees who are already listed as accepted by some
municipality. There are 600,000 of these cards. Set in
among them are 200,000 cards of a different shape and
color which represent inquiries made by relatives for some-
body yet to be found. Two hundred or so people come
daily to this department with inquiries after relatives who
have been lost in the confusion of evacuation and retreat.
As soon as refugees are definitely lodged in any munici-
pality, the mayor is required to fill out, in triplicate, cards
supplied by the Refugee Secretariat, giving name, age,
past and present residence, and other family details. One
copy is kept by the refugees, one by the mayor and one
is sent to the central secretariat, where a group of filing
clerks are constantly busy fitting new names into their
places in the files.
"Since I have already 600,000 listed as arrived, and
Refugees from Malaga whose flight was made terrible by machine guns
200,000 as inquired for, and since I know the dilatoriness
of mayors, I estimate that there must be 1,500,000 refugees
somewhere in the country," said the man in charge of the
file.
Eladia Puigdollars, however, chief of the Secretariat, pre-
fers to be conservative and will not claim more than a
million as definite, though she admits the larger figure
may be right. She judges rather by the number of known
evacuations; by 400,000 people who took refuge in Madrid
from surrounding areas and were later evacuated from
Madrid; by 300,000 who did the same in Bilbao; by an-
other 300,000 from the Malaga area.
Eladia, to give her the name by which I heard her con-
stantly referred to, is a brilliant woman of perhaps forty
years, a Catalan of no political party, who studied methods
of social care for five years in France, Switzerland and
Belgium before entering on her chosen life as a social
worker. She was chief of social assistance in Catalonia
before coming to her present post in the
central government. She gave me a two-
hour interview on the problem and care
of refugees.
They have come from three main areas:
Madrid, Malaga and now Bilbao, with
Madrid being somewhat the largest in
number. The Madrid refugees have come
in organized fashion, from behind well
defended lines. Refugees from Malaga and
Bilbao fled precipitately, harried for days
along the road by airplane and machine-
gun fire, losing their families, leaving large
numbers of wounded and dead on the way.
In a children's colony I talked with a
Malaga boy of twelve who gave me, with
utter detachment, an hour by hour picture
of that terrible flight: how they sucked
sugar cane from the fields as the only
nourishment, fled into olive groves to hide
from the airplanes, crept by night along a
precipice face which was constantly shelled
from the ocean, and saw babies, women
and old men swept to death by a river
swollen by bombed levees. I have also been
told by a British ambulance driver that for
weeks thereafter the Malaga road was lit-
tered with rotting arms, legs, bodies.
FACING THE EMERGENCY OF THIS FLIGHT AND
of the more orderly but no less necessary
evacuation from Madrid, the Spanish gov-
ernment acted to mobilize all resources,
private, municipal, provincial and govern-
mental. A resolution was passed by the
Ministry of Health (at that time in charge
of refugees) requiring every family in
Spain to accept and support at least one
refugee. This heroic measure was accepted
in good part by the people, but as might be
expected, it has worked with varying suc-
cess. Some families were obviously too poor
to shelter a single refugee; others were
loaded with several. Complaints from refu-
gees and the families caring for them make
up a large amount of the day's work of the
local refugee committees. But the fact that
460
SURVEY GRAPHIC
such a measure could be attempted at all and
succeed even in part speaks volumes for the uni-
ted purpose of the Spanish people.
Municipalities and provinces were the next to
shoulder the burden of these refugees. They
were expected to care for all who came their way
as far as they were able. All over Spain relatively
enormous sales taxes were the quickly applied
method to raise funds for this purpose. In Mur-
cia, for instance, the turnover tax on cafes and
bars was 20 percent, and the general turnover
tax on all business, one percent. Provincial com-
mittees were also empowered to impose taxes,
which in some cases pyramided the municipal
taxes to difficult heights. Gradually, however,
the Central Committee for Evacuation and
F35
Assistance of Refugees, with five million pesetas at its
disposal, brought some system into the provincial and
municipal taxes for refugees, and gave subsidies to the
hardest hit parts of the country.
Perhaps half the refugees are at present in private fam-
ilies, and half in requisitioned buildings of all kinds where
they crowd at the rate of a family per room. Catalonia
has taken about half of all refugees, and as the richest and
least touched province provides relatively good conditions:
a subsidy of two pesetas (15 to 20 cents in buying power)
per day per person in addition to lodging. Murcia, of the
more inefficient and burdened South, is in worst condition.
The scandal of all Spain is the Pablo Inglesias refuge
in Murcia, a nine-story building of unfinished flats, into
which nine thousand refugees crowded, without privacy,
partitions, or decent toilets or water. Taking everything
together, the seven-day and seven-night flight from Malaga
under gunfire and without food or adequate water,
coupled with the conditions found in Murcia, caused a 50
percent deathrate in four months among babies under one
year. It is surprising, in fact, that any of them survived.
Today the Pablo Inglesias has 1800 refugees who get one
or two meals a day from the municipal government. Elea-
nore Embelli, an energetic American girl from the "Save
the Children Fund," hands out hot chocolate with milk
and bread as a breakfast for all the children, and pleads
with the mothers to let the children go to a summer camp
in the mountains which she is organizing with the assist-
ance of the Ministry of Education. The Pablo Inglesias
SEPTEMBER 1937
Photographs from the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy
Well-cared-for children in colonies in Catalonia, a rich
province that has taken about half of all the homeless
still smells like a toilet, and the vast unpartitioned rooms
are still Spain's worst picture of huddled misery, yet the
mothers fight against any suggestion of letting the chil-
dren go. One mother actually dragged off and beat with
a stick a charming girl of eleven for the crime of trying
to talk to me about her wish to go to the summer camp.
Another mother clutched to her breast her eighteen-
months-old child — the last of four — with a grimness that
said 'she would see it die in her arms before she would
give it up for a day. But Miss Embelli has won the consent
of fifty mothers to let their children take two weeks vaca-
tion in the hills. When they come back into that stinking
refuge, they will furnish the dynamite to blow up the
resistance of other parents.
Undoubtedly the best cared for and happiest children I
have seen in Spain are those in the children's colonies.
There are only some twelve thousand of these in the
system listed by the Ministry of Education, and an un-
known number, probably less than ten thousand, in colo-
nies under other organizations. A decree passed at the end
of June gave control over all children's colonies to the
Ministry of Health and Education, which will thus estab-
lish throughout the country standards similar to those in
the twenty or more colonies I have seen.
THESE INVOLVE HOUSING THE CHILDREN IN REQUISITIONED
mansions — usually summer and winter resort villas — in
the safe parts of Spain, along the beaches or in the moun-
tains or in flourishing agricultural districts. The children
live here with teachers, cooks, nurses, in the proportion
of one adult to five children and usually ten to fifty chil-
dren in one house. Preference is given to houses where
vegetable gardens can be installed. No houses occupied by
their proprietors have been requisitioned but an emergency
decree makes all unoccupied land or houses subject to
requisition, first, by the War Department and, second, by
the Department for Refugees.
Great individuality marks the life in these colonies
which follow the educational ideals of the teacher in
charge. I saw one charming colony where all children
under eight went nude, taking perpetual sunbaths, while
the older ones wore bathing trunks. Even the teacher gave
an arithmetic lesson on a blackboard under the trees with
only a bathing suit for clothing. The little brown children
461
curled over marble benches in the sun, played with the
water-hose, carried wood for cooking, clustered under
trees for study, with the most delightful and carefree
health. Let no one, however, suddenly cry that Spain
has gone in for nudism. There is only one such colony
among hundreds. Two other colonies exist one hundred
yards away, fully. clothed. They observe, admire and criti-
cize but do not follow. The point is that much individual
difference is allowed.
I VISITED ANOTHER COLONY HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINS IN A
fine ski-club, once frequented by Barcelona sportsmen.
The children took hikes, drank lots of milk (plentiful
here, but not generally in Spain) and executed war dances
on the roofs of old sheds. They told me they were from
Madrid and were having a grand time here. I saw other
colonies in sun-struck Murcia, where the drinking water
had to be brought in carts for the colonies. These had
harder conditions, but the spirit of free, joyous camp life
was the same.
Most of all, I was struck by the quality of the children.
If I am ever compelled, for my sins, to take care of twenty
children unaided, I pray they may not be Americans. I
should prefer them from Spain, and most of all from
Madrid. I have seen Madrid children arrive from a three
days' auto trip in jolting trucks quite unfit for passenger
transport. The last day's ride was fourteen hours long, from
six in the morning till eight in the evening. The children
arrived thin, some with skin diseases for want of soap,
and some with nervous disturbances from bombing but
utterly self-possessed and without tears. Two babies a year
old came thus with their mothers; for three days' ration
they had shared one single can of milk; they were not
even making a fuss.
After supper the youngsters were brought into rooms
with small clean beds, fluffy with white sheets. They
stared as other children might at a picture show; they
hadn't seen such things for months. But they didn't touch
the beds till they were told they might; then with sighs
of delight they piled in. I have seen similar children later,
when their thin little bodies had filled out. They were
healthier, gayer, more active, but they had the same proud
poise and stamina. Madrid is a heroic self-disciplined city;
even her children are proud to show this discipline wher-
ever they go.
The Ministry of Education thinks chiefly in terms of
children's colonies. It wishes to expand them more and
more. The Ministry of Labor and Social Assistance thinks
that colonies should be confined chiefly to orphan children
and to those who for reasons of safety must be taken from
war zones where parents still reside. But everyone agrees
that more colonies are needed. Eighty thousand children
are today exposed to hunger and daily shelling in Madrid.
In the hard winter coming, everyone knows that there
will not be food enough for adequate nourishment of chil-
dren and that those who are in separate colonies getting
food which adults will not be able to have, are more likely
to survive.
Everyone also agrees, and by everyone I mean all gov-
ernment departments, private agencies and foreign ob-
servers as well, that it is not money that is needed, at least
not pesetas. "If our government can carry on a war, it can
also support its children," an official of the Ministry of
Education said proudly to me. She added, "We have
houses, we have teachers and organizers, we have some
462
kinds of food in plenty, we have all the pesetas we need
for our present colonies, and if we need more the gov-
ernment will give it, but — there are things that pesetas can-
not buy since they do not exist in Spain. And these arc
precisely the things that the children need most."
"Milk — and soap," said Eladia when I asked her to list
the primary needs. "By milk, I mean also all the foods
for children under five, milk, cocoa, sugar. These things
have never existed in sufficient quantities in Spain. Now
they are further exhausted by the needs of tens of thou-
sands of wounded men who must have similar nourishing
products.
"Soap is as important as milk if we are not to have
epidemics. We could make soap if the 'control' would let
in caustic soda. We, ourselves, have olive oil. But caustic
soda is a war material, so it is kept out by France and
England. Cannot perhaps some big foreign relief agency
manage to bring in caustic soda, using it only in work-
shops under its own control for the making of soap? It
seems a little thing to ask of the democracies who are
blockading Spain."
Canned meat Eladia put second in the order of needs.
Third place she gave to such foods as beans, dried peas,
flour and clothing. "If we had raw cotton," she said, "we
could make first textiles, then clothing. Cotton also might
have to be brought in under supervision to satisfy the
democratic countries that Spain was not using it to make
munitions against the well-armed Italian invaders, but
couldn't such supervision be given?"
Spain will not know until September whether she will
have to import grain as well. In the past she always has
imported it. But this year, in the midst of war, there was
a 7 percent increase in sown area and much of it was in
grain; there was also a record yield. The need for grain
will depend partly on the amounts of other foods avail-
able; it will be a close problem.
WHAT WILL BE THE FATE OF SPAIN'S CHILDREN IN THE COM-
ing year? They will be organized; they will be cared for.
Hundreds of new colonies will be opened for them; also
hundreds of new schools for the refugee children who
remain with their parents. The budget of the Ministry
of Education has expanded by 190 million pesetas even in
wartime. Whatever Spain can produce, the government
will give her children, putting their needs second only
to the winning of the war.
But, though organized and cared for, they will be hun-
gry unless foreign food comes in to help. There will be
no spectacular scenes of famine; they are too well or-
ganized for that. There will be merely increasing under-
nourishment of a whole generation; lack of milk, of
meat and sugar, perhaps even of bread.
Such phrases have grown old to us; we have heard them
applied to America. Yes but this is worse. This is like
Belgium in wartime, like Germany after the War. In
those days, America helped on a large scale from her abun-
dant food supply; will she help today? If she does, she
will win as a friend a nation whose star and strength are
bound to rise in Europe, a country emerging firmly from
the feudal era into the modern day.
If America fails to help, there will be no outcry, no
sensation, no complaint from Spain. There will be only
steadily rising deathrates among those thin, proud Madrid
children, those passionately possessive Malaga mothers,
those Basques who believe so deeply in their God.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Succor Knows No Sides
UNTIL THE FALL OF BJLBAO THE CARE FOR CHILD vic-
tims of the war in Spain could be rather simply
described in terms of approximately 350,000 refugee
children on the Loyalist side and 89,000 war orphans
and abandoned children in Nationalist territory. The
fall of Malaga increased the number of refugee chil-
dren by perhaps 25,000, and they have fled mostly into
Murcia. The pattern of social care was eitner to billet
children in private homes or to care for them in colo-
nies located in monasteries, castles or homes of former
large landholders.
The organization for the care of children in Loyal-
ist territory has been very well done considering the
general upset conditions in Spain. Municipalities have
set aside buildings for the use of these children and
taxed themselves for their care. Tag days and other
devices for raising funds have been used, but the
large scale displacement of children and mothers has
created an almost insurmountable problem. The great
lack is of milk, fats and sugar. The British Quakers
and the International Save the Children Fund have
now been joined by the American Friends Service
Committee and are supplying these forms of food as
far as their funds will permit. They have not created
separate organizations but are permitting the food
supplies to be administered by Spanish personnel
with a very small supervisory staff.
Before the fall of Bilbao approximately 40,000 war-
orphaned children were provided for in institutions in
Nationalist territory. These were under the care of
the recently formed Nationalist Spanish Red Cross.
The food producing portions of Spain are largely
in the hands of General Franco and although prices
are high, food is not impossible to secure. The textile
mills in Spain are in Loyalist territory however, and
clothing in Nationalist Spain is very scarce.
Preceding the fall of Bilbao the representative of
the American Friends Service Committee was able
to establish arrangements with the Franco regime
for permitting the entry of food into Nationalist
territory duty free, with transportation on the Span-
ish, railroads provided without cost. Safe conduct was
given to staff members and guarantees that food and
clothing supplies would be unmolested in reaching
their destination. The same arrangements have been
effected with the recognized Spanish government and
both pledges have been respected with the strictest
integrity.
Before the fall of Bilbao, an English committee
evacuated 4000 children from that city and took them
to England. Other thousands are being cared for in
France. In addition some 25,000 persons left Bilbao,
fleeing into mountainous communities outside the
city. However, as the Franco army approached
the city more than 75,000 people, mostly Loyalists,
fled from the villages ahead of the army into Bilbao,
hoping for safety and food. Adding this load to a
August 6,
normal population of approximately 176,000, has led
to a tragically confused condition in Bilbao and with
the apparently imminent fall of Santander the con-
dition is likely to be repeated there. This would
seem to indicate the importance of a large scale non-
partisan relief mission to Spain. It is hoped that this
will come through the nation-wide efforts of a com-
mittee now in formation. Thus the Quaker work
which began as a small undertaking rnay become more
representative of American generosity and impartial
good will. [See page 500.]
Evidence that such a mission can administer relief
to Loyalists in Nationalist territory is indicated by the
invitation of the Spanish Red Cross to the American
Friends Service Committee to undertake to feed the
entire refugee population in Bilbao. This undertak-
ing was so great that it was impossible to accept the
invitation. However the responsibility for feeding
300 children daily was accepted with the understand-
ing that this number would be increased as resources
warrant. Every assistance has been accorded the
American Friends Service Committee by Spanish
citizens and officials.
Anyone who has dealt in problems of war relief
realizes that the winter months present major
tragedies, and that the period immediately following
the conclusion of war usually sees more suffering than
during the war period itself. It is therefore of the
utmost importance that the American public should
help generously and promptly.
THERE is ON MANY SIDES A CONVICTION THAT THE
American Red Cross or the International Red Cross
should become the instrument of American relief.
The International Red Cross is exchanging prisoners
and rendering some medical aid. The American
Red Cross has announced to the public that it is
participating in this work to the extent of $2500 per
month, but it seems that there is no immediate like-
lihood of a large scale relief undertaking in Spain on
the part of the American Red Cross. In a statement
to its chapters dated July 9, it says:
". . . Several chapters have made inquiry con-
cerning the work of the American Friends Service
Committee in the Spanish situation. The American
Friends, with headquarters in Philadelphia, have rep-
resentatives in Spain and are now seeking contribu-
tions from the public so that they may extend their
work particularly among the children. The Friends
have engaged in relief activities in Europe at various
times over a period of many years, and the American
Red Cross has had occasion in connection with its
own work to know of the effective and valuable serv-
ice they have rendered. In the Spanish situation their
relief work has been carried on with scrupulous im-
partiality as between various factions, with the single
humanitarian purpose of serving those in need."
CLARENCE E. PICKETT
American Friends Service Committee
SEPTEMBER 1937
463
FOR and AGAINST -
Governor Murphy's Labor Policy
1937 opened with the first widespread labor conflict in the
youngest of our great industries. By February the auto
strikes had been settled, its sit-downs were over, through
Governor Murphy's mediation. June saw the passage by
the Michigan legislature of a bill through which the
governor sought to complement the federal Wagner Act
and create state instrumentalities for dealing with labor
relations.
In the article he contributed to .Survey Graphic for
August, Governor Murphy told the story of how, as execu-
tive of a great industrial state, he had sought to shape a
labor policy based on "the peaceful way as the right
way." He interpreted the provisions of the measure and
indicated that he hoped to see it perfected by amendment
at the special session of the legislature he had called for
July 30.
While the bill lay on his desk, there were sharp
criticisms from both camps of organized labor, from
employers and farmer groups. One section of the proposed
law, while it would have legalized picketing for the first
time in Michigan, also sought to limit it, and this was the
nib of the dissension. Just before the session met, the
governor decided to clear the way for a new draft by
vetoing the bill. In his message he said:
"In re framing this measure during the closing hours
before adjournment, certain provisions were retained that
are correlative to and were designed primarily to aid
enforcement of other provisions that had previously been
deleted. If these provisions were placed on the statute
books in their present form they might be subject to mis-
interpretation, might be given a meaning or effect not
intended, and one that would be contrary to the purpose
of this measure. ... If we are to achieve industrial peace
through legislation of this nature, we must have the good
will and cooperation of those interests that will be primarily
affected by it."
Followed a legislative snag. On the first day of the
special session, the lower house approved the redrafted
bill 56 to 24, but the Senate passed the original bill
dc novo, 22 to 6, and adjourned. A get-up strike.
Meanwhile, the Michigan debate has its repercussions
in the following pages turned into an open forum where
employers, labor leaders, public officials, news commen-
tators and others point with warmth or view with heat.
. . . the governor's major error . . .
ONE OF MR. MURPHY'S PREMISES APPEARS TO BE THAT GOVERN-
mcnt should always refrain from violence in enforcing the
law. Patience and forbearance are seen as the better way.
This seems to take for granted that there are always two sides
to every question. Often there are — often there are not. The
law enforcement function of government is not to look for
sides but to uphold the law of the people, and that process
may very properly require force.
When a child is kidnapped there are no two sides to the
question. When a citizen's place of business is invaded by
hold-up men, it is not a time for patience and forbearance.
We want vigorous action by the authorities. When a court
of law rules that an establishment is held illegally the duty
of the authorities is clear.
By the way, in all the labor disturbances, do you recall a
single case of bloodshed when a sufficient force of troops dis-
played the shining blades of bayonets?
The governor's major error was his failure to appraise the
trend of public opinion in the early days of the troubles. The
American people, slow sometimes to show it, love respect for
law as they love their liberty. A safe working theory for any
governmental executive.
Publisher, The Sanilac Jeffersonian
Croswell, Mich.
HAROLD M. BAKER
. . . more labor laws . . .
WITHOUT EXPRESSING ANY DEFINITE OPINION ON THE MICHIGAN
bill I applaud your effort to have it thoroughly discussed.
Also, I have read with great interest the statement by Gov-
ernor Frank Murphy, who in my opinion has unusual judg-
ment in matters of that kind.
The principal thing that I say is that we must have more
labor organization, more labor laws, and that the worker
must get full protection. However, much of the talk about
labor "responsibility" is engendered to make unfair labor law,
and to make it so labor organizations cannot assert their
rights. By the use of corporations, rights have been invaded
under the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, and
the corporation is by no means an instrument for the pro-
tection of human rights. Therefore, in writing more labor
legislation we should exercise caution for fear that the labor
organization may be destroyed by the effort to save it.
Congressman from Texas MAURY MAVERICK
. . . machinery should exist . . .
I QUITE AGREE WITH GOVERNOR MURPHY THAT "VIOLENCE ON
one side of an industrial dispute begets violence on the other."
I question the statement, however, that "no bitterness exists
between employer and employe in these great industries to-
day." Any measure which will promote reasonable concilia-
tion and abate hatred without controlling labor relations
should be helpful.
The right of labor to organize and to bargain collectively
should be safeguarded and labor should recognize the duty
to carry out agreements made. I believe Governor Murphy
is right when he says, "Industrial peace can be achieved most
readily if there is a balance of power between labor and
capital."
The general public has a definite interest in avoiding in-
dustrial warfare. Not only do employers and employes suffer
from cessation of work; but also, as Governor Murphy points
out, countless others are directly or indirectly harmed.
Government should provide certain means for promoting
conciliation and certain rules of conduct for both sides during
464
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the industrial disputes or strikes. Governor Murphy is right
in believing that machinery should exist, as in the garment
industry, in the railroad and building industries, by which
grievances may be adjusted promptly. Such machinery should
be set up by management and labor as a result of conference
and bargaining. I do not believe in compulsory arbitration.
Government should guarantee fre'edom of action but not dic-
tate such action.
I quite agree with Governor Murphy that "we cannot
coast along" but must make every effort to improve working
and living conditions, to protect labor, capital and the public
and to apply reasonable controls of conduct when disputes
and strikes occur. Finally, the best prevention of unrest, com-
munism, etc., etc., seems to me to be a just system and
complete industrial as well as political democracy. Injustice
on either side provokes injustice on the other and we shall
prosper only if we have justice and peace.
J. LIONBERGER DAVIS
Lawyer; chairman of the board of the
Security National Banl{, St. Louis, Mo.
. . . who shall be boss?
I'M NOT AT ALL SURE THAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT WHAT WE
are thinking and feeling. Is it to shape a labor policy? Is it a
labor movement? If so, whose labor movement?
One of the appalling facts is what I call the failure of
communication. We exchange words but not ideas. Tom
Girdler would make grammatical sense of Governor Murphy's
words and no sense whatever of his ideas. Governor Murphy
can understand Girdler's words but not what he is thinking.
One trouble, I suppose, is that everyone is trying to be
rational, whereas the thing itself is not amenable to reason
if, as I believe, it has the deep emotional character of revolt
and defense.
Governor Murphy says that if the government of Michigan
had shot it out with the sit-down strikers, Michigan today
would stand as a government that had "demanded human
life as the price of its own ruthless supremacy." Was it the
ruthless supremacy of Michigan or the supremacy of law
that was at stake? Herein the governor comes almost, if not
quite, to hold that a state is not justified in employing force
to defend its own forms. Can he hold that a state may re-
nounce force in the face of force?
As one who spent some time on the ground at the time,
I think it would not have been necessary to shoot it out. The
governor is too dramatic. The strikers discovered that they
could defy the law with impunity. That was the moral dis-
aster. I asked the court why no attempt was made to enforce
its order directing the strikers to return possession of the
Chrysler property to the owners. The court said, "The simple
answer is that we were all afraid." Afraid of what? Afraid
that those who were defying the law would resist with force.
You cannot conduct any kind of civilized society in that
manner. If the law is wrong, change it. But what does it
mean to talk of more law, even a law of peace, when you
have a government that is afraid to enforce a law?
Governor Murphy says there was no suppression of civil
liberties. By the government of Michigan, no. But the strikers
by force suppressed the liberty of the owners and managers
to enter their own premises. I say their own premises. There
we touch property rights. Have the owners the right to re-
gard the premises as their own? Have the strikers a property
right in their jobs? I do not say either yes or no. I say only
that when we arrive on the second page at a discussion of
such questions as these we are no longer talking about a
labor problem, nor was that what we began to talk about.
Governor Murphy believes "the present wave of industrial
disputes represents merely a normal reaction of working
people to economic insecurity." Wherein do these disputes,
say in motors or in steel, touch the problem of economic
security? I don't see.
Governor Murphy says no bitterness exists between em
ployer and employe in these great industries today — referring
to the motor industries. The governor's idealism is clear;
his realism is dim. I have just been going through some of
these plants. In a day I saw one man smile. Men work side
by side on the assembly line without speaking, or one says
to another in an undertone, "You'll be getting yours tonight."
Men are afraid to nod as the boss goes by. The mutilation of
human relationships is horrible.
I could go on and on, but to no conclusion. I have no
solution. I doubt if there is one. There can be no peace
over division in a complex industrial society, any more than
in a private family. We had a working tension, and that
appears to be breaking down, not because it turned out too
badly but because the character of the dispute has changed.
It is no longer a dispute simply over division. It involves
now the human ego in all dimensions, finally the class ego.
Who shall be boss?
I say to Lewis: "Labor cannot conduct industry. That
means there would have to be an authority in the name of
labor, and there is no human or historical reason to suppose
that would not be — would not have to be — a tyrannical
authority."
Journalist
New Yor{ City
CARET GARRETT
. . . contracts should be thoroughly observed . . .
As TO THE GENERAL ISSUES RAISED IN THE GOVERNOR'S ARTICLE
I shall simply repeat a statement I have previously made.
The United Rubber Workers of America takes the posi-
tion that contracts should be thoroughly observed by both
parties to the contract.
Grievances should be handled through methods provided
for in the contracts. In event this method fails to secure re-
dress for just grievances the international union will fully
support a strike to secure such redress.
The internal problems of labor, including its discipline
and responsibility, are problems for labor to solve. Govern-
ment coercion of unions, as recommended in some quarters,
is a step toward fascism.
The present nation-wide campaign in the press and on the
radio on "union responsibility" is a deliberate attempt on the
part of employers to plant in the public mind the notion that
all progressive unions are lawless and irresponsible bodies
with the end in view of compelling the unions to incorporate
and otherwise put them at the mercy of governmental or-
ganizations dominated by the corporations or their agents.
President
United Rubber Workers of America
S. H. DALRYMPLE
. . . extinct vermin . . .
GOVERNOR MURPHY'S ARTICLE SEEMS TO ME TO BE VERY SENSI-
ble. The problem before the country is to get labor its reason-
able rights without handing it over to a gang of prehensile
labor leaders. The government should intervene as little as
possible, for Jefferson's maxim that the least government is
the best is as true in this field as in others. Any labor contro-
versy, of course, is bound to arouse high feelings and heads
are likely to be cracked. But it should be easy to differentiate
between honest differences of opinion, however violent, and
the uproars fomented by agents provocateurs whether on the
one side or the other. I have, in general, very little confidence
in labor messiahs. They are predominantly only racketeers.
Soon or late, I believe, the actual workingmen of the country
will get on to the quacks who now own and operate the
SEPTEMBER 1937
465
CIO, and there will be a return to saner ways with no admix-
ture of communistic flubdub. My hope is that, in the long
run, the job-seeking world savior and the company sheriff
will both become extinct vermin, and that workers and
bosses will come to a reasonable settlement, securing the com-
mon rights of all hands.
Author and editor H. L. MENCKEN
Baltimore, Md.
. . . there are better ways . . .
I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE BETTER WAYS OF HANDLING INDUS-
trial relations than those Governor Murphy defends, and my
belief is based on nearly a quarter century of experience.
Since 1915 we have had in our plant what Governor
Murphy would probably call a company union. Each division
of the plant has an employe committee, which meets regularly
to talk over the problems of that shop. Anything they cannot
settle is carried to the plant committee, which is composed
of representatives of all the shop committees. This committee
meets twice a month, once alone and once with an
equal number of representatives of the company. At the
joint meeting, questions from the shop committees are
thrashed out, and also matters brought in by both sections
of the plant committee. These may range from a discussion
of the company's annual report to the question of a par-
ticular kind of soap for one of the washrooms. Some years
ago when organizers came to the plant to form an "outside"
union, the shop committees decided that those who wished
to do so should be free to join the union, but that the men
wanted our plan to continue. Management agreed and we
have never had any "labor trouble."
I regret that employers in general have not used the years
since the War to develop ways of handling the questions of
wages, hours and working conditions which constantly come
up in any plant. If they had, I do not believe there would
now be all these strikes and violence and these irresponsible
unions getting a foothold as they are.
A manufacturer [NAME WITHHELD]
. . . the road to rational working relations . . .
THE SHAPING OF A LABOR POLICY BY GOVERNOR FRANK
Murphy in the August number of Survey Graphic is a striking-
ly enlightened examination of one of our chief public responsi-
bilities. Sound labor legislation is an indispensable function
of stable economic life in a highly industrialized nation
like ours. He points out the road to rational working rela-
tions and industrial peace. The nation is fortunate in this
period of industrial conflict in having the governor of a
great industrial state clearly explain why industrial peace
prevails in those industries operating under collective bargain-
ing agreements between management and labor.
Those who are not experienced in this field are frequently-
misled by such slogans as "freedom of contract" and "the
right to work." Governor Murphy's article reveals the simple
fact that these so-called rights have no meaning or reality
to workers who are entirely dependent upon powerful in-
dustrial employers for jobs. It is quite true, as he states, that
these loudly asserted rights express themselves in low wage
incomes and stifled lives.
I have no patience with the charge that some of these new
labor organizations are not responsible. It cannot be expected
that a full sense of responsibility will spring forth full-fledged
as we are told that Minerva sprang from the brow of Jove,
in the very instant of possessing authority lor the first
time. These new labor groups are not experienced with or-
ganization and authority. Even so they have shown more
moderation in their new found authority than employers who
have long enjoyed unhampered authority. In this freedom
from restraint non-union employers have shown a devas-
tating lack of sense of responsibility to the public.
Scientific management coordinates men, machines and
methods into a harmonious function of production and ser-
vice. Only in this harmonious relationship can management
realize on the skill, experience and natural interest of the
worker in the job, the efficiency of equipment and value of
materials to a maximum degree. The intelligent manager
knows that happy human relations are as much a feature of
scientific management as effectively adjusted mechanical
appliances and processes. He knows also that such adjust-
ments are possible only when the parties by mutual agree-
ment are each free to discuss, accept or reject the terms of
the arrangements under which they are jointly to act and
work. No legislation can effectively protect labor which in a
degree qualifies the right to strike and to peaceable appeal
to fellow workers by picketing, assembly and distribution of
literature.
Lawyer; legislative adviser to MERLE D. VINCENT
International Ladies Garment Workers Union
. . . violence should be punished by law . . .
I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS GOVERNOR MuRPHY*S BILL AT
this time because it is involved in a legislative snarl and the
final measure has not been passed. Certainly as the bill stood
originally, it was a more just, a more equable measure than
the Doyle Act which passed the New York legislature.
The problems that arise in strikes are not limited to
unions and employers. Other groups have rights and these
rights have been violated in Michigan in the auto-
mobile, steel and other strikes. Governor Murphy justi-
fies these violations on the ground that he sought to avoid
violence. But trespassing upon property, the seizure of private
property, the disturbing of the peace of a community, is
violence.
The begettor of such violence should be punished by law
in a court without the intervention of administrative officials.
Any labor law which ignores these violations of public and
private rights is an inadequate law.
The groups which enjoy these rights may be defined as
follows: management's right to work; the right of the em-
ploye to work — that employe who does not wish to belong to
the particular union which has called the strike, or the em-
ploye who does not wish to join any labor union; the right
of the stockholder to the inviolability of the property whicli
he owns; the right of the general public in areas where plants
are situated to peaceful living under police protection.
If Governor Murphy's law, finally passed, provides such
groups, as well as unions and those who wish to strike, ade-
quate protection in their rights, then he has written an
adequate and just law. If he makes no such provision, then
his law will be as lopsided and as unworkable as the Wagner
Act.
I find Chapter IX a wholesome contribution to labor legis-
lation, as it stood when originally passed. Section 18, which
limits the right of injunction, is neither startling nor revo-
lutionary. Nevertheless, the employer must have some legal
mechanism which gives him access to courts when he is
convinced that he has a fair case. It would be preferable, in
my opinion, to develop a new type of injunction, clearly de-
fined and applicable under specific instances, which would
bring labor disputes into the courts and thereby substitute
due process and full publicity for the Star Chamber pro-
ceedings under the Wagner Act and the hotel room nego-
tiations which Governor Murphy pursued in the automobile
strike.
The fullest publicity can only be made available in courts
of law with rules of evidence governing the procedure. With-
out such a juridical mechanism, the present chaos and in-
justice must continue.
466
SURVEY GRAPHIC
I particularly regard section 19(b) of the original act as
correct. The act limits picketing to those who are members
of the union calling this strike. This provision is essential
if strikes are to be fair. This provision is essential if local
communities are not to organize vigilante groups to protect
themselves and their families against professional strikers or-
ganized as a mobile force, wandering from community to
community and from state to state in pursuit of disorder.
Just as the professional strike breaker is a despised creature,
so is the professional striker a despised creature. The hatred
for the CIO in many communities, particularly Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, arises from the importation of
niners and tailors from all parts of the country to conduct
strikes against plants in which these miners and milliners do
,iot and cannot work.
If this section is omitted from Governor Murphy's bill as
finally enacted, then his law will be inadequate and vigilante
groups will have to be organized to protect local communities
from the depredations of professional strikers. The law which
forbids interstate movement of strike breakers should forbid
the interstate movement of strikers.
Governor Murphy's objectives are laudable. His methods,
as formulated in the bill he proposes, are an improvement on
the current chaos. But both are inadequate. Until both the
employer and the union are made responsible under the law
for their conduct, the situation remains chaotic. And responsi-
bility can only be fixed by courts and can only be measured
by money. If a union or an employer without law, reason or
justice, deprives men of the right to work, or destroys
property or imperils the rights of the stockholder or of a
local community, a money payment should be exacted from
the responsible party by a court of law in accordance with
the law.
Such responsibility Governor Murphy's proposal does not
provide.
Writer and lecturer
New Yo>-% City
GEORGE E. SOKOLSKY
. . . dangerous to labor's rights . . .
GOVERNOR MURPHY'S STATESMANSHIP IN THE DIFFICULT JOB
of representing the public interest in the conflict between
capital and labor has been magnificent. Though charged by
the Tories with favoritism for labor, his record has been con-
sistently based on avoidance of violence and bloodshed, on
collective bargaining and industrial peace. His article is more
far-seeing than any recent pronouncement on labor relations
from a state executive. It is difficult to comment on an un-
finished piece of labor legislation. If the legislature corrects
features dangerous to labor's rights, which now outweigh
the bill's benefits, it will take its place with the Wagner Act
and the other laws modeled on it as a long needed charter
for industrial peace.
Director
American Civil Liberties Union
ROGER BALDWIN
. . . grave doubts . . .
I AM GLAD THAT THE GOVERNOR INTENDS TO TRY TO HAVE
amendments in the bill made in the special session of the
legislature as it seems to me there are things in the present
bill which need changing. The section on patrolling or picket-
ing seems to me entirely too limited. The governor's state-
ment that "the board has the authority to decide whether
the unit shall be employer, craft, plant or some other body"
is far from clear. If it means a plant unit as the bargaining
agency, I assume that the unit can choose an outside repre-
sentative.
Governor Murphy's proposal, it seems to me, would work
far better in an industrialized state with considerable develop-
ment in collective bargaining than it would in the average
southern state, or in any state where labor had not gained
considerable power. I have grave doubts as to the sort of
board that would be set up in a number of states and as
to how far labor could trust its impartiality or its under-
standing of labor's problems.
A labor organizer
Atlanta, Ga.
[NAME WITHHELD]
. . . decisions must be reached . . .
WE MAINTAIN IN LAW THE GREAT THEORY OF THE RIGHT OF
rebellion and support the notion of the right to strike, but
resort to either does not always accomplish the purposes of
those who rebel or those who strike. We put the right of
rebellion into our Constitution and we set up in law the
election theory and we actually exert this right in America
every four years. Probably our political method is a little
cumbersome in that we go to the trouble of counting ballots
where we might resort to bullets and shoot it out each four
years.
I have said all this merely to show that what we need
in the solution of our labor and industrial difficulties is a
changed attitude and a realization of the fact that in all
social differences decisions must be reached some way or
other. The give and take is essential to modern civilized life
and we can never hope again to find the time when men
will be able to live with those with whom they agree in
regard to all phases of life. Therefore the test of a civilized
man is his ability to live with those with whom he disagrees.
Probably unconsciously the American people accepted these
views, but whether consciously or unconsciously the Ameri-
can government would not be in existence today if they
were not accepted. Cannot labor and industry learn the same
simple lesson? I have faith that they can. Therefore I have
supported such habit-forming definition-making acts as the
Wagner Labor Disputes Act and I have sympathy for Gov-
ernor Murphy's attempt to work out that happy cooperation
between government, laborer and employer which will bring
the changed attitude of accomplishing ends through peaceful
processes.
U. S. Senator from Utah
ELBERT D. THOMAS
... no violence in Indiana . . .
I AGREE WITH GOVERNOR MuRPHY THAT GOVERNMENT MUST
protect the welfare of the workers, the employers and the
general public by seeking a means to arbitrate labor disputes.
We have been fortunate in Indiana in our conciliation
efforts. The Indiana Division of Labor, between the time
it was established, April 1, until July 10, successfully ad-
justed labor disputes involving more than 50,000 workers.
During that time there were only twenty-five strikes reported.
The state conciliators have been able to avert strikes by getting
both sides to agree to mediation.
The conciliation service of the Indiana Division of Labor
is purely voluntary. However more and more workers and
industries are asking the assistance of the division. I think
the reason is that the division is absolutely impartial and fair
and that common sense and sane reasoning are more at-
tractive than bitter warfare.
There was no violence in Indiana during the steel strike.
I believe one of the contributing factors to this happy situa-
tion was that the workers and employers had confidence in
the Indiana Division of Labor. Another example of that con-
fidence is the number of labor agreements signed with the
Labor Division by unions on the one hand and companies on
the other.
Labor in Indiana has demonstrated that it can be respon-
sible and responsive to the welfare of the community and of
SEPTEMBER 1937
467
the workers, which means indirectly the welfare of industry
as well. Industry in Indiana has demonstrated that it can be
sympathetic and responsive to the problems of its workers.
I think that in this period of education and evolution of
labor relations, labor and industry must have some impartial
arbiter in which they can place their confidence.
I believe that what success we have had in Indiana has
been based primarily on confidence. A Labor Division with
authority to promote voluntary arbitration and conciliators
who can win the confidence of labor and industry would be
more helpful under ordinary circumstances than rules and
regulations.
It is my sincere belief that labor and industry, at least in
Indiana, are developing a better understanding of each
other's problems.
Governor of Indiana M. CLIFFORD TOWNSEND
... he sees very clearly . . .
I THINK FRANK MURPHY'S LABOR POLICY is THE MOST ENLIGHT-
ened in the U. S. He sees very clearly that legislation such as
his Michigan Labor Relations bill is necessary (a) to fore-
stall reaction and (b) to prevent labor wildcatting that can
only lead to vigilantism and reaction.
Writer and editor JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
New Yor^
. . . but I do not agree . . .
I HAVE READ THE ARTICLE BY GOVERNOR MuRPHY WITH IN-
terest and agree with much that is said therein. I think I am
just as sympathetic with the laboring man as Governor
Murphy is or may be, but I do not agree with the following
words which are taken from the second paragraph from the
top of the second column of page 5: "And since the property
rights of employers are carefully delineated by law, it might
be just and fair to make some effort toward incorporating
into law the worker's property right in his job. Admittedly,
the legality of such rights is by no means clearly defined."
It seems to me that the theory which underlies these
words is directly at variance with the very foundation of our
system of government, and recently some of the courts have
so held.
A large industrial employer
[NAME WITHHELD]
. . . the responsibility of labor . . .
GOVERNOR MURPHY'S ASSUMPTION THAT, WHEN LABOR ("GREAT
masses of people") does not like the law or its administra-
tion, it has "the right to act for itself" is somewhat confusing.
This appears inconsistent with his previous statement that
"the peaceful way is the right way."
Labor law, of course, has for a long time lagged behind
industrial development. As Governor Murphy says, "It was
obvious that many labor demonstrations were a protest againsl
the lag of law behind modern industrial developments." His
proposed remedy in Michigan is properly a better law — one
that more clearly defines the rights of labor.
Much more emphasis could have been put upon the re-
sponsibility of labor to make sure that, as the labor laws
improve, the technique of labor gives evidence of more and
more respect for all laws, including those specifically de-
signed to benefit the worker. While the present current of
public opinion is running strongly in favor of a better break
all around for working people, it is well to remember that
this America of ours is one of the most volatile nations on
earth. It can change its collective majority opinion almost
overnight. See Florida boom — stock market crash — pee-wee
golf — last election.
Labor's new found power, ruthlessly pursued, can boom-
erang into all sorts of counter excesses, especially in certain
localities and in some states.
"The peaceful way is the right way" as a guiding thought
could fittingly become universal.
Director STANLEY B. MATHEWSON
Cincinnati Employment Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
. . . the same for a hundred years . . .
AT THE TIME I RECEIVED GOVERNOR MuRPHY's ARTICLE I ALSO
received a copy of the New Yor^ Times reporting a decision
by Vice-Chancellor Berry of New Jersey. If this opinion pre-
vails in the Michigan Court then Governor Murphy's labor
policy is unconstitutional. The vice-chancellor based his
opinion on a decision of the United States Supreme Court
handed down in 1892:
"Whatever enthusiasts may hope for, in this country every
owner of property may work it as he will, by whom he
pleases at such wages and upon such terms as he can make;
and every laborer may work or not, as he sees fit, for whom,
at such wages as he pleases; and neither can dictate to the
other how he shall use his own, whether property, time or
skill."
The vice-chancellor said, referring doubtless, in part, to a
decision of the same court forty-five years later:
"Too often the ear of the court is tuned to the voice of
the mob rather than reason. By tolerant and temporizing de-
cisions, liberty is constantly being judicially lost. Within less
than half a decade more constitutional rights have been sac-
rificed by supine, tolerant and vacillating authority than can
be regained by a century of reaction."
Nevertheless I know of no better statement than that of
Governor Murphy on the economic relations of employers
and employes acting collectively through their own represen-
tatives. His statement is evidently the outcome of his own
intense efforts to use conciliation instead of the violence
which he had legal authority to use to the extreme limit, and
which would be demanded by the vice-chancellor in New
Jersey. The newspapers report that he held the antagonistic
representatives together day and night until they reached an
undictated collective agreement.
Conciliation is the highest art of reasoning, quite different
from the vice-chancellor's "voice of reason." It is the reason-
ing of "tolerance" and of inducements proposed to each side
to make concessions, instead of the strict logical reasoning
of the court from a few simple predetermined rights.
Yet the governor recognizes two essentials upon which
there can be no concessions: "Labor must learn to discipline
its forces, to hold in check impractical or untimely demands.
It must keep its agreements inviolate. ... If labor's leaders
fail in those respects, the public demand for drastic restrictive
legislation will surely be irresistible."
Employers, of course, cannot afford to make agreements
with unions whose leaders do not, or cannot, enforce the
agreements on recalcitrant members in spite of their griev-
ances. Yet the inviolate support of the agreement by the
employers themselves is the strongest weapon in the hands
of leaders for enforcing the agreement on their rebellious
members. A stoppage in violation of the agreement is a
strike against both the union and the employers. The unions
can be and are suppressed in Russia, Italy and Germany,
and will be suppressed in America if we go communist
or fascist, neither of which will be necessary if conciliation
can forestall it.
The present turmoil, which the governor mentions as re-
sulting from years of business depression and accumulation
of unventilated grievances, is not really unusual. Proportion-
ate to the number of wage earners in the country the turmoil
a hundred years ago, in the year 1836, was as great. It, too,
468
SURVEY GRAPHIC
followed a long depression of ten years, but disappeared in
the depression that followed the panic in 1837.
The anarchist bomb of 1886 that killed seven policemen
and wounded seventy, was the culmination of the recovery
of business after the long depression following 1873 and the
turbulent new membership of the Knights of Labor after
1880. During the year preceding that bomb I had been
reading in the newspapers the alarm that five men, led by
Powderly, held tyrannical control over the industries of the
country. The bomb, according to Gompers, put the labor
movement back fifteen years in this country.
I attended the convention in 1894 of the American Railway
Union and saw Debs, whom I had previously known, wel-
come the Pullman strikers and induce his organization to
call a strike that paralyzed the railways from the Pacific to
the Atlantic. The strike was suppressed by President Cleve-
land, and the Supreme Court endorsed the injunction in
labor disputes, with the imprisonment of Debs for contempt
and his conversion to socialism. The "orderly process" of
trade agreements, which Governor Murphy mentions in the
railway industry, followed the agreements made by the rail-
way companies with the brotherhoods which had stood out
against Debs and his mass turmoil of labor.
In 1902, during the recovery from a long depression, I was
with John Mitchell in the five months' strike of the anthra-
cite coal workers when he steadily refused to call out the
bituminous miners in violation of their agreement with the
bituminous operators. After the anthracite agreement was
made by a practically compulsory federal commission, the
anthracite operators refused to deal with the union directly
until they found their mines filling with the anarchistic
I.W.W. who never made trade agreements. The anti-syndi-
calist laws followed in many states, especially during the
War.
Other instances of vast turmoil in the past might be men-
tioned. The present situation differs in the enlarged propor-
tion of the total population reduced permanently to the status
of wage earners by the amazing spread of mass production.
This brings them together in one shop or in many shops
owned collectively by investors through a large corporation.
The menace is greater on both sides though the "attitude"
has been the same for a hundred years.
If the many federal and state boards created to deal with
employer-employe relations fail in their capacity for concilia-
tion or their capacity to induce fidelity to agreements, then
"drastic restrictive legislation will surely be irresistible."
In other words, there is no liberal solution of the problem
of industrial conflict within capitalism. But there are more
or less good approaches to it, and Governor Murphy's is
among the better approaches. It is, however, a grave weakness
of the Michigan plan that it limits so drastically the right of
picketing. A strike is of interest to other workers than those
who work in a particular plant. I hope the proposed modifi-
cation of the bill at this point will be carried through.
NORMAN THOMAS
Socialist candidate for President, 1928, 1932, 1936
... he did not . . .
GOVERNOR MURPHY'S ARTICLE IMPRESSES ME WITH HIS UTTER
inability to grasp the most important features of the labor
situation. How could a man so patently without the courage
and integrity to meet the problems of his great office write
an analysis of the labor problem? How could a man of real
brains talk of the General Motors and Chrysler problems as
though they were in the same category as the sweat shop,
with which he is no doubt familiar?
Did the governor find out whether the employes wanted
to strike or wanted to work? He did not. Did he enforce the
law? He did not. Did he find out whether the 300,000 men
and women involved wanted to go back to work? He did
not. Did he stop strikes after the so-called settlement? He
did not. Did he act like an American? He did not. Did he
act like a governor? He did not.
Midwestern manufacturer
[NAME WITHHELD]
Professor of economics
University of Wisconsin
JOHN R. COMMONS
. . . irresponsible elements . . .
SEVERAL DAYS AGO I WROTE A DISPATCH ON THE SUBJECT OF THE
Michigan labor bill. I cannot think of anything that I would
want to add at this time. In that dispatch, I said:
"The big question that will be asked, however, is what
possible good is any law in the State of Michigan, new or
old, when irresponsible elements may defy court orders and
go unpunished?
"As yet there has been no prosecution of the individuals
who committed contempt of court in Flint by refusing to
withdraw from General Motors plants where a sit-down
strike was being held. Likewise, in Detroit, the order of a
court was defied by strikers at the Chrysler plants."
Writer and editor DAVID LAWRENCE
Washington, D. C.
. . . while capitalism lasts . . .
GOVERNOR MURPHY'S ARTICLE, THE SHAPING OF A LABOR
Policy, is an able and persuasive statement of an advanced
liberal view of the function of government. Government must
protect human values, he says, it must have certain industrial
standards; it must protect public interests, but it should
avoid compulsion of the type illustrated by various proposals
for compulsory arbitration. With all this in general I should
agree, but with this important addition. Industrial conflict is
rooted in the nature of the capitalist system. It is one ex-
pression of an inescapable class conflict. That conflict may be
waged along better or worse lines. Sometimes the very lines
of conflict themselves are blurred. But it exists and it can-
not be escaped. Government in a capitalist society may be
more or less bad, more or less influenced by the pressure of
working class groups. Nevertheless while capitalism lasts gov-
ernment cannot truly be an umpire. It cannot truly be con-
cerned for a public interest, somehow or other outside the
lines of conflict. It always tends to represent the interests of
the dominant group.
. . . the paramount public interest . . .
THE ATTITUDE OF GOVERNOR MuRPHY IS THE ENLIGHTENED
one that law must constantly be adjusted to changing social
and economic needs. The significance of this article — asidt
from its many specific progressive declarations — lies in the
recognition of the paramount public interest in industrial
peace, with government as the active representative of the
public in maintaining peace. However, I cannot rid myself
of the feeling that government can never hold even balance
between contending owners and workers. In the past owners
have had the greater economic power, and so government
has, by and large, reflected their interest. If now workers
become predominant, government must, over a period, veer
to their side. I hope that this last will occur, for I believe
that we shall be happiest in America, and have the highest
standard of living as a nation, when we have a workers'
economy, and therefore a workers' government.
BROADUS MITCHELL
Associate professor of political economy
Johns Hopkins University
SEPTEMBER 1937
469
And Now, a Co-op Hospital
by AVIS D. CARLSON
In Elk City, Okla., the Plains farmers and a determined doctor have built up a
cooperative medical service center in spite of professional opposition. This is
the dramatic story of its struggles, its growth and its trail-blazing in health
education.
WHEN ANY NEW LINE OF ATTACK UPON AN OLD SOCIAL PROB-
lem can be labelled successful on its own scene, it is worth
study. The first venture in the United States in a coopera-
tive hospital and medical service has now reached that
stage. It has had seven years of struggle against the uni-
versal human timidity in the presence of a new idea and
against the organized opposition of the medical profession.
It still has to win in the Oklahoma Supreme Court a legal
skirmish which involves its right to exist. But most ob-
servers familiar with the Oklahoma landscape now believe
that the community hospital of Elk City is a permanently
going concern.
For years social students have pondered the various
problems created by the widening gap between the con-
stantly improved medical service available and the finan-
cial ability of large sectors of the public to use it. The de-
pression so greatly intensified the problem that it forced
some sort of bridging of the gap for relief clients. But for
the multitudes on the next income levels the gap only
spread. The report of the Committee on the Cost of Medi-
cal Care in 1932 dramatized the problem and fertilized dis-
cussion by bringing together an array of statistics about
actual conditions and by making specific recommenda-
tions. Here and there governmental units and groups of
physicians began to experiment with one or another of
these recommendations, particularly those advising group
practice and group payment. At the same time the de-
pression-born intellectual ferment and respect for small
savings were stirring the American cooperative move-
ment into a sharply accelerated growth.
It remained for a group. of Oklahoma cotton farmers
at Elk City, a sunburned little town of 5500 down on the
edge of the Dust Bowl, to unite the two ideas in a hospital
association. It is this unique combination of group practice
and group payment with the cooperative principle of or-
ganization which makes the Elk City experiment sig-
nificant.
The history of the Farmers' Union Cooperative Hospi-
tal, or as it is usually known, Community Hospital, is
fascinating. Perhaps it could have grown up nowhere
else in the United States, for as is usually the case with
new ideas, it originated in the brain of an unusual indi-
vidual and its continued development against all kinds
of obstacles was possible only because he had exactly the
blend of tenacity and shrewdness that he has. Dr. Michael
A. Shadid is that person. The American medical pro-
fession with its 150,000 members includes, of course, many
different types of personalities, but Dr. Shadid is no "type."
As one talks with him it is not hard to see why. He was
born in Syria and came to this country old enough to
have been a student at the American University of Beirut.
470
He is a graduate of the medical school of Washington
University in St. Louis, but an immigrant nearly always
brings to his work a special emotional set, an inability to
be completely molded into native attitudes and prejudices.
Dr. Shadid was also Semitic, which set him apart from
his midwestern fellow practitioners in other ways. It was,
then, not strange that during his early days in America he
became interested in the Marxian philosophy and before
long found himself a Socialist.
In many rural communities a Socialist doctor might
have had hard sledding, but Oklahoma is young and fairly
tempestuous. During his twenty years in Beckham County
prior to 1930, Dr. Shadid worked up a good practice. He
is the sort of physician who inevitably gets a large "fol-
lowing" along with a good collection of enemies. His
socialism made him more keenly aware than most doctors
of the problem of poverty and its effect upon medical
service. And as he grew older he came to believe more
firmly in preventive medicine.
BUT NOT EVEN THIS rara avis AMONG DOCTORS COULD HAVE
worked out the plan in just any community. The locale
had to be something rather special. It was exactly right in
southwestern Oklahoma. The Farmers' Union is there the
farm organization — and the union, under the leadership
of the late John Simpson, had for years been promoting
cooperatives. All around Elk City there were co-op gins,
oil stations, grocery stores and lumber companies. Here
was the other half of the equation Dr. Shadid was seeking,
a powerful organization already experimenting with
group self-help, already familiar with cooperative prin-
ciples.
And so in the fall of 1929, three years before the Com-
mittee on the Cost of Medical Care was to report, he
called together representative men and laid out his plan:
if 2000 families were to unite in a cooperative association,
they could get for themselves as a group what they had
never been able to have as separate families, adequate
medical service. If each bought a $50 share of stock they
could buy or build and equip a hospital. After that, annual
membership dues of $25 a family would, Dr. Shadid esti-
mated, be sufficient to cover medical, surgical and hospital
care.
The idea took. In 1930 a permanent organization was
effected. The next year the first unit of the hospital was
built. As the brick walls went up, the earlier ridicule
from the local physicians changed to bitter hostility. The
Beckham County Medical Society was allowed to lapse
for a period and when it was revived Dr. Shadid was so
sure that he would be excluded that he did not apply for
membership. That automatically deprived him of mem-
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Community Hospital is "ours" to twelve hundred member families who live within twenty-five miles of Elk City
bership in the state association. The right of the hospital to
exist and of physicians on its staff to retain their licenses
moved swiftly into state politics. Governor "Alfalfa Bill"
Murray interposed a heavy hand by promising to dis-
miss the Medical Board if it revoked any Elk City licenses.
Oklahoma farmers warmed into their traditional animos-
ity toward professional or business groups which seemed
to them to be infringing on their rights, and the battle
went merrily on.
So much has been written recently about the fight that
it may be interesting to explain it briefly. The Oklahoma
statutes governing medical practice contain a section for-
bidding "capping" or "steering," which seems to be Okla-
homese for the soliciting of patients. I am told that the
law was originally enacted to catch the gentry who posed
as "specialists in men's diseases" and employed agents to
"steer" patients to them. Since any large cooperative asso-
ciation must in its organization stage actively push the
sale of its memberships, the Hospital Association has, in a
sense, been guilty of "steering" patients to the doctors on
the staff, or "peddling medical service." It could never
have organized without doing it. But the whole character
of the enterprise is so different from those aimed at by
the statute that the question of "ethics" certainly needs
interpretation. The Farmers' Union, labor unions, Veter-
ans of Industry of America and other backers of the hos-
pital are pressing for an amendment that will specifically
exclude cooperative and non-profit organizations from the
steerage provision. Meantime both sides of the contro-
versy are waiting a decision from the Supreme Court as
to whether or not the State Board of Medical Examiners
has a right to conduct a trial to revoke Dr. Shadid's license
for unethical practice. Most unbiased observers, however,
believe that the organizations backing the hospital are too
well intrenched politically to surfer permanent defeat.
So much for history. The hospital itself is more inter-
esting than its long birth struggle. Physically it is rather
imposing for so small a building because it is built well
out of town and rises from the flat, newly-turned sod
with an air that is almost belligerent. In its short six years
it has twice had to be enlarged and the seams marking
these defiant spurts of growth are plainly evident. Even the
SEPTEMBER 1937
young plantings and the patch of lawn which have some-
how been nursed through the drought look new and
slightly revolutionary besides the bareness around them.
INSIDE, ONE LOSES THIS FEELING OF UNEXPECTEDNESS. IT is
just a small hospital going about the daily business of any
such institution. Its beds are standard. Its surgery is as
spotless, its kitchen as bustling, its halls as clean, its
nurses as brisk and professional as in any other hospital.
Last year a thousand operations, almost three a day, were
performed in it. The equipment is good throughout, I am
assured by a medical acquaintance who recently went over
it carefully.
In only two respects does the hospital plant differ from
others of its size. One is, of course, that it contains a series
of offices for the staff physicians and dentists with waiting
rooms large enough to accommodate the daily run of
patients. The other is that it houses a small pharmacy
which is also part of the association service. When a mem-
ber has seen his doctor and obtained his prescription, he
steps down the hall and has it filled at his own drugstore.
The saving is considerable, often amounting to as much
as 40 percent. The drugstore has another advantage in
that the quality of the drugs dispensed is under the abso-
lute control of the staff.
At the time of my visit the hospital staff included three
doctors, a dentist, a technician, eighteen nurses and office
girls and two janitors. Until last fall there had been for
some time seven physicians and two dentists. But when in
November the State Medical Board suddenly refused to
renew the temporary license under which the staff eye-ear-
nose-and-throat specialist had been practicing and ordered
Dr. Shadid to appear before it for trial, four of the doc-
tors and one dentist left precipitately.
Until the question of licenses is definitely settled, it
will be difficult if not impossible to secure and keep an
adequate staff. It is the plan, when the issue is settled and
the membership paying annual dues has reached 2500
families, to increase the staff to eight physicians, includ-
ing two surgeons, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist,
three practitioners in internal medicine, and a urologist.
In the past and for some time to come, the men at Com-
471
munity Hospital must be of a rather unusual disposition,
men willing to face professional disapprobation for the
sake of working with a new idea. They must be enthusi-
astic about the principles of group practice. They must
have something of the pioneer spirit. And their training
and experience must be above question. Even if it were
willing to trust its medical
care to less than first-class doc-
tors, the Hospital Association
could not take chances on
competence with the state
medical organization sniping
all the time.
The association has now
sold a total of 2500 shares,
1800 of which are completely
paid for, the rest somewhere
along the installment road by
which Americans commonly
pay for things. In spite of
four years of crop failure 1200
families paid their annual
dues for this year. When this
number reaches 2500, as it
should before long, it is the
plan to close the membership.
Around 95 percent of the
members are farmers scattered
out over the rough red soil
of that part of Oklahoma and
an adjoining strip of Texas.
The rest live in the villages
and towns of the region.
Some of them have moved
away, but retain their mem-
bership because, as one of
them said, "I can load my family in the car and come all
the way down from Colorado for an annual check-up
cheaper than I can have it done at home. And if anything
gets seriously wrong with any of us, it is much cheaper
to come 300 miles to our own hospital." A woman living
as far away as Denver still keeps up her membership.
Last spring she came back for a major operation because
it cost her less and because she knew and trusted the
doctors.
THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, WHICH CARRIES THE FINANCIAL
responsibility of the project, is, as might be expected, made
up of farm and co-op leaders of the locality, elected by the
association members themselves. The five directors in-
clude a general manager of a co-op lumber company, a
manager of a co-op gin, a WPA paymaster, a farmer and
a leader in the cooperative association in Elk City. Thus
they are all familiar with the cooperative technique, and
most of them are accustomed to responsibility for a good
volume of business in the course of a year's time, though
there is not a dictaphone or a walnut desk among them.
They come as close to representing "the people" of south-
western Oklahoma as it would be easy to find.
What do they and their fellow members get for their
dues, originally $25 a year, but recently cut to $24? The
total is astounding, although of course it must be remem-
bered that the general price level is much lower in rural
Oklahoma than in New York. They get, in the first place,
all the medical and surgical examinations and care that
The man with the idea — Dr. Michael A. Shadid
they and their families need in the course of a year. There
is nothing niggardly about the spirit of this service either.
Members are urged to have a thorough examination once
a year, on the principle that a good many serious troubles
can be avoided by discovering them in their early stages.
Every member I talked to told me that he sought medi-
cal advice more frequently
and earlier than he ever had
done under private practice.
All laboratory examinations,
such as blood, urine, and
sputum tests, are included in
the service. A small charge
is made for the materials
used in metabolism and al-
lergy tests. The charge for an
X-ray picture of any part of
the body (except the teeth,
which are covered by the ser-
vice) is $3. Children are im-
• munized for diphtheria and
vaccinated for smallpox as a
\ I matter of routine. Serums are
administered as needed. If a
patient must have a doctor
call at his home, the fee is
$1.50 plus a mileage charge of
25 cents per mile one way.
Naturally under the hospital
system home calls are cut to
a minimum.
The second service consists
of hospitalization whenever
any member of the .family
needs it, with room and board
and nursing service, even a
special nurse if the physician in charge thinks it advisable.
Until this summer the charge for medicines and other
materials furnished by the hospital has always been a flat
dollar per day. At the last director's meeting, however, the
charge was lifted to $2 per day and the membership dues
lowered to $24 a year. Since the family is entitled to its
surgical work with no fee from the doctor, an appen-
dectomy would cost around $40, $18 for the use of the
operating room and $2 for each day of hospitalization. A
tonsillectomy with the customary overnight stay costs
$10. If a family had no medical service in a whole year
but one of these operations, its $24 dues would still have
been an excellent investment.
For their $24 the families also get, and for most of them
it is their first experience at it, good maternity care. This
includes the standard pre- and post-natal care with hos-
pitalization at confinement. The charge is $10 for the use
of the delivery room plus the regular $2 per day for the
stay in the hospital. A farm baby can thus be ushered into
the world with all the modern safeguards for himself and
his mother for just $30. No high cost of babies here! If
he is the average sort of farm baby of that region, his
older brother and sister came into the world with no
medical attention whatever until the hour when their
mother was brought to bed in her own home. At those
confinements she had no nursing service except what the
hired girl or neighbor women could give, and no post-
partum care. Out of the experience she probably ac-
quired what she calls "female trouble" enough to make
472
SURVEY GRAPHIC
her life miserable for years to come. And at that she paid
the doctor who delivered the baby from $25 to $40. It is
really no wonder that the parents of "the hospital baby"
are warmly enthusiastic. One father said to me, "We never
even knew what care a woman ought to have until we
joined the hospital." His wife added, "And look how big
and strong the baby is. I didn't know how to feed the
others either."
As A LAST SERVICE THE MEMBER FAMILY GETS ALL OF ITS
dental examinations, even the X-rays and extractions
free. From the standpoint of the hospital this part of the
service is pure pioneering, for among the farmers in south-
western Oklahoma dental hygiene and any popular un-
derstanding of the relationship of teeth to health have been
practically nil. Teeth come in. After a while they ache.
Then they are removed. When so many of them are gone
that the rest are a nuisance or when they are loosened
by a gum disease, they are all extracted and, if the family
exchequer will permit, plates are put in. That is a typical
case history of teeth in that and many other rural sections
of America. The Hospital Association is trying to do a
piece of health education for its members by including
dental examinations and extractions in its list of services
and by making available all restorative work, such as
bridges, plates and fillings, at what seems to an outsider a
ridiculously low price scale.
Anyone who has had contact with Community Hos-
pital is always asked two questions: what advantages and
disadvantages does the plan have on its own scene, and
how much significance does it have for society at large.
So far as the members are concerned the first question
is easily answered. One of the charges brought against
Dr. Shadid for unethical practice is "fleecing the public."
It is hard to see how anything but pure malice could
prompt the charge. The members have, for the first time
in their lives, a well-rounded medical service at a price
they can afford to pay. It is, to be sure, not quite com-
plete, for there are some operations with very delicate
technique which cannot be done at the hospital and for
which the plan offers no provision. But after all, such
cases are rather rare, and the coverage provided by the
association is so far superior
to the medical service the
members had formerly been
able to afford or could possi-
bly get as individuals that it
is nonsense to talk about
fraud. When a family of five,
or fifteen for that matter,
gets what these families are
getting for $24, it is certainly
not being fleeced. Neither
can a family of two com-
plain about $18 dues or a
single person about $12.
As for the original $50,
that represents an actual in-
terest in a physical property
and can be sold just as any
other property can be. If the
membership becomes lim-
ited, this interest will be
even more valuable than it
is today. One member told Saturday when farmers go to
me, "I wouldn't take $1000 for my share if I couldn't buy
another. It is worth that not to have to worry for fear
some of us will have a long sick spell or an expensive
operation."
The only real disadvantage to the members comes
from the fact that they are scattered over such a wide
area. Most of them live within twenty-five miles of Elk
City, but numbers of them are much farther out. After
all it is inconvenient and occasionally dangerous to be
so far from one's physician, even in a day of telephones
and hard surfaced roads. And since most western farm-
ers have the habit of going to town on Saturday, it be-
comes such a heavy day at the hospital that the wait is
often tedious, though perhaps no worse than many a city
patient has to endure in the outer office of a popular physi-
cian. The hospital service would undoubtedly be more
convenient if the members lived closer. But Community
Hospital belongs to Plains farmers and they simply do
not live close together. To meet this difficulty, the board
of directors recently installed a second service plan where-
by the distant family which cannot conveniently or eco-
nomically come for ordinary office calls is for $12 a year
entitled to hospitalization at the usual rates in case of
any serious illness.
From the standpoint of the staff the answer must be
less positive. Under the circumstances, when the Hospi-
tal Association has been subject not only to the uncer-
tainties of all new and rapidly developing organizations
but also to the concerted opposition of the outside medical
profession, the staff has undoubtedly had an uncomforta-
ble time in many respects. It is not pleasant to face pro-
fessional obloquy month after month and to know that
in the end one may lose all professional standing. In addi-
tion, at times there has been the strain of a heavier rou-
tine than men should carry. Particularly since last fall,
when the staff suddenly shrank to less than half its for-
mer size, has the strain been hard. This of course is not
an inherent fault of either group practice or a coopera-
tive hospital association. When the question of licenses is
finally settled so that the staff can be increased to its
proper size, there should be no overwork, except during
periods of epidemic, when (Continued on page 496)
town, Main Street is crowded with cars, the hospital with patients
SEPTEMBER 1937
473
Blueprinting the Machine Age
by BEULAH AMIDON
Coming inventions that already cast their shadows before and recommenda-
tions on how to turn them into social pluses; a far-seeing study of technical
change by the National Resources Committee.
IN 1769 JOSEPH CUGNOT INVENTED A THREE-WHEELED CAR-
riage driven by two steam cylinders which moved a load
in addition to its own weight. The fact aroused little in-
terest at the time. It has only historical interest today. For
more than a century, hundreds of other obscure inventors
struggled with the scientific and engineering problems of
a "horseless carriage," while steam and electricity made
their slow way from the laboratory to practical use. Fear,
superstition, inertia, ridicule, helped block the way to this
swift mechanical means of transportation. In 1896, A. R.
Sennett read a paper before the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in which he contended that
"automatic carriages" could not be widely used because
they required great skill to operate inasmuch as the driver
"has not the advantage of the intelligence of the horse in
shaping his path." Six years later, when President Theo-
dore Roosevelt had the temerity to ride in an automobile,
the unreliable machine was followed by a horse-drawn
vehicle in case of a breakdown. It was not until 1909, when
the left-hand drive and center control were introduced,
that production figures of passenger cars passed the 100,-
000 mark, and the production of motor trucks did not
reach 10,000 until 1911. In less than three decades has come
the development of today's vast motor industry, with its
almost endless direct and indirect effects on our public
and private lives.
The story of the coming of railroads, steamships, tele-
phones, power looms, telegraph lines, fairly parallels the
history of the "horseless carriage." It is not difficult to see,
looking back over the decades, that a different attitude, a
more intelligent coordination of effort could have speeded
the application of power and reduced much of the hard-
ship that followed the introduction of many new inven-
tions. It is far less easy to try to deal with the problems of
technology in terms, not of yesterday, but of today and
tomorrow — to attempt to foresee coming inventions, and
to fit them into the going world without dislocation of our
economic and social life. Indeed, it is difficult for many
of us to realize today that the great age of invention has
not passed. And yet the most comprehensive survey of
the field of technology yet made in this country shows that
the wheels of technical progress not only continue to turn,
but that their rate is increasingly swift.
In its first report on the science resources of the United
States, Technological Trends and National Policy, the Na-
tional Resources Committee looks ahead to life made still
less laborious, more interesting, more healthful by "the
kinds of new inventions which may affect living and
working conditions in America in the next ten to twenty-
five years." Beginning where parts of the Hoover Study
of Social Trends left off in 1933, the new Roosevelt study
surveys the current directions of research and its engi-
neering applications. The report was prepared by a sub-
committee of the science division of the National Re-
sources Committee. William F. Ogburn of the University
of Chicago directed the survey, as he did the 1933 study;
associated with him were John C. Merriam, head of the
Carnegie Institution in Washington, and E. C. Elliott,
president of Purdue University. In preparing the sixteen
sections into which the three-part report is divided, the
committee had the cooperation of leading scientists, engi-
neers and technicians, and drew on the data of industrial,
academic and governmental research agencies.
Public reaction, as judged by the press comment, is at
this writing [August 1] very mixed. In his syndicated
column, General Hugh Johnson declared:
The recommendations are foggy, but if what they mean is,
as seems to be the case, that we need a sort of professional
select committee to recommend to government what ought to
be done about new ideas, the whole report should be filed in
the ash can.
The Christian Science Monitor hailed the report as "one
of the two or three great public documents of the decade."
The New Yorf( Times carried two pages of excerpts
following a front page story, and commented editorially:
. . . this report is an important historic document because
it exhibits the formidable difficulties that face the forecaster,
because it may cause governmental agencies to look more
into the future, and because it calls by implication for a kind
of education which will imbue engineers-to-be with a deeper
sense of social responsibility.
The New Yorf( Herald Tribune said in an editorial:
We suspect that the citizenry will be impressed ... by this
document ... as an interesting example of the weaknesses
which have overwhelmed nearly every one of the President's
actual attempts at centralized, bureaucratic "planned" admin-
istration. The theoretical approach, the tendency to assume
that to state vast problems is to solve them, the leap to accom-
plish great ends without considering practical means, the
genial substitution of a roseate vision for a factual considera-
tion of the inordinate costs — it is upon precisely these rocks
that there has come to wreck virtually every actual experiment
in social plan, from NRA downward, which the American
people have been unwise enough to entrust to Mr. Roosevelt's
debonair hand.
Viewed dispassionately, the report is not so much a
prescription for remedies as an examination and definition
of a national problem. Remedies are largely left to the
agencies which the committee suggests as nationally ser-
viceable if we are to reap the benefits and minimize the
economic and human costs of our advancing machine age.
The structure of the report underscores this objective.
It is divided into three parts, very unequal in size. The
474
SUBVBY GRAPHIC
first, made up of five sections, considers the Social Aspect
of Technology. Part Two, which is very brief, deals with
the relationships between Science and Technology. Part
Three, which fills 270 of the 367 large, double column
pages, discusses Technology in Various Fields, outlining
recent developments and their engineering, social and
economic meanings in agriculture, the mineral industries,
transportation, communication, power, the chemical in-
dustries, the electrical goods industries, metallurgy, the
construction industries.
Hindsight is proverbially easier than foresight, and yet
those responsible for this national exploration hold that
it is possible to protect the living and working conditions
of the American people during the forward march of re-
search and invention and to some degree to foresee and
forestall the disruption of haphazard technical change.
Judging by past experience, experts have had only
"spotty" success in forecasting coming inventions — exam-
ples of shortsightedness or of amazing blindness balance
examples of accurate prediction. Thus in October 1920, a
long editorial on future developments in Scientific Ameri-
can mentioned neither radio-telephonic broadcasting nor
talking pictures. Yet the beginning of broadcasting is
usually set at the opening of KDKA, in November 1920,
and talking pictures "had been realized since about 1887."
In 1900, when George Sutherland wrote his Twentieth
Century Inventions, he foresaw picture telegraphy, radio-
telephony, wireless clocks, and an equivalent of the re-
cording telephone. But as to submarines and aviation he
shut his eyes. He wrote: "The amount of misguided in-
genuity which has been expended on these two problems
. . . during the nineteenth century will offer one of the
most curious and interesting studies of the future historian
of technological progress." Examining hundreds of rec-
ords, reports and attempts at forecasting by both lay and
expert writers, the National Resources subcommittee offers
"as an excellent rule for the present study — to predict only
inventions already born, whose physical possibility has
therefore been demonstrated, but which are usually not
yet practical, and whose future significance is not com-
monly appreciated." As an interesting example of the
application of this rule, the survey considers what of social
consequence may be anticipated from "aviation without
danger from fog," since it is now possible to list twenty-
five means apparently available for conquering it.
ONE OF THE GREAT SOCIAL CAINS TO BE EXPECTED FROM A
foreknowledge of coming technical events would be the
minimizing of technological unemployment. The report
holds that no satisfactory measure of the volume of tech-
nological employment has yet been developed, "but at
least part of the price of constant change in the employ-
ment requirements of industry is paid by labor since
many of the new machines and techniques result in 'occu-
pational obsolescence.'" [See Survey Graphic, May 1937,
page 273.] The report points out that "the time lag be-
tween the first development and the full use of an inven-
tion is often a period of grave social and economic malad-
justment as, for example, the delay in the adoption of
workmen's compensation and the institution of 'safety
first' campaigns after the introduction of rapidly moving
steel machines." This lag, the survey group holds, empha-
sizes "the necessity of planning in regard to inventions."
As moves in the direction of less wasteful and more
humane technical progress, the report recommends first,
Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Report on Technological Trends
studies of important inventions "that may soon be widely
used with resultant social influences of significance."
Developments, which this survey believes "promise to
play an immediate part in future technological changes,"
are: "the mechanical cotton picker, air conditioning equip-
ment, plastics, the photo-electric cell, artificial cotton and
woolen-like fibres made from cellulose, synthetic rubber,
pre-fabricated houses, television, facsimile transmission,
the automobile trailer, gasoline produced from coal, steep
flight aircraft and tray agriculture." Since patent laws in-
fluence the rate of technical progress, the committee urges
that "the whole system be reviewed by a group of social
scientists and economists."
The report also recommends new agencies to deal with
problems and possibilities of advancing technology. It
proposes a joint committee representing such public bodies
as the Bureau of Commerce, Department of Labor, De-
partment of Agriculture, Bureau of Mines, Interstate
Commerce Commission, which would follow new devel-
opments, mark the industries and occupations likely to be
modified by technical change, and the extent and direc-
tion in which unemployment is likely to follow.
As its major recommendation, the report emphasizes
the need for "a permanent, over-all planning board,"
which would follow and help systematize "the continuing
growth of the already high and rapidly developing tech-
nology of the nation."
The report as a whole is a mind-stretching forecast of
what we may reasonably expect the scientists and engi-
neers to make possible in the years just ahead. But it is
more than that — a call to the American people to put the
new wonders of the machine era to social use. Our fore-
fathers fumbled, delayed and paid in bitter coin for the
cotton gin, the spinning jenny, the printing press. Can we,
these experts ask, do better with television, the cotton
picker, the "electric eye"?
SEPTEMBER 1937
475
MEN'S WORK
THE DAY'S
WORK
Etchings by
JAMES E. ALLEN
DRYING COD
Etchin
THE EXCAVATORS
A Donor's Dilemma
by BARCLAY ACHESON
Why not let the government do it all? What services should we support
privately and why? Beset by tax bills and urgent appeals, a contributor
goes into executive session with himself and works out a personal
formula for giving.
THE COMMUNITY CHEST DRIVE is JUST OVER THE HORIZON.
On my desk is an accumulation of appeals from good,
bad and indifferent philanthropies — "gimme letters" ac-
cording to my daughter. Unprecedented taxes have
changed both my ability to give and my point of view;
the most important difference between the present and
the past being the degree of government participation in
public welfare. As I glance through this assortment of
mail I wish to do my share because I believe in private
philanthropy, but I cannot forget that flippant but per-
tinent remark, "The gimmes will git you if you don't
watch out."
Under the circumstances it would be easy to repeat
the usual criticisms that are sometimes made of private
giving — that it penalizes generosity and permits niggardli-
ness to go scot free; that it is often inspired by high pres-
sure campaigns so that it is almost as compulsory as
taxation; that it can never assume responsibility for the
economic security of all citizens, in good times or bad;
that its paternalism fosters class consciousness; that charity
is hit or miss instead of democratic justice, and so on —
and to let the government do everything.
But it happens that I do not have that much faith in
government or in politicians. Despite the government's
function to insure all the human security that municipal,
state or federal facilities can provide, I am mistrustful
of the adequacy of government experimentation. To the
best of my knowledge, the greatest creative resource of
our nation is individual initiative financed voluntarily by
a far-seeing minority. I believe it has been as great a
factor in social advance as it ever has been in our much
vaunted industrial progress. There are many distinctive
tasks which government cannot, and should not, under-
take. Indeed I am inclined to believe that government
should proceed slowly in fields where private welfare and
cultural agencies have not paved the way and set the
pace, if not the standards, for widespread tax-supported
activity. Believing this, I am committed to philanthropy.
But as I read the letters asking me for voluntary con-
tributions, I need not say yes, or write a check for all.
I believe that private giving deserves the lilt and ad-
venture of discovery. I cannot feel personally generous
toward routine established work that, no matter how
much it enriches the life of the community, is logically
a candidate for public support.
My favorite illustration of the way pioneering initiative
originated a community reform is furnished by the
origin of public playgrounds. Take Boston, for example,
or New York; or take the experience of a group of people
at Hull-House, Chicago, a generation ago. Multitudes of
children in the congested poverty-stricken districts were
exposed to a moral environment as filthy as the back
478
alleys and gutters in which they played. Private philan-
thropy first recognized and then sought a solution of this
grave problem. The idea of playgrounds was evolved and
four years were spent demonstrating their value and
devising equipment, training leaders and developing a
year-round program of activities. As the new playgrounds
improved it became evident to the entire community that
a great need had been met.
The playgrounds might have been established as a per-
manent philanthropy with an ever-enlarging employed
staff, program and budget. Instead, the pioneers behind
this movement undertook to sell the idea to the city. The
effort was successful. In 1898 the Chicago City Council
appropriated one thousand dollars for playgrounds. The
following year the mayor appointed a special park com-
mission to report upon the subject. The commission
found what had once been garbage-strewn vacant lots
now transformed into playgrounds overflowing with
happy, laughing children. It was able to study records of
cost and of practical results in improved health and de-
creased child delinquency. The favorable report of that
commission later won enthusiastic public support with
the result that today Chicago is justly proud of a great
network of tax-supported playgrounds.
This illustrates how a plan, developed privately at low
cost and on a limited scale until its practicability is clearly
apparent, may later have a far-reaching influence— may,
in fact, make an important contribution to an interna-
tional movement. Today, for example, every one applauds
the inspiring development of public recreation areas
under Park Commissioner Robert Moses in New York —
perhaps the most notable fruition of the early Boston,
New York and Chicago experiments. Yet there is to me
a real value in a playground that is still privately main-
tained in Philadelphia. It serves as a social laboratory —
as a pace setter and as a standard setter for the future.
Of course not all philanthropies are susceptible of growth
into public enterprises as playgrounds have been. And
it is not desirable that they should be.
RECENTLY I READ A LIST OF WHAT ONE c;oou AUTHORITY CALLS
"Significant Dates in Social Work in the United States."
Over 90 percent of the events are clearly the result of
individual efforts, supported during their initial stages
by private contributions. Many were conceived and
established in spite of indifference or open hostility.
Among them I found such important events as the or-
ganization of the National Red Cross; the earliest pro-
vision for the care of destitute, neglected and delinquent
children; the inauguration of a society that is the parent of
modern prison reform; the firsf school for boys found
guilty of minor offenses in court; the first tuberculosis
SURVEY GRAPHIC
sanitarium; the first school for the training of social
workers; and the first city-wide charity organization in
America.
Some dates mark governmental reforms preceded by a
long process of public education, led and financed volun-
tarily by private citizens. To such crusades we owe the
first child labor legislation, the first laws limiting women's
working hours, the first state board of charity, the first
juvenile court.
As nudgers of public progress or as managers of spe-
cial continuing private efforts to explore the infinite
promise of American life in manifold avenues of cul-
ture, health, human understanding and education, volun-
tary enterprises will never lose their franchise upon
American generosity. I need not — and could not —
enumerate even the most outstanding. But with their
record of achievement before me, I return to these in-
sistent "gimme letters" with increased respect. They
represent more than freedom of speech or freedom of the
press, they represent my right as a freeborn citizen to use
my own money and time experimenting with ideas that,
if practical, may make this old world more just — a
kindlier happier place.
I must choose carefully. Every gift means going with-
out something I would like to have, either for myself or
my family, and I cannot even hope to do something for
all the worthy claims made on my time and money.
So THIS LETTER GOES IN THE WASTE BASKET. IT IS FROM AN
old-fashioned orphanage that has not produced an orig-
inal idea in fifty years. Like many other institutions, it
represents the best thought of a generation that is gone.
Its pioneer work is done. No well trained social states-
man starting with a clean slate today would rebuild it.
It exists only because it was created without terminal
facilities. Its orphan wards are not subnormal mentally
or physically, nor are they delinquent. It is not carrying
forward experimental or scientific work among them.
Therefore if this old-fashioned orphanage were developed
into a child placing agency, eventually, perhaps, to be
turned over to the tax-supported child welfare agencies
of the state, it would have some basis of reasonable rather
than emotional appeal. Mrs. Sage stated my point of view
neatly to the trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation in
1907: "The foundation . . . should . . . preferably not
undertake to do that which is now being done or is
likely to be effectively done by other individuals or by
other agencies. It should aim to take up the larger and
more difficult problems and to take them up so far as
possible in such a manner as to secure cooperation and
aid in their solution."
Her second sentence recommends leadership and team-
play rather than egotistical star performances. In illus-
trating a point there is value in a familiar story and in
accepted conclusions that have stood the test of time.
The origin and development of our public school system
meets these conditions. It shows how an enlightened
minority may invest its leadership and financial resources
intelligently to convince voters of the desirability of an
important reform. It began with the conviction that uni-
versal education was essential to democracy. Here and
there the far-visioned altruistic few organized and
financed "free schools." Existing private schools provided
textbooks, teachers and a system of education. The re-
formers traveled up and down the land to argue that
only by compulsory education could all the citizens in
our new republic understand the privileges and obliga-
tions of representative government. Today, two hundred
and thirty thousand public schools, housing twenty-five
million pupils, stand as a monument to their success.
Private endeavor has a peculiar genius for scouting
ahead and blazing the trail of social advance. But does
the obligation of volunteer giving and, in a large measure,
the usefulness of private philanthropy end when the
original pioneering work is done?
For our answer let us go back to another letter in the
appeals that started this whole train of thought. It is from
a small denominational college. When I visited it several
years ago I was depressed by its inadequate equipment
and the low academic standards of its faculty. Heretic
hunters and pinched salaries made the retention of cour-
ageous progressive teachers impossible. Naturally the
graduates were provincial and bigoted. That institution
exists by exploiting ancient loyalties and by pretending
to offer first class educational facilities. Its students would
do better at the nearby state university. Its letter goes in
the wastebasket.
But here is a letter from another small college doing
something that it would be difficult, if not impossible,
for a comfortably established tax-supported institution to
attempt. Its trustees and faculty are on fire with a new
idea. They believe that students will learn and retain
more by dividing the thirty-six weeks of the school year
into four equal parts and then concentrating on one
subject during each quarter, rather than carrying four
subjects simultaneously throughout the year. Experi-
ence seems to indicate that this type of study is more
adapted to some subjects than to others — but the point
of my story is that pioneering work is never completed.
Both in education and in social service there are frontiers
that will never be crossed.
Throughout the history of education in this country
progressive private institutions have been developing new
ideas and testing methods. The public schools have made
good their gains, and only occasionally outdistanced them
in pioneering pedagogical inventiveness.
With a few exceptions in mind, there is good ground
for concluding that the greater the need for a radical
departure from previous experience, the greater the need
for independent initiative and privately financed creative
imagination, free from bureaucratic control. How long,
for example, do you suppose it would have taken the
government machinery of any southern state after the
Civil War to have started Negro vocational schools such
as Hampton or Tuskegee? Fortunately this method of
creating useful social institutions and agencies seems to
be peculiarly intuitive in a nation of pioneers like ours.
AN ACUTE NEED AMONG CONSCIENTIOUS LAYMEN IS A CLEAR-
cut definition of public and private responsibility. A few
facts may give us perspective and clarify our thinking.
During the early months of this depression 30 to 40 per-
cent of America's relief is said to have come from private
contributions, but by 1934 private giving was providing for
less than 5 percent of these expenditures. Volunteer giv-
ing found itself unable to cope with a nation-wide crisis.
If we widen the field to include delinquency and crime,
social security, child and family services, public relief,
sanitation, the care of the handicapped, health and mental
hygiene, leisure time and group activities and other social
SEPTEMBER 1937
479
responsibilities that America finances collectively, it be-
comes increasingly clear that volunteer giving provides
for a comparatively small part of the aggregate.
Complete figures on private and public budgets are not
available but during 1935 seven typical eastern cities
including New York, a non-chest city, spent over three
hundred and eighty-six million dollars on welfare work.
Of this sum 76.3 percent came from public funds and
23.7 percent from private pocketbooks.
The largest single factor in the financing of private
social work in the United States is the community chest.
But at the peak of its relief burden in 1932, 397 com-
munity chests raised only a little over one hundred
million dollars. And in 1936, 448 community chests raised
eighty million dollars.
It seems to me that what we need is a policy that will
relieve private philanthropy of responsibilities that ex-
ceed its cash resources and at the same time retain for
it those duties for which it has peculiar talents.
REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT, BECAUSE IT DEPENDS ON
majority support, nearly always lags behind enlightened
minorities. It therefore usually follows instead of leads
or guides popular opinion. This statement does not ig-
nore, nor is it intended to minimize the established
work of city, state and federal agencies. The individual
initiative of self-sacrificing public servants at times has
been heroic. But valuable as their research work and
discoveries are, the fact remains that their policies must
conform to political expediency. Those in power are
promptly dismissed by ballot unless they keep step with
majority opinion. In normal times, therefore, they are
compelled to move cautiously along lines of established
policy, according to precedent and tradition.
When an emergency arises, like our recent depression,
panicky public opinion demands quick results. This in-
duced our federal government not only to undertake
needed measures of relief, but also to embark on a series
of social reforms, some of which were in reality untested
experiments costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
There was little time and there were few tested govern-
ment facilities for experimenting with a variety of pos-
sible solutions on a limited scale, involving a few people
and comparatively small expense.
In a small homogeneous country like Great Britain
some progress has been made in experimenting with
new ideas and educating the public in their use without
loss of confidence in government's integrity. But there
the civil service is withdrawn from political influence.
Our American "spoils system," our spectacular pressure
groups, our insincere partisanship and our political
chicanery make the testing and developing of new ideas
and the calm appraisal of reforms proposed by politicians
very difficult.
Fortunate indeed are we to have the opportunity of
supporting going demonstrations in all fields of human
betterment, of financing agencies and foundations that
appraise public affairs, of contributing to unpopular
causes, of giving to those who care for people and things
that government cannot or should not intrude upon, even
in a beneficent way.
All who are critical of too rapid government expan-
sion into new and untried fields must, to be sincere and
consistent, beat government to the job at hand. They
must give — and sometimes they must give till it hurts
worse than taxes. But they must not begrudge a penny.
Each of us, of course, must think for himself. 1 have
evolved my own formula for giving and it includes
a word of advice to the philanthropies that, in my modest
way, I favor. Indeed, as I ponder my checkbook I am
moved to suggest three clear-cut responsibilities for pri-
vate philanthropy. First, unload. Discover constructive
ways of liquidating those relics of the past that duplicate
what others are now able and willing to do more effi-
ciently. Or to put it another way: when society has ac-
cepted the reform you advocate, find a new and worthy
task or quit. The second is to accept as your peculiar
responsibility the duties of pathfinder. This means sup-
porting promising new ventures until their value, or
lack of value, is demonstrated. Then concentrate on ef-
fectively placing your conclusions before the general
public. Informed public opinion must then do its part
or force government agencies to accept what you achieve.
The third is to act as a friendly corrective to city, state
and federal public agencies, as is done by such agencies
as the State Charities Aid Association in New York or
the Public Charities Association in Pennsylvania, thereby
guiding government expenditures and counterbalancing
the hysterical swings of extremist psychology. Such a
partnership between enlightened minorities and their
government is mutually advantageous.
To have a part in this process of democracy as a free
agent, demonstrating the value and virtue of private
initiative, is a privilege. Only the unselfish can appreciate
it, perhaps, but in my opinion it is also something for the
selfish to contemplate. Without intelligent, vigorous,
voluntary philanthropy, we should certainly be at the
mercy of politicians to a much greater extent than we
now are. And politicians seldom invite us to participate in
things — they usually demand support through the cold
blooded office of the tax collector. Therefore I read the
"gimme letters" with more than perfunctory interest and
respond, be it ever so modestly, because of a conviction
that I must do my part to keep private initiative, the
chief agent of progressive change, hard at work fulfilling
its functions within the community. I prefer institutions
that realize to the full that their place in the program of
things is to be workshops for research, the results of
which may be shared by society as a whole. Private
giving deserves this thrill of discovery and unless there
be this exploring and experimenting in all fields of social
endeavor, I do not believe that we can hope for a peace-
able adjustment of our social order to the bewildering
changes of this industrial age.
WHETHER WE ARE DIRECTORS OF PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS, CON-
tributors, or just ordinary folk unable to sit at ease in the
presence of human injustice, let us go into executive ses-
sion with ourselves, sort out and classify our philanthropic
loyalties, and then ask ourselves whether or not the
private hospitals, private schools and various organiza-
tions with which we are familiar are really doing some
form of progressive work that lifts them above the aver-
age level that tax-supported institutions must accept. If
there is nothing original about the philanthropy desiring
my support I prefer to decline with courtesy and con-
tribute to some distinctive task awaiting attention, some
enterprise yet to be explored which may enrich the life
of the nation. I favor supporting with zeal the pioneer
whose face is to the dawn of a better day.
4SO
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A
Storm Over India
Wide World
by ERNEST O. HAUSER
As the new constitution goes on trial, Jawaharlal Nehru, man of action, takes
the place of the passive Gandhi in leading India's restive masses. A thumb-
nail portrait by a Far Eastern reporter.
INDIA is IN THE SPOTLIGHT AGAIN. THIS HAS BEEN FRE-
quently the case since the end of the Great War. At almost
regular intervals, India has come back to the headlines,
and those headlines have meant serious trouble for Britain.
The present news, however, is cheerfully received in Lon-
don: the political deadlock which had crippled the work
of the India administration for three months has finally
been overcome. Congress, the powerful Nationalist party,
has revised its attitude of refusing political responsibility
under the new Constitution and is ready to cooperate with
the British authorities. Yet behind this pleasant facade of
a gentleman's agreement there remains a very uncom-
fortable situation, the potentiality of a crisis far more grave
than any of the previous conflicts which were overcome,
this way or the other, by the skill of British diplomacy.
For Britain has to reckon with a rapidly shifting scene in
India. A new element has come on the stage; a new man
has arisen; and the psychological background has changed;
It is no longer that "seditious saint," Mahatma Gandhi,
who is on the other end of the rope. Gandhi has practi-
cally left the arena. He has renounced his office as presi-
SEPTEMBER 1937
dent of the All-India National Congress, and he has pub-
licly barred the title of Mahatma, the Great-Souled, which
"stunk in his nostrils." Mr. Mohandas K. Gandhi is not
expected to be the man to lead the Indian masses if the
present armistice should break into revolt again. He does
not cause the India Office any sleepless nights.
Perhaps he never did. Satyagraha, his almost religious
dogma of passive resistance to British rule, was a rather
convenient platform after all. Occasional outbursts could
easily be adjusted when the Mahatma himself solemnly
condemned them. Three hundred and fifty million Indian
people were easy to handle as long as they rallied behind
the Saint. Once, when the Mahatma himself had adopted
a policy which increased the potentiality of violence, Lord
Irwin, the viceroy, concluded a holy pact with him. The
pact ended a twelve months' campaign of civil disobedi-
ence. That was in March 1931, a date which marks the
beginning of Gandhi's dwindling popularity. A wave of
violence swept the country. Terrorist groups, including
the famous Red Shirts, sprang up. British officials were
threatened and assassinated. Hordes of young people
481
X
Pictures. Inc
Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's choice as the new leader in India
paraded the streets in Delhi, shouting, "Down with
Gandhi." Vernacular newspapers bitterly attacked the
Mahatma for having "sacrificed starving peasants, their
wives and children at the threshold of peace." The radical
youth, imbued with anarchistic and communistic ideals,
dropped him as leader because he had shown himself
opposed to the establishment of a "purely labor govern-
ment."
The idea of class struggle has been an element entirely
foreign to the Mahatma's political ideology. In fact his
propaganda for national independence was meant to find
response among the upper classes first of all. These classes
who had monopolized, through two milleniums of tra-
dition, the potentialities of wealth and intelligence, were
the most likely to understand and to embrace his doctrine.
Gandhi carried the upper classes, the industrial and the
bourgeois castes alike. To them he was the political leader
as he was the Saint to the masses. Gandhi never thought
in terms of capital and labor. He would never have
thought of consciously antagonizing the big landlords,
the princes or the Brahmins. He did not overlook, of
course, what was fundamentally wrong with their su-
premacy. Yet he believed, and he sincerely believed, that
"better relations between landlords and tenants could be
brought about by a change of heart on both sides." And
he pursued "a policy of non-interference" in the internal
administration of the native states, thus preserving a fa-
vorable attitude on the part of the maharajahs.
Here Gandhi became a political paradox. He condoned
the existing social order with all its monstrous inequali-
ties, its semi-feudal exploitation and its medieval rural
conditions. On the other hand, he was striving to better
the lot of starving peasants and downtrodden outcasts.
Especially the third category of underprivileged humans,
the growing urban and industrial proletariat, disapproved
of his policy of moderation. It was the time when Moscow,
under the influence of "Trotskyist" world-revolutionaries,
sought to establish an "Indian Federal Worker's and Peas-
ant's Soviet Republic." Red propaganda had found its way
into India. More or less hazy ideas about class struggle
coupled with a genuine dissatisfaction on the part of un-
derpaid industrial workers pressed for action. Gandhi was
unable to satisfy this demand. It would have been neces-
sary to antagonize the very stratum which carried his
nationalist ideas.
But even in the ranks of his most ardent political fol-
lowers there was a growing murmur of dissatisfaction.
Modest and futile as his Untouchable campaign had been,
it was sufficient to arouse suspicions in the Right Wing, in
the camp of the most conservative, high caste Hindu Na-
tionalists. These elements in Congress added their ortho-
dox pressure to the very unorthodox pressure coming from
outside the party. In October 1934, Gandhi gave up his
presidential chair. "God knows that I shall speak from
this platform again."
THE NEW MAN WHO TOOK THE VACANT PLACE OF LEADER WAS
a choice of the withdrawing Mahatma himself. Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru is young and brilliant. He is ardent
and active; his adamant features strangely contrast with
the superhumanly mild appearance of Gandhi. Nehru
does not walk barefooted through the gleaming dust of
villages and mountain roads. He rides a fiery white horse,
and he likes flowers. There is no patience, no Satyagraha,
in his words and gestures. His speech is ignition: "Our
members must fight and not spin."
Jawaharlal is the son of a Brahmin millionaire. He was
educated in England. He joined the Mahatma's move-
ment at an early age, became one of his most devoted
followers, went to prison, distinguished himself in the
ranks of the Nationalist party. Nehru is a Nationalist, too,
like Gandhi. But unlike Gandhi, he does not adhere to
the doctrine of a purely spiritual weapon, even if it might
be "the greatest of weapons at the disposal of mankind."
And, unlike Gandhi, Nehru does not believe in the elim-
ination of social injustice through a "change of heart."
Nehru has been to Russia. He has also been to England
and he has been studying the effects of British rule com-
bined with age-old privileges of landlords, Brahmins and
princes on India. He emerged as a socialist.
"The only solution for India's problems lies in socialism,
involving vast revolutionary changes in the political and
social structure and ending the vested interests in land
and industry as well as the feudal autocratic Indian states
system which has long outlived its day." Evidently Con-
gress President Nehru, so addressing the Mahatma's or-
ganization from the Mahatma's chair, has the affection of
all the young and radical groups outside the party. The
cleavage between Nationalists and nation seems smoothed
out. There is now no need for terrorism and patent radi-
calism, since the new national leader, the legitimate suc-
cessor of the Mahatma, is a radical himself. For the first
time in the history of the Swaraj movement, the masses
feel bound to the party. This is no longer a movement of
the wealthy and the educated. A dynamic force has come
into being, overpowering the static doctrine of Satyagraha.
Gandhi had first pronounced and propagated the demand
482
SURVEY GRAPHIC
for national treedom. But Jawaharlal has aroused the
three hundred and fifty million people as no one before
him. He has widened the scope, he has built up a mass
movement that sweeps the country and that does not seem
to stop at the word of skillful British diplomats.
The elections of February 1937 offered an excellent and
unprecedented opportunity for the militant pandit. In less
than a fortnight, Nehru covered 5000 miles in a whirlwind
campaign. He stepped down from his presidential chair
and flashed through the country. Travelling by airplane,
elephant, camel, car and boat, he carried his message to
the remotest village. Thirty-three million people, in the
most spectacular of all elections, went to the polls. And
Congress came out with an absolute majority in six key
provinces: Bombay, Madras, Behar, Orissa, U.P. (United
Provinces) and C.P. (Central Provinces). In the five re-
maining provinces, where legal devices prevented the
Nationalists from obtaining the absolute majority, they
were returned as the largest single party.
It is true that Nehru did not fight this campaign under
merely socialist slogans. The rural electorate which is chief-
ly composed of political raw material would not have un-
derstood too much of them, anyhow. Moreover he still
needed the Congress leaders, intimates of the ex-Mahatma
and all but one of them millionaires. So the fight for so-
cialism was postponed. The elections were carried under
the slogan of political independence and, more specifically,
fight against the new constitution, "this new charter of
bondage which has been imposed upon us despite our
utter rejection of it."
THE NEW CONSTITUTION WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE DIPLO-
matic masterpiece of Sir Samuel Hoare, came into force at
midnight on March 31 of this year. To be more exact, only
half of it came into force. India's new experiment as a
self-governing federation is to be tested first in the eleven
provinces which are under direct British rule. A little later,
India's "Saint" might still perform a miracle for the new constitution
when "British" India has sufficiently appreciated the "new
ideals of partnership and cooperation" which are to re-
place, in the words of Governor General Linlithgow, the
old ideas of imperialism, the rest of India will join the
new scheme.
THE CONSTITUTION IS ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT ACHIEVE-
ments of British statesmanship in this century. Britain,
worried over the loss of the Mahatma as a pacifying force,
and alarmed over the dynamic psychology behind Nehru's
advance, was thinking of some new combination. Some-
one simply had to be found to run India for Britain. For
it seems rather hard to depend alone on 70,000 British
soldiers and officials -to run a colony of three hundred and
fifty million people. Particularly if these three hundred
and fifty million stop rallying behind a man who spins
and .start rallying behind a man who rides a horse and
talks, of the sword. "It is an interesting and instructive
result of British rule in India," said Jawaharlal in a recent
address in Congress, "that when, as we are told, it is try-
ing to fade off, it should gather to itself all the reaction-
ary and obscurantist groups in India, and endeavor to
hand partial control to the feudal elements." To a certain
degree, this holds true. The new stratum which has been
selected to "run India" consists of two groups which might
well be called reactionary. They are the princes and the
bourgeois.
There are 600 autonomous native principalities in India
today. Their rulers are rajahs or maharajahs who govern
their countries under the most extreme type of autocracy.
There has been no change about these states, which took
shape in the early part of the nineteenth century when
British rule was not yet stabilized. Individual treaties
were concluded between the British and the native rul-
ers, treaties that have stood unshaken in the rapidly chang-
ing scene of social and economic conditions. The rulers
who once for all had received their fixed place in the
imperial organism, were given free
hand inside their boundaries, with a
British adviser in their palace as the
only limit to their powers. It has been
up to the rajahs themselves to make use
of those powers. Some of them, to be
sure, have used them in- the most en-
lightened and progressive way. Their
subjects, who have benefited from the
facilities of a modern scheme of edu-
cation,, public health -and welfare, have
prospered more than their compatriots
who are under the direct administration
of the .India Office. But even those en-
lightened rajahs did all this *on their
own, acting on their autocratic initia-
tive under the motto I'Etat c'est mot
andvimder no mandate from their peo-
ple. This state of affairs has been long
a target .of leftist criticism within and
without Congress. Nehru, who assumed
Congress leadership as a mouthpiece of
the Left Wing, quickly threw the whole
strength of his attack against the prince-
ly autocrats. He pilloried them as "the
most backward elements in the coun-
try-" ^e Demanded that their subjects
should enjoy by law the same personal,
SEPTEMBER 1937
483
civil and democratic liberties as those of the rest of India.
And he succeeded in stirring up discontent and criticism
inside the native states as well as in "British" India.
THE RAJAHS DID NOT OVERLOOK THE DANGEROUS GROWTH OF
this rebellious trend. "May I in all modesty say," stated the
maharajah of Patiala, chancellor of the Chamber of
Princes, "that the princes have no intention of allowing
themselves to be destroyed by anybody, and that should
the time unfortunately come when the Crown is unable
to offer the Indian States the necessary protection, the
princes and states will die fighting to the bitter end."
Britain understood and took advantage of this unique
opportunity. The new constitution allots, out of the 635
seats in the two chambers of the federal legislature, 229
seats to the Indian princes. There they are going to sit
and vote on an equal level with their elected colleagues
from "British" India. They carry no mandate from and
no obligation to anyone. And they command, voting
as a body, more than one third of the legislature — their
peoples numbering 81 million or less than one fourth of
India's population. "To live not only under British im-
perialist exploitation but also under Indian feudal control
is something we will not tolerate," says Nehru.
Next to the maharajahs who feel a new impetus (and
some of them are said to be even building up efficient
armies), there are the big landlords and the bourgeois.
In listening to the radical tune of the young president,
growing discomfort has fallen upon these elements, who
represent the bulk of those attending the annual meet-
ings of the Congress Party — for th«y can pay railroad
fare to get there. These gentlemen of high caste and of
high social and financial standing had been inclined at
the beginning to concede the utmost to their newly elected
leader. He was the choice of the withdrawing Mahatma.
He was a Nationalist, like themselves, and he was a Brah-
min, a pandit, a millionaire. Jjiwaharlal Nehru's father
was the aristocratic, noble and beloved Pandit Motilal
Nehru, their friend who died in prison. With rising
amazement they passed resolutions which encouraged
peasants and workers to form trade unions. With sur-
prise they learned that the only remedy for India's ills
was "the socialist structure of society." Yet they followed
Jawaharlal through the elections, although a break was
avoided only, it seems, by postponing the socialist slogan.
Britain has taken advantage of this growing difference
too. Under the new regulations landlords and other
bourgeois elements are voting as groups. They enter the
legislative bodies as groups and they are able to act with-
in these bodies as groups. This device bestows more
power upon them than they could claim by their propor-
tional strength. The conservative members of the party
were expected to cooperate with the British authorities in
making the new constitution work. They were to take
office as ministers in the provincial governments which
exercise their "autonomous" power — with a British official
standing by, ready to intervene and to veto their laws as
soon as things get out of hand. However, even those
moderate members, who were willing to accept office and
to do their best in introducing the new "ideals of partner-
ship and cooperation," had to follow the discipline of the
party. And the party leader, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,
was not ready to cooperate. The British governors in all
those provinces where Congress had reached the absolute
majority were asked to yield their prerogatives before-
4S4
hand. Congress candidates were willing to be ministers,
to vote and to pass laws — if the British promised in ad-
vance not to veto them. This request was refused, of
course, on the part of the governors. Consequently Con-
gress members did not accept office and the provinces had
to be governed by crippled minority governments.
There had been no other shock like this in the India
Office for a long time. If non-cooperation was to be the
final word of the Nationalists who had just given proof
of their overwhelming following all over India, the fiasco
of the experiment was evident. And at the present mo-
ment, with the political situation tense in Europe, tense
in the Mediterranean and tense in the Far East, Britain
could hardly afford a general fiasco in India with all its
implications of civil disobedience, repression and riots.
The British Under-Secretary of State for India has tried to
build a bridge by saying, "It is certainly not the inten-
tion that governors, by narrow or legalistic interpretation
of their own responsibilities, should trench upon the wide
powers which it was the purpose of Parliament to place
in the hands of ministries and which it is our desire that
they should use in furtherance of the programs which
they have advocated." Even this statement, however, was
not enough to allay the feelings of Congress. Something
unexpected changed the almost hopeless situation.
The minority ministries, which have been in office since
April 1 and which were expected to follow a rather dull
and reactionary course, have introduced a type of drastic
social legislation that even radical Congress ministers
hardly would have dared to propose. And the provincial
governors, in order to save face, have kept their mouths
shut. This effective cooperation apparently was taking the
wind out of the Congress's sails. Congress leaders at last
saw that it was safer to trust the Marquess of Zetland's
declaration that the governors were to be "partners," not
"watchdogs" of the ministers. Hence the resolution that
"office is to be accepted and utilized."
THE STOP-GAP CABINETS WHICH HAVE DONE THEIR DUTY
are now being replaced by Congress governments. The
provincial assemblies will get together, and the constitu-
tion will get a fair trial. Is Congress willing to make the
constitution work? Its committee has announced that the
fight against the constitution will go on— "in every pos-
sible way." This announcement clearly reveals the back-
ground of the sudden change of attitude. A tactical move
has been carried out, for India's Nationalists under the
leadership of Nehru, want to fight inside the walls.
Meanwhile, with the present situation indicating an
armistice for an unknown period, eyes are turning once
more to the personality of the ex-Mahatma who stands in
the background. If he is no more the political leader,
he still is the Saint. He might be able to perform a
miracle, to make the constitution work and to prevent
Congress from reverting to open resistance should the
occasion arise. Whether Gandhi is ready to step back into
politics again, no one can tell. Since his retirement in
1934, he has made only one political speech. That was at
the Congress meeting in Faizpur in December 1936 and
the aged Saint, mildly looking through his spectacles
upon 10,000 cheering Nationalists, said, "I am prepared to
go back to jail again — and I am prepared to be hanged.
I feel that Jawaharlal Nehru would be equally prepared
to be hanged." This is the highest tribute which possibly
can be paid by one leader to the other in India.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
IV— At the Soil Conservation Service
by HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM
ON RARE OCCASIONS, ONE ENCOUNTERS A CAREER THAT LEADS
as straight to its goal as a midwestern highway that stretches
without deviation farther than the eye can see. Such a career
is that of Dr. Hugh H. Bennett, chief of the Soil Conserva-
tion Service.
His whole government service, extending back a third of
a century, led inevitably to the campaign to save the nation's
most basic and irreplaceable resource — its soil. Through his
efforts a -special government bureau was established, millions
were spent to guide the first tottering steps in a campaign
against soil erosion and Americans generally were aroused
to the danger of squandering the country's natural soil re-
sources.
Bennett himself sums it all up in a sentence, "Soil and
water conservation has been my life's work."
Even as a youngster of nine on a North Carolina farm,
he helped his father lay out a terrace to stop a gully which
was eating into the rich farm land. The boy asked why they
were doing all this work. The man replied, "To keep the land
from washing away." It was Bennett's first lesson in soil con-
servation.
Like other Americans, he had the pioneer viewpoint of
land as inexhaustible. It was the mood of the time. Bennett
recalls that when he was sixteen and stayed out of school one
year to earn money to go to college he whacked away at a
stand of native hickory, oak, pine and dogwood to clear a
twenty-acre plot for a neighbor. He helped to plant this
newly bared topsoil in cotton. Forty years later, Bennett re-
visited the site. Relentless plantings of cotton had done their
worst. The topsoil was gone. In many places, erosion had
eaten down to the bare rock. The rest of the field was deeply
gullied and unfit for agricultural use.
"Nobody had told us it was wrong to use land that way,"
Bennett said. "Now most of it is abandoned, growing up in
piney scrub; gashed, ugly, all but worthless for generations
to come."
Upon graduation from the University of North Carolina
with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, Bennett took a civil
service examination and qualified to make surveys for the
Bureau of Soils. One of his first assignments was in Louisa
County, Virginia. While there, the young soil surveyor was
asked by his chief in Washington to investigate why hillside
soils in certain regions were so much less productive than
bottom lands of the same soil type. The reason was simple.
Every time it rained the good, rich topsoil was sluicing
down the hillside slopes, leaving an impoverished field.
Bennett reasoned that what was happening to the hillsides
of Louisa County must be happening all over the country. In-
vestigation proved he was right. Bennett set out to tell the
world about the menace of erosion. He has never let up on
his self-imposed assignment. Year in and year out as he
worked up the ladder of government promotions because of
his excellence in mapping soils, Bennett maintained his mis-
sionary zeal, trying to interest others.
Although Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot had
pointed out the evils of erosion a generation ago when they
battled to preserve the nation's forests from exploitation, a
comprehensive program of soil conservation was not estab-
lished until Franklin Roosevelt came into office.
But the spade work for this program under the New Deal
had been prepared a decade ago. Congress established seven
stations, later adding three more projects but only after
Bennett had converted a number of congressmen to the cru-
sade against erosion. James P. Buchanan of Texas, an influen-
tial Democratic member of the Appropriations Committee
and a farm owner himself, had been impressed with the data
presented by Bennett and sponsored the legislation.
With information prepared from tests at these stations, it
was possible for the New Deal to set up an emergency con-
servation agency with relief funds. When the President
looked for the man best qualified to direct the new work,
Bennett was recommended.
In 1935, as dust storms were whirling topsoil from the
prairies eastward over the Atlantic seaboard, Congress estab-
lished the Soil Conservation Service as a permanent division
of the Department of Agriculture. Bennett, as its head, con-
tinued his tireless efforts to arouse the nation to its obliga-
tions of soil conservation. He talked before agricultural
gatherings and city forums. He established an organization
with demonstration areas dotting the nation so that farmers
could see for themselves what soil conservation could do.
BENNETT BELIEVES THAT AMERICA'S RECORD OF HEEDLESS LAND
abuse and needless exploitation is unsurpassed in all history.
In two centuries, he says, approximately 75 million acres of
once fertile land have been made generally unfit for practical
cultivation while the menace of erosion overhangs three out
of every four acres of our crop lands. Salvation lies in proper
methods of terracing, strip farming, crop rotation and grass
growing.
"The conservation of productive soil and the protection of
our farming lands from depletion and destruction by rain
and wind has become one of the most important national
problems of the day," Bennett believes.
"Upon its solution depends the ability of the land to sup-
port that great segment of our population which takes its
living from the land, and the continuing ability of this nation
to produce from its own soil the necessities of existence.
That ability to support and produce, plentifully and in
variety, made America great; it must be sustained if America
is to stay great. And it can be sustained only if the fountain
of production — the soil — is guarded and preserved.
"The problem is by no means solely agricultural. It affects
the urbanite as surely as it affects the farmer. Its solution is
of as much importance to the industrialist as to the agricul-
turalist. It is of vital concern to all America, because all
America must have food and clothing taken from the soil.
"But soil conservation involves far more than the mere
physical control of soil erosion. Inevitably interwoven with it
are social and economic implications of vast importance. The
deterioration of the land means the decline of social struc-
tures, forced migration, abandonment of farm lands, and the
undermining of community life. Taxes cannot be paid from
impoverished fields. The burden must shift to those who can
pay. Nor can industry easily sustain the continuing loss of
farm markets, one after another as the land dies. The entire
financial and industrial structure of the country is inextricably
involved in the need for maintaining the productive capacity
of our crop lands."
Yet gigantic as the problem is, Bennett believes that the
general good sense and the hard-headed business acumen of
Americans will not permit them to be licked by erosion —
and their own folly. The very fact that this generation has
taken stock and realized the need for conserving our land
resources is a long stride toward the problem's solution. A
new land era is here. Conservation replaces exploitation.
SEPTEMBER 1937
485
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
A Woman Without a Country
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
WILLIAM PENN, FOUNDER OH PENNSYLVANIA, COMING
today to these shores, would not be admitted to American
citizenship. Neither would George Fox, the saintly John
Woolman, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lucretia Mott . . .
or, for that matter, Herbert Hoover. Or any other of the
distinguished line of members of the Society of Friends —
popularly known as Quakers. It is cardinal among the
principles of that religious body, which takes quite seri-
ously the teachings of Jesus, to oppose war in any form
or upon any pretext, and to abjure personal resort to
violence against any other human. But the Supreme Court
of the United States has declared that personal conviction
against the bearing of arms and refusal to promise per-
sonal participation in war ipso facto evidences unfitness
for citizenship under the American flag. That decision
applied in more than one instance and is for the moment
at least the law of the land; but it was given first, most
downright and conspicuous, in the then famous but now
forgotten case of Rosika Schwimmer. She is not a Quaker,
but all her life has been an uncompromising opponent of
war in all its aspects and manifestations, a forthright and
untiring fighter for reasonable peace and good will among
men and nations.
She was, to be sure, at the time of this decision, a
woman past fifty years of age, and neither in this country
nor in any other of the civilized world were women re-
quired or supposed to participate personally in battle;
nevertheless in the Chicago naturalization court before
which came her final petition for admission to citizen-
ship she was rejected for the sole reason that she refused
on grounds of conscience to promise that in the event of
war she would personally take up arms! Don't laugh — it's
true; that is precisely what happened. And upon appeal
six justices of the Supreme Court of the United States,
on May 27, 1929, upheld that rejection.
Often I have wondered how Jesus of Nazareth would
fare before any typical naturalization court in this coun-
try— or nowadays before any court in any country. Never
mind about today's Germany, where as a Jew he would
have shrift even shorter than before the Roman court
of Pontius Pilate. During the World War it was my lot
as managing editor of a newspaper to decide upon and
suggest subjects for cartoons. In those days, as always dur-
ing wars, the Almighty Himself was beset night and day
by mutually contradictory prayers for victory — being in
each country appropriated as the tribal deity and assumed
as a matter of course to be enlisted upon "our side."
After the publication of an uncommonly truculent sermon
in this vein, in which the preacher averred that Jesus
himself would be found fighting for the Allies, I was
under sore temptation to illustrate it by a cartoon show-
ing the Author of the Beatitudes operating a machine-gun
or leading a bayonet charge. ... In the end I agreed
with my editorial colleagues that it would be too strong
medicine — especially for the preacher of that particular
486
sermon — so difficult is it for any of us to endure the
logic of our professed beliefs. But now in this other con-
nection I insist upon imagining that other Preacher, of
the Sermon on the Mount, facing some Dogberry in a
naturalization court, his admission to any national citizen-
ship depending upon his promise to spit death among his
fellow-men . . . yes, if you please, to participate personally
in the bombing of great cities teeming with hapless
women and children. Before such a court, and — again
rejected, as of old.
BRAVE OLD OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, IN THE DISSENTING
minority opinion in the Schwimmer case which will ring
in the hearts of real Americans long after that of the
majority has blown away into oblivion, put his finger
precisely upon that spot:
"I would suggest that the Quakers have done their
share to make the country what it is; that many citizens
agree with the applicant's belief, and that I had not sup-
posed hitherto that we regretted our inability to expel
them because they believe more than some of us do in the
teaching of the Sermon on the Mount."
He pointed to the even more fundamental and far-
reaching issue; that involving a double standard for
citizenship:
"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more
imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the
principle of free thought. ... I think that we should
adhere to that principle with regard to admission into as
well as life within the country."
Of course Justice Brandeis concurred in this opinion.
So did the late Justice Sanford, who died the following
year. The six of the majority were Chief Justice Taft and
(again of course) Associate Justices Butler (who read the
prevailing opinion), Van Devanter, Sutherland and
McReynolds. Also Stone, despite that concurrence reck-
oned among the so-called "liberal group" in the Court.
Mr. Hughes Was not then in the Supreme Court, being
at the time a member of the World Court at The Hague.
Neither was Cardozo, nor Roberts — all three now counted
as "liberals." One may wonder what would happen now
— whether in due course the Court may reverse itself.
Anyhow, inspired by Justice Holmes's utterance, the
late Congressman Griffin of New York introduced a bill
"to reconcile naturalization procedure with the Bill of
Rights." Upon his death in 1935 its sponsorship was
taken over by Caroline O'Day, representative-at-large,
and over it the battle with the militarists and professional
patrioteers goes on; for it was they who engineered the
obstruction to Rosika Schwimmer's application; they who
then and subsequently assailed her reputation with
epithets and calumny, continuing to this day. Yet Justice
Holmes, supporting the opinion of all who know her,
that she is of humanity's finest, voiced the impression that
"the applicant seems to be a woman of superior character
and intelligence, obviously more than ordinarily desirable
as a citizen of the United States." Adding that "it is
agreed that she is qualified for citizenship, except. . . .
The exception being that she would not promise per-
sonally to bear arms!
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Well, let be as they may the academic questions —
if you can regard them as academic — the decision left
Rosika Schwimmer a woman without a country. In filing
her "first papers" she had perforce renounced her native
allegiance to Hungary where she was born; our own
"sweet land of liberty" which she desired to make her
own would have none of her; to this moment allowing
her only the precarious legal status of a "tolerated alien."
She is thus one of the increasingly vast army of the in-
voluntarily "stateless" — men, women and children born
somewhere but by man-made technicalities and intoler-
ance denied any citizenship whatever. Her own shock-
ing experience has added poignancy to her advocacy for
years of an internationally recognized "world citizenship."
There is perhaps something tragically appropriate about
it, for all her life, as Thomas Paine said of himself, the
world has been her country, and to do good her religion.
By taste and skill an accomplished musician, scholar and
journalist, she has devoted herself, under a pledge self-
imposed in girlhood, to the solution of the problems of
humanity, and in her time those problems have headed
up in the major problem of peace among the nations.
It is no derogation of her special colleagues, Jane Addams,
Emily Greene Balch, of the United States, Chrystal
MacMillan of Great Britain and Alletta Jacobs of Hol-
land, to say that Rosika Schwimmer was par excellence
the driving force in the efforts growing out of the Inter-
national Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, to
convoke a continuous conference of mediation on the
part of the neutral nations. It was in aid of this effort
that Henry Ford's "Peace Ship" sailed on its errand, so
much ridiculed then by the unthinking and uninformed,
but bearing a somewhat different aspect now. In nearly
every belligerent country the statesmen hoped for neutral
mediation; the neutrals were willing and ready; but it
would be futile without the United States, and President
Wilson withheld support. Had that support been given —
how different might the world be now!
Space lacks even to summarize the unflagging service
of this woman in the cause of peace. In vain one searches
the list of those who have labored in that behalf for man
or woman better entitled to the reward of the peace-
maker; so tragically sacrificed at last by rejection at the
hands of the country making loudest professions of devo-
tion to the cause to which she has devoted her life.
Driven into retirement and involuntary silence, and with
health impaired by her harrowing experiences, she has
concentrated upon the making of a closely documented
history pf the democratic peace attempts in which she
has been a central figure — this in compliance with an ap-
peal voiced upon her fiftieth birthday ten years ago.
•
LONG AGO SHE SHOULD HAVE HAD RECOGNITION BY THE
Nobel Peace award. Jane Addams, herself recipient of it,
avowed in 1915 that Rosika Schwimmer was the first to con-
vince her that the pacifists might do something toward
stopping the World War. It was she who induced Miss
Addams to preside over that international conference of
women. But there have been intimations that her uncom-
promising pacifism would be an obstacle — anyway no
Nobel prize has been forthcoming. So now there is afoot
an international movement to make an unofficial award,
commensurate in amount with that prize such as has
been given to others not more deserving to say the least.
The initial invitation to participate in the sponsorship,
issued last February, was signed by Carrie Chapman Catt
and Lola Maverick Lloyd, Albert Einstein, Selma Lager-
lof, Eugenie Miskolczy Meller and Romain Rolland.
The plan was to make the presentation on her sixtieth
birthday, now at hand on the eleventh of September;
but the time since the inception of the plan has been
too short. Already a substantial part of the projected sum
has been given or pledged; but the actual collection of it
is retarded by the severe restrictions upon export of
funds. Also there is the obvious fact that labor for peace,
democracy and the constructive federation of humanity for
the purposes worthy of its powers is nowhere in the
world a "gainful occupation." In several countries it is
just now a punishable if not a capital offense. Many of
those who in more favorable times would have helped to
bring this enterprise to swift and generous conclusion can
only express now grief that they are impoverished. Never-
theless it goes on,' retarded by these conditions but un-
discouraged; backed by an international committee of
over two hundred and of impressive personnel, representa-
tive of American liberalism, of course, and that in every
country in Europe — including notable exiles from Ger-
many, Italy, Hungary, Russia and even Ethiopia. By no
means all committed to ultra-pacifism. There is still time
for those ashamed of this great woman's martyrdom
under the present interpretation of our laws to join in this
offering of penitent dissent. Contributions in any amount
may be sent to the treasurer of the international com-
mittee, Mrs. Victor Olsa, 178 East 93 Street; general in-
formation may be sought from the secretary, Miss Elaine
G. Sanders, 2 West 89 Street, New York City.
IN A SPEECH THE OTHER DAY BEFORE A GREAT PEACE MEET-
ing in London, presided over by Viscount Cecil of Chel-
wood, Dr. Alice Masaryk, daughter of the Grand Old
Man of Czechoslovakia, herself a tireless worker for in-
ternational good will, made a striking appeal for peace
as indispensable opportunity for the world to make sane
use of its increasing command of the secrets and resources
of nature. Reading her ringing words I find myself
thinking of the god Poseidon's mourning over ravished
Troy, as versed in Gilbert Murray's noble translation of
Euripides' The Trojan Women:
How are ye blind,
Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast
Temples to desolation, and lay waste
Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie
The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.
As Francis Hovey Stoddard says in his introduction to
that translation, to be of the action of this play imagina-
tion need not travel back three thousand years but simply
leap a thousand leagues of ocean. For there is nothing new
about war except the increased horror of its techniques,
due to what we are pleased to call "progress." As ever,
women are the chief sufferers. Euripides' heart-racking
tragedy starkly dramatizes that fact. Yet, as John Ruskin
told them seventy years ago, war exists "only by your per-
mission." It is fitting that the protest, and the common
sense, of women should be inspired and led by such as
Rosika Schwimmer and Alice Masaryk.
Rosika Schwimmer, lifelong fighter for a saner world,
is with characteristic modesty vastly embarrassed by this
effort to honor her. She believes fervently in recognizing
constructive heroism, but she cannot see herself as be-
longing in the .category 'of heroes. They never do.
SEPTEMBER 1937
487
Modley Pictorializes the U. S.
Photograph by Helen Post
GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE
1830
I860
1910
1922
1936
Eoch jtup representi I million grow font employed in foreign (rod*
THE CHANGING CLASS COMPOSITION
WAGE WORKERS
ENTERPRISERS
FARMERS I AND LARGE
OWNERS
1870
1935
FAR- ENTERPRISERS
MERS AND LARGE
| OWNERS
man represents 1,300,000 gainfully occupied men
Rudolf Modley seems to be taking the whole United
States in his stride statistically speaking. His pic-
torial charts, diagrams and maps are beginning to
bob up everywhere, in magazines, booklets, books,
exhibits, government reports. Always darting back
and forth between New York and Washington or
some other city is this bronzed hatless young man
with twinkling eyes and a quick mind. The old
line graph and bar chart must cling to the arm of
the trained man and woman for salvation, for they
have never had much to say to the wider* audience.
Not so the pictograph, which everyone can read.
Statistics "nach der Wiener Methode," says Modley,
who worked with Otto Neurath and his associates
in Vienna for seven years in the graphic presenta-
tion of social facts, are not foreign to the United
States. In a 200-page book shortly to be published
by Harper (probably at $3) How to Use Pictorial
Statistics, Modley credits the first modern pictograph
to an American book by W. C. Brinton published
in 1914. This isolated example was unknown in
Europe where the new picture language was de-
veloped under Neurath in the early 1920's, grew to
maturity in his famous social museum in Vienna,
and spread to Soviet Russia, Holland, England and
488
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THE UNITED STATES
AND THE WORLD
IN 1935
U.S.A.
POPULATION
WHEAT PRODUCTION
STEEL PRODUCTION
COAl PRODUCTION
COTTON PRODUCTION
fc.Uft |^^UoJ^JjMbJAlfc]<»wU«J^J
iimmm
WEALTH (1929)
Oil PRODUCTION
nun
REST OF WORLD
tJ^HH^H^f «J ^t fX| I-E| |Xt flf^f^ jjt,
iilHiii
mi
Eoch lymbol '»p'«ienli 10 p«> c
The chart at the left and those on
the page opposite will appear in The
United States: a Graphic History by
Hacker, Modley and Taylor, to be
published in the fall by Modern Age
Books. Interesting in themselves for
the facts they show, they appear «»
examples of different kinds of chart
making in Modley's text on pictorial
statistics. Of the simple marine chart
he says that it is like a newspaper
headline but is in terms more com-
prehensible than a tabloid vocabulary.
The changing classes chart indicatei
at the same time changes in total and
percentage figures. The U. S. and
the world chart shows how an axial
arrangement may be used to give dif-
ferences while preserving totals on one
line. The plantation diagram below
was prepared for Farmers Without
Land, Public Affairs Committee, 1937,
and is an example of the use of the
method in a non-statistical field.
this country. Here it has become a naturalized
citizen with an ever-increasing family. It has modi-
fied its appearance somewhat in the effort to adjust
to American habits. It has been widely used — not
always with understanding. Modley's lucid little
book will show laymen, statisticians and artists who
reach out for this new kind of chart what are its
advantages, its limitations, its abuses. He sees a wide
future for pictographs in fact films, popular ex-
hibits, social museums and schools. This year
Modley and Survey Graphic have been experiment-
ing in using either a pictorial chart or a diagram
relating to some outstanding feature of the maga-
zine's contents as a cover design. The pictorial
diagram is a new development and is not concerned
with statistics; it simplifies and dramatizes facts —
the activities of an organization, the processes of
soil erosion — but must be accurate and informative.
The pictograph is still young enough to experiment.
It was only five years ago that the first reproduction
of Neurath's charts appeared in print in this coun-
try— in the March Survey Graphic of 1932. And
Modley's own organization, Pictorial Statistics, Inc.,
as yet the only group here to do pictorial work in all
fields, is just three years old.
AVERAGE COTTON PLANTATION (1934)
HI. ,iiiii. .iiih.
.iiih, .iihi. .iihi. .HI
in, ..MI,, .iiih. .iiih. A
ill T
SEPTEMBER 1937
489
LIFE AND LETTERS
The Sovereignty of Principle
by LEON WHIPPLE
INTEGRITY. THE LIFE OF GEOKCE W. XORRIS, by Richard L. Neuberger
and Stephen B. Kahn. Vanguard. 400 pp. Price $3.
THEY BROKE THE PRAIRTE, by Earnest Elmo Calkins. Scribner.
451 pp. Price $2.50.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
THE VIRTUE OF A GREAT MAN IS NOT ALONE IN HIS ACTS BUT
in the lesson he teaches of the sovereign power of a principle
in life. Senator George Norris of Nebraska is a great man.
In this solid and simple history of his public career the
authors have rightly chosen as the core of their interpretation
the great principle of his spirit. That is his faith in the
people and his desire to serve them and to help them serve
themselves with the tools of democracy. The title, Integrity,
is right for he is an integer, a unity, established on a law
of character that has worked as universally as a law of Na-
ture. He has not been molded from without and so has been
independent of party, of public clamor, of established views,
and even of personal ambition. Integrity he has, and thus
the other elements of greatness defined by President Roose-
velt in a tribute to him: unselfishness because that is riis
principle; consistency because all he has done flows from this
single ideal; courage because he has to obey his inner light
and therein has found strength to endure calumny and lone-
liness.
So rare is this gift of integrity that George Norris has be-
come a symbol as did Jane Addams. Our troubled age can
be proud because it bore two such citizens of the Republic
from whose beneficence human life borrowed dignity and
hope. They expressed, too, the same principle — love for and
faith in the plain people — or what the Christian religion
means by the lovely word, Charity. Rich then as this plain
story is in its record of the acts and words by which a
progressive statesman bettered life for the people and im-
proved their instrument of self-government and gave them a
vision of how the free gift of Nature in water power may
lighten labor and bring refreshment, its higher value will
be that the story may restore our faith in the power of a
principle enduring through a life span.
Because Senator Norris has a rule of life he has seemed
gifted with clairvoyance. He could anticipate the power age,
then live to have a great dam of the TVA given his name.
He could anticipate the evil consequences of war in 1917
because he wanted to spare the people from its sufferings and
aftermath, and live to enjoy that rarest reward of greatness,
vindication in his own time. So he has been called "one of
the major prophets of America." This was no miracle of fore-
sight but of insight. The principle that was true in 1917 is
true in 1937. He stood fast on the idea that war is hateful
and that money is one of its roots and that the people have
forever paid the price of war — and the times caught up with
him. How simple it is to live by principle — and how hard!
You can find what it cost in the moving chapters that
recite how he and the little band of wilful men in Congress
fought against militarism, against the fateful entangling
steps, and finally voted against the declaration of war. If
you have forgotten what it means to oppose a President and
a nation on the verge of war, read of Norris's proposal of
a recall election in Nebraska to give the people the right
to 'decide whether he represented them, with its closing
words: "I. much prefer to be a private citizen, rather than
to be a rubber stamp even for the President of the United
States." In spite of real risks he went home to tell his people
the truth, and his faith was justified for later they again
elected him to the Senate — to the everlasting glory ot
Nebraska.
Principle alone will explain his years of struggle to give
the people cheap electricity. Consider that he was born on a
farm in Ohio in 1861 when only the telegraph foretold the
gifts of electricity. Nothing in his age o'r environment
taught him the words he used later: "Since Adam and Eve
were driven from the Garden of Eden there has never been
discovered an element with so many possibilities of useful-
ness and pleasure as electricity." Then he simply remem-
bered the back-breaking, heart-breaking toil of the farmers
he had known as a boy and as a judge dealing with mort-
gages in Nebraska, and began his long labors to assure them
the blessings "given to them by Almighty God." He re-
solved that no monopoly should exploit the people by a con-
trol of this gift. His spirit became a more important part ot
the distribution system than the material links of wire.
Again he was serving the people.
FAITH IN DEMOCRACY PLUS PLAIN COMMON SENSE WAS THE ROOT
of work for better forms of government, such as the "lame
duck amendment" and the one chamber state legislature.
now on trial in Nebraska. He had learned how politics mis-
used antiquated parts of the machinery of government to
thwart the will of the people. He set out to change these
things and he succeeded. And he is willing to change the
power of the Supreme Court because, as he declared in a
memorable speech, Legislation by the Judiciary, "The mem-
bers of the Supreme Court are responsible to nobody. Yet
they hold dominion over everybody. . . . Our Constitution
ought to be construed in the light of present day civilization."
The logic of making every element of the government re-
sponsible to the people once more determined his course.
Age has brought no compromise of principle, for a principle
is forever young.
The story of these great endeavors is supplemented by
the story of his own political fortunes, and his relations to
parties and movements. The authors note that there are now
younger men in Congress who are to the left of Norris who,
they imply, is old and perhaps old-fashioned. He does not
recognize, they feel, that what he wants for the people cannot
be gained by reforms in government or attacks on parts
of the system, but must be based on a new social economy.
But in refusing to endorse a planned collectivism Senator
Norris may be clairvoyantly right again. There is evidence
enough throughout the world that the principle of dem-
ocratic choice and consent is needed to make workable
whatever kind of collectivism the human race is capable
of. That the Progressives have not exerted as much power as
they might have, had they organized for common purposes,
is true; but the notion that Senator Norris had no program
is not true, for to apply a principle to many particular prob-
lems is program enough for one man.
Certain elements of a biography in the round are not
given, no doubt because the authors believe, and rightly, that
here the career is the man. But questions arise: we are curi-
ous about what sort of person Norris is, and what philosophy
of life he holds outside the realm of public affairs. He is
deep-rooted in Midwest America, and that is so important
for understanding him that it is profitable to read for back-
ground. They Broke the Prairie, in which Earnest Elmo
Calkins gives some account of the settlement of the Upper
Mississippi Valley in terms of one town, Galesburg, 111. Here
came pioneers onto the unbroken prairie who set up a town
490
and founded that remarkable college, Knox. Mr. Calkins
gives an illuminating history of the families, their economic
beginnings and progress, the coming of the Burlington Rail-
road, the social changes through the years, that is rich in fact
and folkways though not always full enough in interpreta-
tion. It is a useful addition to our growing literature on the
making of These States.
This community was perhaps somewhat more complex
and self-conscious than those in which Senator Norris grew
up, but it was founded on the virtues he reveals — courage,
independence, faith in democracy, and a desire for a better
life for the plain man. What is to be the nature of that
better life? Senator Norris is convinced the government
should help the people enjoy light and power. I should like
to know how he feels about the government helping the
people to enjoy the gifts of music and art and the theater.
Something about his travels and about the books he reads
would help us understand the man. That he is in part an
artist is revealed in his robust sense of ironical humor and
his command of words. There is the joyous story of the
meeting at which his two opponents for the senatorship en-
dorsed his program but sought his seat — to spare him labor
in his old age. He replied that the people had better reeled
him since one opponent could hardly read his speech with
his glasses, and the other was bald while Norris's white plume
still flourished.
His biographers do not picture him as an orator, but he is
something greater — a revealer of truth with a clarity and
economy of language that seems simple because it is the
bone and sinew of reality. Mastery of the piercing phrase and
the brilliant comparison is his, but the solemn strength of
his words resides in the perfect expression of the idea in his
mind and heart. The "No" against the declaration of war
in 1917 uttered by those six "wilful men" (and rarely in
history has there been a greater energy of will summoned
up by statesmen than was needed that day) was not a word,
but an act. Ten years later, he listed in a few grave sentences
what he deemed "our harvest from what we have sowed"
and closed with the words: "You ask me if I would vote
today as I voted ten years ago. The answer is I would."
It is the right of few men to utter such a granite sentence.
The principle on which was founded this career of service
and inspiration can only be unbased if the people in whom
Senator Norris has faith prove themselves not intelligent
enough, or self-disciplined enough, or honest enough, to carry
on his work or to enjoy the gifts he helped bring to them
with values beyond mere materialism. In humble apprecia-
tion of all he has done, we may still ask of him one service —
that he tell us what kind of public education he thinks can
help youth master an age of power for democracy. For
there are dangers in power, as always. What principle can
he bequeath as great as that he has lived?
Such a gift would be one more monument among those
that this fortunate statesman can see around him while he
still serves. One is the record his conscience wrote during
war. One is an amendment written into the Constitution of
the United States. One is the imperial plinth of Norris Dam
in the Tennessee Valley that is multiplied into a thousand
memorials each day when the lights go on in simple homes,
or the washing machine and water pump take up their tasks.
His memory is not only in the hearts of his countrymen, but
in their very hands when they mark ballots or do chores.
LIFE AND LETTERS— REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS— Continued on page 492
That Spain's Children May Live ,
SOCIAL WORKERS
COMMITTEE
Executive Committee
Harald H. Lund,
Chairman
Helen M. Harris,
Wayne McMillen.
Vice-Chairmen
A. Gordon Hamilton
Treasurer
Mary E. Boretz
M. Antoinette Cannon
Mildred Fairchild
Jacob Fisher
Ben Goldman
Harry Greenstein
Peter Kasius
John A. Kingsbury
Wayne McMillen,
Mary van Kleeck
National Committee
(Partial List)
Lillian D. Wald
Honorary Chairman
Edith Abbott
Maurine Boie
Grace L. Coyle
Neva Deardorff
Leah Feder
Sheldon Glueck
Helen Hall
Marion Hathway
Paul KelloKg
Eduard C. Lindeman
Owen R. Lovejoy
Harry L. Lurie
Bertha C. Reynolds
Mary Simkhovitch
Walter West
An Organization Is Formed
• Social workers, by the very nature of their
profession, must be concerned with the wel-
fare of children who are victims of the fascist
invasion of Spain.
For this reason, the Social Workers Com-
mittee, organized in February, 1937, and
engaged in the following months in raising
over $5000 for medical aid, now turns its
attention to child welfare.
Purposes
• The purposes of the Social Workers Com-
mittee are:
(1) To raise funds for the care of children
in Republican Spain ; and
(2) To offer professional advice and
guidance to organizations giving aid to
children in Republican Spain.
SOCIAL WORKERS COMMITTEE
For Child
130 East 22nd Street
Help Now!
• A national campaign is in progress to
raise funds, clothe and shelter the refugee
children. That Spain's children may live,
send contributions and pledges to the nation-
al office of the Social Workers Committee or
to your local city chapter of the Committee.
Help Now!
Make checks payable to "Social Workers Committee."
I enclose $ that Spain's children may
live.
Name
Address
City
Organization
State
TO AID SPANISH DEMOCRACY
Welfare
• New York City
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491
A Trotskyist - Marxian Interpretation
THE CONQUEST OF POWER, by Albert Weisbord. Covici-Fricde. 2 vols.
1688 pp. Price $7.50 a set postpaid of Surrey (iraflnc.
ALBERT WEISBORD'S HUGE TEXT OF 1688 PAGES, DIVIDED INTO
two volumes, devotes seven chapters to rise and dissolution of
liberalism, five chapters to anarchism of the several varieties,
three chapters to trade unionism (reformist and revolution-
ary), eight chapters to rise and nature of socialism (up to
"the proletarian revolution"), ten chapters to fascism (in-
cluding two on American fascist trends and their future),
and sixteen chapters to communism from early uprisings to the
present situation. In the main the text rests upon secondary
sources and works by "bourgeois" writers. There are, to be
sure, many references to original sources, such as the works
of Rousseau, Lincoln, Emerson and Marx, but Mr. Weisbord
has relied heavily upon researches of others and has un-
earthed no startling amount of buried materials unknown to
informed students of the topics he covers. This is, of course,
no criticism of his work, but a mere indication to possible
readers already familiar with a few hundred standard treatises
dealing with the topics in question. What distinguishes Mr.
Weisbord's volumes is the selection of, and emphasis on,
facts fairly well known, under an overarching hypothesis
which may fairly be called Trotskyist-Marxian. Naturally this
emphasis puts many old events and personalities in a light
somewhat strange, and invites a fresh review of old accept-
ances. Nowhere else can be found such a copious documenta-
tion of the preconceptions adopted by the author.
Besides selecting and emphasizing his facts in the run of
the text, Mr. Weisbord sometimes indulges in collateral com-
ments of a moral or speculative nature. He makes the Ameri-
can Revolution in the main "a sordid fight for control over
the wealth and resources of the New World." Again, speak-
ing of the draft riots in New York City during the Civil
War, he declares: "Had the workers won in New York City,
their real victory would have precipitated a workers' revolt
throughout the Union which, far from ending the Civil
War, would have carried it out in a much more radical man-
ner and would have attempted to complete the democratic
revolution which ended up by freeing the chattel slaves, with
a proletarian revolution to end wage slavery." "Sordid" ex-
presses a moral judgment, and the guess about the draft riots
is certainly speculative.
In keeping with his preconceptions, Mr. Weisbord regards
Marxism, as he interprets it, as a kind of exact science, and
all doubters as rather poor creatures. The social agnosticism
of persons called "liberals" flies in the face of the revelations
of Marxian science. Under the same preconceptions, John
Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and the present reviewer are appar-
ently helping on the trends to fascism, "with all the claptrap
so prevalent now in Europe." The city manager plan seems
to be fascist also. The Socialist and Communist parties are
treated as "middle class bodies" in connection with the survey
of fascism. Rooseveltism will "mature into a well-rounded
Bonapartism."
Mr. Weisbord is rather critical of European Communists
who do not "know" America. Even Lenin was mistaken
about the American Revolution. So Mr. Weisbord lays out
his program with special reference to what he regards as
Americanisms. First he places the Negro question; Negroes
are to have a separate territory and government in the United
States if they so desire. The workers are so well educated in
the United States that they can declare their independence
of the bourgeois intelligentsia — to which Mr. Weisbord be-
longs. Stalin and the liberals are wrong; proletarians in Amer-
ica have little use of parliamentarism and elections. The
general strike is something that an American understands;
it can be used in lining up workers against capitalists.
"Lynching is something for every American Communist to
understand and not to scold." It is American. The thing to
do, says Mr. Weisbord, is to rally proletarians as lynchers
and take action on "the wealthy employers and financiers."
"Here, then, is a program which a truly American com-
munist movement will not hesitate to adopt" in due time.
Then will come that famous spring into freedom and happi-
ness. "The victory of communism," concludes Mr. Weisbord,
"spells the end of all further conquest of power. Once the
working class has established its firm control, the whole sys-
tem of politics, of the rule of one individual over another,
will disappear forever."
New Miljord, Conn. CHARLES A. BEARD
Product of Our Times
THE INCREDIBLE MESSIAH— THE DEIFICATION OF FATHEH DIVINE, by
Robert Allerton Parker. Little Brown. 323 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of S«r-
vfy Graphic.
THIS BOOK IS AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS INTERESTING. WHAT MR.
Parker has done is to take Father Divine not so much as a
personality but as a social and religious phenomenon, and to
present him as a sign of the times. There is plenty of material
in these pages bearing on the Negro leader himself. Mr. Parker
has uncovered whatever may be known of his early career; he
tells the full story of the Sayville (Long Island) adventure,
which first brought Father Divine into prominence; and of
course the Harlem chapter is written up in extenso — the
"heavens" and their "angels," the love-feasts, the "celestial
finance," the political activities of "God," and the various
legal conflicts. It is a fantastic and grotesque epic, not to be
explained in anything to be found in Father Divine himself,
but rather in the complex of psychological and sociological
forces which he has made his own. "From the contrast be-
tween the symbol and the person who embodies it spring all
the ironic comedy and all the ludicrous pathos of this social
drama."
Messiahs, "Gods," are of course nothing new. They are
as old as the various Messiahs of ancient Israel, and as recent
as the Egyptian Mahdis and the Chinese "Heavenly Kings"
of our own day. Somewhere always, in our own country as
in other countries, there are these "divine" prophets who
gather their superstitious followers and work their alleged
miracles. Father Divine is one of these curious characters.
What is needed to bring them forth is "a mentality (in the
people) whose dominant trait is an almost bottomless reser-
voir of credulousness," coupled with social conditions of utter
wretchedness, leading to "chronic anxiety (and) personal
insecurity, which in turn produce a state of expectancy and
a conviction that a solution to all earthly troubles must soon
appear." Father Divine found these conditions in Harlem in
the depression, and exploited them with results unparalleled
outside of an African jungle. Mr. Parker tells this tale with
abundant detail and ironic sympathy, and has thus produced
a first class sociological document.
New York JOHN HAYNES HOLMES
Figures for the Folk
MATHEMATICS FOR THE MILLION, by Lancelot Hogben. Norton.
647 pp. Price $3.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A BOOK ABOUT MATHEMATICS WHICH OUTSELLS ALL FICTION
and non-fiction, as this one does in England, must possess
extraordinary attractiveness and simplicity to focus the atten-
tion of the reading public upon a field of knowledge usually
believed to be dry, boring and uninteresting. Certainly the
teaching of mathematics in our public schools makes for
antipathy toward it in later life. Yet an acquaintance with
the subject most commonly disliked by highschool and col-
lege graduates is vital for thoroughgoing understanding of
the development and present status of our society.
Professor Hogben orients mathematics toward the social
environment, dealing primarily with the applications of
mathematics to everyday life, to industry and war, to the
social sciences. Thus we can see that his conception of math-
ematics as the "language of size," that is, as a tool which
492
has developed in response to the demands of industry and
commerce for more adequate methods of determing quan-
titative relationships, follows naturally and logically. But
most mathematicians object violently to this method of
approach. To the majority of mathematicians, mathematics
is a discipline, a field of speculation, wherein systems are
developed and expanded on the foundation of assumptions
or postulates that have no bearing upon natural phenomena.
Despite the absence of an index, the lack of references for
further reading and the use of standard exercises found in
every text, Mathematics for the Million is the first successful
book written for the layman since Whitehead's Introduction
to Mathematics. It will prove especially valuable for people
interested in the interpretation of mathematics as a social
phenomenon, particularly the use of mathematics in psychol-
ogy, economics and sociology.
New Yor/^ JACK SCHUYLER
Italian Revolutionary
BREAD AND WINE, by Ignazio Silone. Harper. 319 pp. Price $2.50 post-
paid of Survey Graphic.
THE PROTAGONIST OF SlLONE's NOVEL IS A REVOLUTIONARY
unconventional and thoughtful enough to be able, after fifteen
years of Marxist adherence, to stop for a moment in his course
of fanatical loyalty and wonder: "Has not truth for me
become party truth? Have not party interests ended by dead-
ening all my discrimination between moral values?" This
question however is a side issue: Pietro Spina is never con-
fronted by the actual tragic dilemma of choosing between
party good and absolute good — his problem is the simple,
adventurous, almost hopeless one of making converts in the
face of an iron dictatorship. Returning to Italy from exile,
sick and in secret, just before the Ethiopian war, he finds
friends who succor him but who will have none of his ideas.
He completely fails to pierce the ignorance and conservatism
of the peasants. When he speaks of freedom they say: there's
too much freedom now, the way the women carry on. . . .
While he tells of a country where property is abolished, his
hearers are running off to outwit each other for some poor
scrap of land. They can't understand words, they must have
facts, Spina thinks, so he scrawls anti-Fascist phrases on a
wall — with the result that the peasants think neighboring vil-
lagers are responsible, and beat them up. Spina goes to Rome
and finds a few active party members, fated to discovery and
death. The struggle seems hopeless — yet here and there a
convert is made, and it is from such hopeless beginnings that
revolutions grow.
Silone contrives to weave in many brief histories of stu-
dents, peasants, petty gentry and revolutionaries, and draws
some lively portraits. Curiously he quite neglects to evoke the
colorful Italian landscape, while his Roman scenes might be
set in any big city. Nevertheless his book has the quality, com-
plexity, sympathy and humor that create a world into which
the reader is plunged. Spina's death among mountain wolves
and snows as he flees from Fascist agents seems unnecessarily
melodramatic and arbitrary in a narrative that is otherwise
of moving integrity.
Nyac^, N. Y. HELEN BRYANT
Every Town's Health
HEALTH UNDER THE "EL" — THE STORY OF THE BELLEVUE-YORKVILLE
HEALTH DEMONSTRATION IN MID-TOWN NEW YORK, by C.-E. A. Winslow
and Savel Zimand. Harper. 202 pp. Price $2.25 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
FAMILIAR AS HE WAS WITH THE WORK OF THE BELLEVUE-YORK-
ville health demonstration and with the earlier experimental
efforts in this field carried on by the New York City Health
Department, this reviewer was amazed by the material pre-
sented in this book. The title leads one to expect merely an
account of health work carried on in a local area of New
York City. To be sure such an account is presented, and it is
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law in his own state"
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How further progress can be made in providing
borrowing facilities for the American family
0 In few fields has the struggle
for social betterment gained more
tangible results than in the effort
to provide reasonable small loan
facilities for the American family.
Not long ago there was, as one
committee report stated, "untold
suffering, not only from the high
rates of interest charged by illegit-
imate lenders, but from the fact
that people, unable to find money
at any price, were helpless in the
face of the pressure of creditors."
Replacement of antiquated usury
statutes with a modern small loan
la.w has largely corrected this social
ill in better than half of our states.
Those who formerly faced garnish-
ments, judgments, repossessions,
foreclosures, rental ejectments,
bankruptcy, loss of credit, can now
borrow funds from personal finance
companies and other credit agencies
to tide them over periods of money
stress.
Many still dependent on
unlicensed lenders
But what is the situation in the
twenty odd states which have no
small loan law? What lending facil-
ities are available there? For a large
majority of wage-earners unlicensed
lenders are the only source of loans.
Usurious rates of interest— usually
240 per cent per vear— are charged
borrowers. Moreover, lenders dis-
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the principal in interest and still
owe more than they borrowed.
Recourse to the courts is often of
'ittle avail.
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"Credit for Consumers," states
that "every consumer should in-
sist on having a workable small
loan law in his own state, and
should insist on having the law
strictly enforced."
Interesting booklet sent free
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interesting, clear and well supported by facts. But this book
is far more than merely a record of local interest; for the au-
thors utilize the local experiences for searching discussions of
public health administration generally, discussions which de-
serve to be widely read by health administrators, municipal
administrators and leaders in health and social welfare
throughout the country.
Following a foreword by Mayor La Guardia, the book gives
a brief but interesting historical sketch of the Bellevue-
Yorkville district going back to the early Dutch times. This
provides the reader with the necessary background, the better
to appreciate the health problems of the district as they are
presented in the following chapter. The reader comes to re-
alize that the Bellevue-Yorkville district is really a city within
a city and that the experiences gained by the seven years' dem-
onstration have applicability in American cities generally.
The history of the Bellevue-Yorkville experiment divides
itself naturally into three periods, of which the first, from
1922 to 1926, was devoted largely to the preliminary spade
work and the formulation of a detailed program. The years
1927 and 1928 saw the program gradually crystallized and
translated into action, while the last five years, 1929 to 1934,
saw it in full operation. The gradual evolution of the work is
described in two chapters, after which comes an informative
chapter on the important subject of public health nursing.
Here we find an instructive discussion of generalized versus
specialized nursing, with a fair appraisal of their respective
advantages and drawbacks. The following chapter, Carrying
the Message into the Homes, gives an excellent presentation of
the purpose and means of health education. The information
given as the result of the Bellevue-Yorkville experience should
be of great value to others utilizing this important means of
promoting public health.
Throughout the work of the demonstration emphasis was
laid on the need for enlisting the active participation of the
people themselves in the health of their community. Numer-
ous concrete examples are given showing how this was ob-
tained. In other words the program carried out in the district
was not imposed on the people, it was developed through
mutual cooperation. "We have," say the authors, "dreamed a
higher and nobler dream of a state in which the common
welfare is intelligently sought by all the citizens working to-
gether— not as beneficiaries of benevolent dictatorships — but
as members of a vitally cooperating group. The good life
attained by democratic means is tht 'American dream.' "
Director CHARLES F. BOLDUAN, M.D.
Bureau of Health Education, New
Blum, Extraordinary Frenchman
L6ON BLUM: FROM POET TO PREMIER, by Richard L. Stokes. Coward
McCann. 2/6 pp. Price $3 postpaid 'A Survey Graphic.
IN IIS UNASSUMING WAY THIS BOOK IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF
how biographies of living statesmen should be written. It
is also a proof that such biographies can be intelligently
written, and have some chance to remain valuable for a
considerable lapse of time; at least until new political events
will have thrown on the subject a light clearer than any
analytical description.
A biography of Leon Blum was certainly needed; after
having gone through this excellent one, the reader feels the
desire to know more, to become familiar with Blum's po-
litical and literary writings, to refresh his recollection of the
extraordinary events that decided Blum's destiny. These
events are: the Affaire Dreyfus, the death of Jaures, and
the 6th of February 1934. The Affaire dragged him into
politics, the assassination of his master forced him to active
party work and later on to party leadership, the menace ot
fascism made of him a national leader and the premier of
France. At no moment does Blum seem to have had a wil-
ful longing for the role that history was going to impose
on him. This excellent among all students of Stendhal did
(In aniivenng advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
494
not consider power as the stake of his gamble in life. There
is very little of the traditional hero and much less of the
bombastic leader (after-war style) in this statesman, who
possibly is a great man. There is on the contrary obedience
to his ideals, assiduous fulfillment of the various tasks that
the events of history have entrusted to him, and above all,
intelligence, an intelligence always at the service of loyalty.
Blum's life moved in a zone defined by three activities,
tach of them at different times the leading one: professional
practice of the law, sophisticated literature, left-wing pol-
itics. The combination of those three activities is by no means
unique; it characterizes a type which is represented in every
civilized country. The modern intellectual of this type
focuses his attention on these three lines, groping for the
opportunity by which he will realize himself; he feels that
their intersection marks the zone where the problems of our
time must be faced. Legal profession, literary refinement,
radical inclinations are thus frequently combined in the
same man; this seems a contradictory blend, but it is not
the fault of the modern intellectual if he has to find a diffi-
cult equilibrium between skill, tastes and sentiments.
Among these intellectuals Blum is the one who has been
forced to face the greater task. Mr. Stokes follows his career
very closely without either hero-worshipping or debunking.
He proves how easily Blum could have turned into a
Proust, who was a man of his environment and generation.
But Blum was definitely responsive to certain humanitarian
ideals and personal loyalties which made him respond to
the call of politics. He lacks the direct, almost physical grasp
of political instincts and emotions that characterize the
natural-born political leader. He is somehow detached and
aloof even in the situation in which he is more definitely
enmeshed. What he thought more fitting to himself, it ap-
pears from Mr. Stokes' book, was the role of playing second
fiddle to a great natural-born leader like Jaures. He became
a leader himself although remaining a subordinate. The
constant question that he has asked himself is, "What would
Jean Jaures wish that I, such as I am, should dor"
Graduate Faculty MAX ASCOLI
New School for Social Research
Voices from the Southwest
RHYTHM FOR RAIN, by John I.ouw Nelson. Hotighton ilifflin Co.
-'71 pp. 54 plates. Price $3.25.
PEOPLE ON THE EARTH, by Edwin Corle, Random House, 401 pp.
Price $2.
BROTHERS OF LIGHT: THE PENITENTES OF THE SOUTHWEST, by
Alice Corbin Henderson, illustrated by William Penhallow Henderson,
Harcourt, Brace. 126 pp. Price $2.50.
Prices postpaid of Suri'cy Graphic.
THE FASCINATION WHICH THE INDIAN CEREMONIALS AND THE
religious traditions of the Spanish-Americans have always
had for visitors to our southwestern states is not based, I
believe, simply on the human tendency to be entertained by
whatever is unfamiliar and exotic. The civilized races are
beginning to turn to the Indian for something which they
have lost touch with in themselves and which I can only
describe as a kind of communal relationship to the natural
and spiritual forces of existence.
John Louw Nelson in his novel, A Rhythm for Rain, de-
picts primitive man as a people against the elements. His
story concerns the Zuni Indians at the time of a severe and
long continued drought. It is obvious that the tribe could
not possibly have survived the ordeal if each man had con-
fronted it as an individual. But each man retained his atti-
tude of responsibility to the group, and it was the courage
and faith of the group which carried them through when
separately each would have perished from despair, if not from
thirst and starvation. It is unfortunate that Mr. Nelson with
his exceptional acquaintance with tribal customs is not a
(In answering advertisements please
495
THERE'S A "BABY BOOM"
IN TENEMENT ALLEY
The Russos. The Dubinskis. The Caputtos. The
Zappados. All of them have new babies.
Now there'll be huger washes — more work to
do — and less time for the mothers of Tenement
Alley to get it done.
These aren't easy problems to solve. But extra
help with the washing and cleaning would cer-
tainly make things a bit easier and encourage
better living conditions.
And extra help is what Fels-Naptha Soap brings.
Its richer, golden soap and lots of naptha get rid
of dirt quickly — even in cool ivater! It's well worth
suggesting.
For a sample bar, write Fels & Co., Phila-
delphia, Pa., mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CLEAN NAPTHA ODOR
HOTEL PARKSIDE
NEW YORK
In Gramercy Park
The Parkside is one of New York's nicest hotels . . .
maintaining traditionally high standards and homelike
atmosphere. Directly facing Private Park.
SINGLE ROOMS FROM $2.00 DAILY
Attractive weekly and monthly rates
Moderate priced rettawant
A few minutes' walk to majority of the Welfare Coun-
cils, social agencies. . . . Convenient to all important
sections of the city. Write for Booklet S.
20TH STREET at IRVING PLACE
UNDER KNOTT MANAGEMENT
SATISFACTION!
The replies from Survey Graphic ads are increasingly
gratifying and I am very glad of the business that has
developed from it. They have all been such extremely
nice contacts.
— A 1937 Travel Advertiser.
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
better craftsman. The story is poorly constructed and the
writing distinctly amateurish.
It is quite another matter with Edwin Cork's novel,
People on the Earth, which fully deserves its publisher's ac-
claim as "one of the finest novels yet born in the South-
west." The hero, a Navajo Indian, is taken from his own
people and given a white man's education. But a white
man's education fails to transform him into a white man,
and it has almost completely separated him from the inheri-
tance of his own race. He finds himself neither one thing nor
another, desperately questioning, "What am I?" The answer
comes at last from its only possible source, inside himself.
He finds his way back to "the People" without at the same
time losing his individuality, so that he can say: "We have
seen Red People and White People and from them both we
have become new. Maybe we are the People now."
Mr. Corle writes with a simplicity of word and sentence
rhythm which is extremely effective in recreating his par-
ticular scene.
Brothers of Light by Alice Corbin Henderson is a sym-
pathetic account of the Penitente Brotherhood in New
Mexico. This brotherhood is a survival of the Third Order
of St. Francis dating from the time of the Spanish explor-
ers, and each year its members re-enact the Passion in their
isolated villages, as an act of personal and group devotion.
Mrs. Henderson has watched it with equal devotion and her
account is not written for those who are looking for the
sensationalism implied by the fact of flagellation. The book
is effectively illustrated in black and white by William Pen-
hallow Henderson.
Otowi, N. M. PEGGY POND CHURCH
PAUL LAURENCE DUN BAR, by Benjamin Brawley. University of
North Carolina Press. 159 pp. Price $1 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A SHORT AND NOT TOO PENETRATING BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICAL
estimate of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Negro poet whose
general recognition brought the Negro author into the main-
stream of American letters. For that very reason greater em-
phasis on the social tides of late Reconstruction thought
ought to have received equal attention with the personal
history of this gifted and lovable lyric poet. — A. L.
And Now, a Co-op Hospital by AVIS D. CARLSON
(Continued from page 473)
physicians everywhere expect to be on duty day and night.
It is the policy to allow each staff member a vacation period
for study or travel at some time during the year.
So far as recompense goes, the staff physicians and dentists
have not fared badly. As a group they get a fixed percentage
of the income from membership dues. This with the fees they
collect from the non-member patients who come to them and
are charged the usual fees for private practice gives them
incomes ranging from $3000 to $8000, all net, since there is
no overhead. According to the figures assembled by the Com-
mittee on Medical Costs the median net income of American
physicians in 1929 was $3800, and the average $5300. And
the average income of practitioners in rural areas was less
than half as large as those made in metropolitan districts.
During the depression the incomes fell sharply. According to
figures compiled by the California Economic Medical Survey,
in 1933 the net incomes of 57 percent of California physicians
was under $4000. Thus the incomes of the staff at Com-
munity Hospital compare favorably with the general average
even of 1929, are better than the rural average for that time,
and certainly are very much better than the staff could have
hoped to make during these bitter years of depression and
dust in western Oklahoma.
At the same time they have been freed from the worry of
collections, overhead expense, and other business details which
are extremely distasteful to most doctors. They are also re-
lieved from the necessity of continually acquiring new
patients so as to build their own practice and meet the
inroads made by competing physicians. Once he got used to
the idea, many a doctor would undoubtedly find it a blessed
relief thus to be shorn of his business functions and free to
be purely a physician. He certainly would find that this type
of organization because of its complete removal from political
control and its preservation of the doctor-patient relationship
has very real advantages over any form of "state medicine"
which has thus far been suggested.
As an experiment which combines for a rural area the prin-
ciples of group practice and group payment, Community
Hospital seems to me to have real significance. In an arresting
section describing a satisfactory medical program the Com-
mittee on the Cost of Medical Care insists that group practice
if properly organized can be made to yield real advantages,
such as the economical use of hospital facilities and scientific
equipment, professional stimulation, breaking down of "the
separatist habits of thought and action which beset the spe-
cialist," and material assistance "in bringing specialists into
proper relation with one another and with general medical
service." On the other hand, warned the committee, "group
practice may perpetuate some of the defects of individual
practice and, in fact, may create new difficulties if the type of
organization is faulty, or if the responsible individuals are not
suited to their tasks."
As a type of organization for attaining the advantages and
avoiding the disadvantages of group practice, the cooperative
hospital seems to be peculiarly effective. It can easily be made
to comply with all the standards set up for group practice by
the committee, and the project at Elk City does comply with
them. It gives general medical care, and when its legal
troubles have been ironed out so that the staff can be com-
pleted, it will also provide a fairly well-rounded specialist
service. Diagnosis and treatment are thoroughly coordinated.
Patients attach themselves at will to a particular physician
who is especially responsible for their care, thus preserving
"continuity of relationship." The board of directors has the
financial and general administrative responsibility; the pro-
fessional group has absolute control over the medical part of
the work. And it is a non-profit organization.
As one talks to members of the association, one comes to
feel that merely as a project in health education it has had
much social value and that its cooperative form of organiza-
tion contributes to that value. Perhaps the very opposition
the hospital has had to meet has strengthened its member-
ship loyalty and hastened a membership understanding of
what constitutes adequate medical care. At any rate they con-
stantly use the phrases, "our hospital" and "I never knew. . . ."
Over and over they say, "What business have the outside
doctors trying to ruin our hospital?" and "I never till I joined
the hospital. . . ." In fighting back at its enemies, the hospital
has naturally described the services it offers. Since the details
of its struggle for existence have been well aired in the
Farmers' Union and labor press of Oklahoma, low income
groups all over the state are beginning to get a new vision
of what they should have and might have in the way of
medical care. Already plans are being made for similar hos-
pitals. It is probably true that the Oklahoma Medical Associa-
tion has done the institution of private practice a disservice
in fighting the Elk City experiment and thus giving it a
publicity that it might otherwise have been years in getting.
The Farmers' Union Cooperative Hospital Association has
blazed a trail that seems likely to be used.
496
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
WINTER AND SPRING QUARTERS
1938
UNDER the present curriculum plan, students
may enter at the beginning of any quarter.
A substantial number of field work placements are
available in the Spring Quarter. Winter and Spring
Quarter dates are as follows:
Winter Quarter January 3 - March 23
November 3, 1937 Application date
Spring Quarter March 28 - June 18
January 26, 1938 Application date
A catalogue giving full details of the pro-
gram of the School will be mailed upon
request
122 East 22nd Street
New York, N. Y.
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
ADVANCED CURRICULUM
The Advanced Curriculum offers a full year of
class and field work in each of the following fields:
Case Work in Child Guidance Clinics
Child Placing
Psychological Therapy with Children
Supervision in Social Work
Teaching in Social Work
Courses are open to graduates of accredited graduate
schools of social work who have had a year of subse-
quent successful professional experience in a field closely
related to that of the curriculum for which they apply.
Special bulletin will be sent on request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET. PHILADELPHIA
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
A Graduate Professional School Offering Courses
Leading to the Degree of Master of Social Science.
ACADEMIC YEAR OPENS JULY, 1938
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for September, 1937
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW FOR
CHILD GUIDANCE
I. The Prognostic Value of the First Interview,
Harriette Mills
II. The First Interview as a Guide to Treatment.
Louise Ritterskampf
Single Copies, 75c
Annual Subscription (four issues), 12.00
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
SCHOOL OF NURSING
OF YALE UNIVERSITY
A Profession for the College Woman
The thirty-two months' course, providing an intensive and
varied experience through the case study method, leads to the
degree of
MASTER OF NURSING
A Bachelor's degree in arts, science or philosophy from a
college of approved standing is required for admission.
For catalogue and information address:
The Dean, YALE SCHOOL OF NURSING
New Haven, Connecticut
PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL
hessian hills school
progressive - coeducational • day and resident • nursery thru
ninth grade • curriculum includes work in studios, laboratory
and shop • frequent trips - hiking, teni.is. swimming, skating •
new children's house • winter term: oct.-may; camp: july-aug.
croton-on-hudson, n. y. — \1 kr. from m. y. e. — trl : crototi Mi, or writ* lor catalog.
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497
Shorewood, Where Adults Are Students
by WILLIAM E. DALEY
A COMMUNITY WHERE MORE ADULTS THAN CHILDREN GO TO
school — that is the boast of Shorewood, Wis., a suburb of
15,000 people near Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. In this
community, known as Milwaukee's "gold coast" because of
its attraction for members of the higher income groups,
more than half of the four thousand families in the village
participate voluntarily in the program sponsored by the Shore-
wood Opportunity School. Nearly a thousand adult non-
residents also go to the school. At present, 3213 adults are
enrolled in its classes, with 2683 children in the high and
grade schools of Shorewood. "This enrollment record," says
Harvey M. Genskow, director, "so far as we have any authen-
tic information, is unapproached by any other community in
the country.
A recent study showed that only 1.4 percent of the students
were less than eighteen years old; 44.7 percent were between
eighteen and thirty; 48.5 percent between thirty-one and
fifty; and 5.3 percent were over fifty. Of the total, 99.1 per-
cent had completed the eighth grade; 77.3 percent were high-
school graduates; 46.4 percent had had some college training;
23.3 percent were college graduates, and 9.2 percent were
doing or had completed some graduate work in college.
The residents themselves have made this unusual record,
but school officials have provided any cultural or recreational
opportunity desired by a large number if it was financially
possible. The program was built around sound experiments,
adopted from time to time. Keeping classes interesting to the
individual is one of the main objectives of the school.
"Adults are interested and feel that the work is worth-
while," the director explains, "and they spend several nights
a week in pleasurable and profitable leisure time activities."
One Shorewood man has furnished two rooms in his home
— complete even to a radio cabinet — with furniture which he
made in the school. Another spent two years carving a single
chair, but when it was finished he had reason to be proud.
The number of teachers required to carry out the school's
program varies from fifty up to as many as seventy-five, when
seasonal courses such as golf and gardening are taught. All
staff members are paid by the Opportunity School. A few
are members of the regular highschool faculty, but most of
the night school instructors are specialists in their subjects as
teachers, professional men or people who have developed
some hobby.
A former Marquette University professor, now on the Wis-
consin Industrial Commission, lectures on current affairs. A
well-known Milwaukee artist teaches drawing and sketching.
Dancing and music are taught by private instructors. A fac-
ulty member on leave of absence from the University of Wash-
ington, is conducting a social science class.
The Opportunity School uses the Shorewood Highschool
buildings and equipment, but pays its share of power, light,
water and other service bills. Designed in college campus
style, the highschool offers vocational students the facilities
of an administration building containing classrooms and
library, an arts and science building, a manual arts building,
an auditorium and a gymnasium.
Not all these buildings were utilized when the Opportunity
School was started fifteen years ago. During the experimental
years only classroom activities were sponsored. Since 1928,
when the yearly attendance was one thousand, the adult edu-
cation program has been considerably expanded. It is signifi-
cant to note that the school achieved its greatest success during
the depression.
Today the vocational program costs $50,000. The past
year's budget shows that villagers paid $27,900 in local taxes
to support the night school; the state contributed $7300. The
school made $15,000 during the year from enrollment fees,
athletic fees, dramatic and musical productions and voluntary
collections taken at its lectures. About $8400 was realized
from enrollment fees alone. The fee for residents is $1 per
term for each class. Non-residents pay the same enrollment fee,
but an extra charge of 50 cents an evening is paid by the
community in which they live.
The Opportunity School program is divided into several
parts: class activities, the Sunday afternoon community lec-
ture course, physical education, dramatics, recreational music.
Class activities include a wide range of subjects. Dis-
cussions on modern social and political problems and current
events skyrocketed to popularity during the past few years.
Awakened to the great changes in national and world affairs,
people were eager to learn more of what was happening in
the world about them. Vocational school leaders were quick
to recognize this sudden swing to political and economic
topics and sponsored classes which soon became the best at-
tended in the school program.
ACADEMIC COURSES INCLUDE THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; PARLIAMENT-
ary law; business courses, such as bookkeeping, business and
real estate law, machine calculating, salesmanship, shorthand
and typing; English and literature courses, such as conversa-
tional English, word study, book reviewing, everyday writing,
and contemporary literature; speech courses, such as charm and
personality, interpretative reading, public speaking and voice
of the child; art appreciation; child study; individual psychol-
ogy; home care of the sick; languages — French, German and
Spanish; lip reading, and mathematics.
Other courses include beginners' English for new Ameri-
cans; advanced English and citizenship; arts and crafts, in-
cluding applied arts, art metal, drawing and sketching, wood-
working, photography. There are also classes in gardening,
landscape gardening, interior decoration, sewing, hat design-
ing, beauty culture, home and food planning.
The Sunday afternoon lectures caught the interest of the
townspeople from the first. One thousand attend each week.
Many Shorewood residents would no more miss a single lec-
ture than they would their Sunday dinner. During the past
year there have been noted speakers on a variety of subjects.
The physical education department is almost as popular as
the academic department. Last year's figures gave an attend-
ance of 16,172 in the academic classes and of 13,000 in the
physical education activities. These include an outdoor recrea-
tion program in summer, a winter sports program and a
recreation program in the gymnasium and indoor pool.
The physical education department cooperates with the
village's recreation committee in providing play facilities for
adults as well as excellent games for spectators. Its success is
indicated by the estimated attendance last year of about
220,000 spectators and participants.
The Shorewood village board and the school board have co-
operated in a comprehensive playground program of night
baseball. With the installation of electric lights in 1934, four
leagues were organized — a minor league for boys under
eighteen, a league for older boys, a business men's league for
men over twenty-eight, and a league composed of some of
the best players in Milwaukee County. Membership in the
first three leagues is restricted to Shorewood residents, with
a limited number from the surrounding suburbs. Last sum-
mer 450 boys and men actually participated in the games,
498
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SITUATIONS WANTED
M;in, experienced supervisor in family case
work, desires position. Member American
Association of Social Workers. Catholic.
Excellent references. 7452 Survey.
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with commercial course. Vicinity New York.
7453 Survey.
IUKTITIAN - HOUSEKEEPER desires posi-
tion in Institution or School. Country pre-
ferred. European and American experience.
Excellent references. 7454 Survey.
Hoys' worker, training and experience group
and case work, seeks connection with Settle-
ment or Institution. R. J., 925 - 31 Street,
Des Moines. Iowa. _
MATRON — DIETITIAN — 12 years' experience
wishes position Jewish Institution. Excellent
references. 7413 Survey.
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Your Own Agency
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sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
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friendly counsel for those who desire it. No
fees. 7419 Survey.
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THE BOOK SHELF
Practical techniques for creative activity
CREATIVE GROUP EDUCATION
S. R. Slavson
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"Let the Nation Employ Itself"
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PROHIBITING POVERTY
By
Preitonia Mann Martin
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DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP THERAPY
Fay B. Kiirpf, Ph.D.
The psychotherapy of Otto Rank as related to
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Bibliography.
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SOCIAL WORK TECHNIQUE
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MULTIGRAPHING
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while attendance at these games reached 85,000. The program
was augmented last summer with a girls' league, and a team
in the Wisconsin state league, in which the Shorewood entry
has held the championship.
The winter gymnasium features indoor baseball games
for business men's leagues, basketball, volleyball and hockey
matches on specially lighted rinks.
The indoor swimming pool attracts between 1000 and
2000 youngsters and adults weekly. Considered one of the
best in the United States, well lighted and well ventilated,
it draws swimming teams from other parts of the country.
The Playshop is Shorewood's adult theater group, where
members learn the theory and practical application of all
phases of stagecraft — acting, directing, costuming and make-
up. A number of short plays, a three-act mystery drama and
a comedy were produced last year by the theater group. In
addition they study play reviews, the history of the theater,
and children's plays.
The Shorewood A Cappella Choir, under the direction of
(In answering advertisements
Noble Cain, program director of the N.B.C.'s Chicago studios,
has probably accomplished more in building up the musical
program in the school than any other single group. Last year
the choir, with a former member of the Chicago Civic Opera
as guest soloist, gave a concert before an audience of 1000.
The music department offers classes in harmony, music
appreciation, piano, violin and voice; and it has its band,
orchestra, ukelele club, women's chorus and operatic chorus.
Hundreds of educators throughout the country have re-
quested detailed information on the rapid growth and popu-
larity of this vocational school system. In the past year in-
quiries have come from California, Texas, Massachusetts, New
York, New Jersey, Florida, Minnesota, Louisiana, Illinois and
Ohio. A number of educational groups plan to use Shore-
wood's program as a model, adapting it to their own com-
munities. A University of Wisconsin professor who brought
twenty of his students to visit the classes said, "We have
come to see what really can be done with school buildings
along adult education lines."
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
499
(Continued from page 455)
political penetration in the Netherlands' In-
dies, Indo-China and Malaya. On page 481
he gives a vivid picture of the new man of
the hour in India. •
RUDOLF MODLEY, WHO CAME FROM VIENNA
in 1930 to the Museum of Science and
Industry in Chicago and afterwards estab-
lished Pictorial Statistics, Inc. in New York,
is no stranger to our pages, though he is
usually concealed behind the name of his
organization. A pioneer in the use of pic-
tographs in this country, Survey Graphic
welcomed the introduction of his charts in
those handsome government publications,
The Mississippi Valley Report, The National
Resources Report, Little Waters, The Great
Plains Committee Report, and many other
books. It has reproduced many of these and
frequent charts, diagrams and maps which
Mr. Modley has planned especially for
Survey use. Notable among these were
the striking syphilis charts used in connec-
tion with Surgeon General Parran's article
on syphilis in the July issue for 1936. And
be it footnoted to pages 488 and 489, Mr.
Modley stoutly maintains that he is the owner
of several hats.
WRITING WITH ENTHUSIASM OF A CUL-
tural, recreational and vocational school for
adults that has made leisure hours in a
suburban town near Milwaukee full of color
and variety, William E. Daley, editor of the
town paper, The Shorewood Herald, and
several other local papers, tells a success-
story that many a community will wish to
emulate. (Page 498.)
WE ADMIT AND REGRET TWO ERRORS IN OUR
August issue. The first might be called a
mass error. This was in the small caption
beneath the cover design which referred
to strikes in the first four months of 1929.
As the design made clear the year was 1937.
The other error was more personal. Grace
Noll Crowell, author of the poem, Cotton
Pickers, appeared as Helen Noll Crowell
on page 427. This was discovered unfor-
tunately only after the first issues arrived
in the editorial office fresh from the printer.
Mrs. Crowell was less dismayed than the
editors. "I always liked the name of Helen
a lot — so I don't mind a bit," she wrote.
AMONG OURSELVES
The Whole World Gains
AS IN THE DAYS OF THE FORTY-NINERS —
of Carl Schurtz, Abraham Jacobi and their
contemporaries — • Germany loses and the
whole world gains when great men and
women are forced into exile. Alice Salomon
has joined their company. Just five years ago
she received the Silver Medal for Merits to
the State — an honor bestowed only by the
Prussian cabinet voting unanimously. In
wartime she had received the Red Cross
Medal and the Cross for Merits in the War.
But these were only tokens of the creative
part she has played in German life, in
movements for human betterment and the ad-
vancement of women. The medical faculty
of Berlin University once gave her an
honorary medical degree in recognition of
her health and research work. To the social
workers of all lands she is known as
founder of the first German school for
social work, growing out of classes she or-
ganized in Berlin as far back as 1899.
'I he gauge of her interests was set early
in the thesis she wrote on graduating from
the University of Berlin. This was on
The Causes of Unequal Pay for Equal
Work of Men and Women. There fol-
lowed over the years several textbooks on
economics, civics and social problems; a
survey in thirteen volumes of the modern
family. But even more than her books, her
gift for personal contacts, her insight, the
Or. Alice Salomon
grasp of her fine mind and her executive
faculties have made her a living force.
Nor has her leadership been confined to
Germany. She helped organize the Inter-
national Congress of Women in Berlin in
1904; she served from 1920 to 1933 as vice-
president of the International Council of
Women. She was an honorary correspondent
of the International Labor Office. The semi-
centennial meeting in Washington of our
National Conference of Social Work was the
occasion of her tour of the U. S. in 1923.
Last winter she again lectured here,
leaning backward to avoid any reference to
the present situation in Germany, speaking
on social work in France and England,
gathering materials to round out her work
on education for social work, and in her
lectures often drawing on the drama of
woman's adventure as developed in her book
Heroische Frauen.
It was in late May she was given three
weeks in which to leave the country which
for over two centuries has been the home
of her ancestors. In a letter to a friend she
writes:
"As to my American trip, let me assure
you that no reproach about anything I have
said or done there was made by the secret
police. It was just that I had been frequently
abroad which was brought against me. But
given the fact that I was quite unsafe at
home, I could not have lived through these
years without frequent periods of respite.
So there it is.
"As things have been decided for me,
which I have always considered to be the
best that can happen to anyone in matters
of great doubt, I have accepted the decision
as a God-send, though it is pretty difficult
500
to look upon the secret police as a mouth-
piece of the Almighty."
An editorial in the New York Times
concludes thus:
"The 'crime' for which Dr. Salomon,
despite her aloofness from politics, has been
expelled from her native land has not been
disclosed, but it isn't far to seek. Her
Jewish ancestry (though herself a devoted
Christian), her international contacts, her
broad humanitarian interests, her efforts on
behalf of women and labor — these in the
minds of the German political police are
sufficient to justify exile of this well-
beloved and widely honored German
woman."
Dr. Salomon is now in London, but there
is prospect that she will come to the United
States in September and take up the broken
strands of her life work in the fields in which
she is a master.
U. S. Aid for Spain
THE SOCIAL WORKERS COMMITTEE TO AID
Spanish Democracy — for child welfare — is
the latest entry among agencies to bring help
to war sufferers in Republican Spain; and its
focus is precisely on those needs of orphaned
and refugee children which are interpreted
in Miss Strong's article. Harald H. Lund is
chairman, a widely representative national
committee has been formed, and a group of
social workers are participating in a tour of
inquiry now in process, arranged by the Open
Road and the North American Committee to
Aid Spanish Democracy. This North Ameri-
can Committee of which Bishop McConnell is
chairman, not only through its Medical Aid
Bureau, which has established base, field and
other hospitals at the front, but in its gen-
eral operations for flood relief and succor, is
by far the largest operation to date supported
by Americans. It engages the collaboration
of a group of affiliated organizations whose
sympathies are with Republican Spain. Close-
ly related are the American Friends of Span-
ish Democracy of which Bishop Paddock is
chairman, and the Trade Union Committee
to Aid Spanish Democracy. The American
League Against War and Fascism is also
about to launch a program of child help.
At the other end of the spectrum, aid for
distress in Nationalist Spain is sought by
the American Spanish Relief Fund of which
the Rev. Francis X. Talbot, S.J. is chairman,
the American Committee for Spanish Relief,
Basil Harris, chairman and other Catholic
bodies. So far, the American Friends Service
Committee, as happened in the tragic situa-
tions growing out of the World War, is the
spearhead of that succor which "knows no
sides" (page 463) ; yet it is a commentary
on how little the great bulk of well-to-do
Americans have been aroused to point out that
(save for modest American Red Cross grants
and a single contribution of $1000) as yet
the largest checks the Quakers have received
have been of $200. The chief hopes for a
wide front of activity reaching through to
every part of Spain and of a calibre that
Americans might feel proud of, lie in unlim-
bering of the American Red Cross (reversing
its policy to date) and in the institution of
a new non-partisan committee, as yet hanging!
fire, which could carry forward a prograrrl
comparable say to Serbian relief. John A.J
Kingsbury is convener of this group. Th(j
call for such action is urgent.
PRINTED BY
BLANCHARDPRES
NEW YORK
-CONTINUED FROM OTHER SIDE
the splendid pageant which has followed the course of the Nile.
Despite this vast and shifting scene of history, Ludwig's massive
volume is not heavy with dates and places; it carries its cyclopedic
knowledge lightly. Through it all the protagonist of the story
remains clear. The Nile, mighty artery of life to land and people,
flows majestically through the ages while humanity grubs and
claws on its banks.
SOME TYPICAL OPINIONS
The Nile stands among the finest of Emil Ludwig's works for its sheer
exuberance in descriptive passage, its wise weighing of historical factors,
its recreation of famous scenes and its deep human sympathies.
—HARRY HANSEN, N. Y. World Telegram
Is based on a magnificent conception and, I think, develops it with extra-
ordinary skill and passion. Few books that I have read of late have
afforded me more solid pleasure.
—CLIFTON FADIMAN, The New Yorker
Beautifully written. . . . Should be on the shelf of every library.
— OLIN SNEED, Atlanta Constitution
This is a magnificent book. Like Gibbon he has often summarized in a
paragraph the knowledge gained from many books.
—ALICE BEAL PARSONS, The Nation
Is not only one of the best things he has ever written but also one of
the most richly rewarding of recent serious publications in any field.
— HERSCHEL BRICKELL, N. Y. Evening Post
What a river ! What a life story ! Neither the Ganges nor the Yangtse,
the Amazon or our Mississippi carries such a flood of story with its
water. . . . The Nile is, I think, Emil Ludwig's best book.
—LEWIS GANNETT, N. Y. Herald-Tribune
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From Survey Graphic 9/37.
FREE
COPY. . . JorDW Library
ENIL
By EMIL LUDWIG
RETAIL PRICE FIVE DOLLARS
"WHAT A RIVER! WHAT A LIFE STORY!"
IT was in 1924, when Ludwig first saw the
Great Dam at Aswan, that he conceived the
idea of writing the story of the Nile, as he had
written the story of great men — as a parable.
Critics are almost unanimously agreed that
the resulting work, published early this year,
is Ludwig's greatest.
As we follow the course of the Nile, origi-
nating in a primordial land of wild beauty and
maturing amidst our ripest civilization, there
arise before our eyes all the shadows of the
past: an endless train of historical figures, the
warring tribes, the strange races, that have
desperately fought and struggled for existence
along its shores. The river nurtures and sus-
tains them all — "men of the mountains and
men of the marsh, Arabs, Christians and can-
nibals, pygmies and giants."
Here is the story ot Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba; of Alexander the Great; of the
Ptolemies; of Abyssinian slave markets; of
Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra; of Stanley's
heroic discovery of Livingstone and the Congo ;
of Mehemet Ali and his murder in one day of
all the Mamelukes; of Bonaparte; of how the
dervishes cut down General Gordon; of the
romantic Colonel Marchand's trek through the
jungle; of Lord Kitchener — and countless other
heroes, adventurers and madmen who makeup
—CONTINUED
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SURVEY
OCTOBER 1937
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
INTERDEPENDENCE VS
NATIONALISM
1932
1936
Each ship represents 4 billion dollars of world exports and imports
Each tank represents 4 billion dollars of world arms and war expenditures
What Chance Has Freedom?
INSECURITY IN THE MODERN WORLD by HAROLD J. LASKI
Reunited China
AMBASSADOR WANG by BEULAH AMIDON
Man the Destroyer
AN ARTICLE by KARL A. MENNINGER, M.D.
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Portrait bust by Jan Stursa, in the Modern Gallery in Prague
MASARYK, 1850-1937
On September 14 the founder and first president of the
republic of Czechoslovakia died at Prague. Thomas Garrigue
Masaryk was a great humanitarian, a great philosopher and
teacher, a great democrat. Today even more than at the time it
was written, his ringing defense of democracy (in his book The
Making of a State, 1927), is a sign for free men everywhere to
bind upon the hand: "I defend democracy against dictatorial
absolutism whether the right to dictate be claimed by the
proletariat, by state or by church. . . . Democracy, say its op-
ponents, contemptuously, consists of perpetual compromise. Its
partisans admit the impeachment and take it as a compliment.
. . . Democracy, conceived as tolerant cooperation, signifies the
acceptance of what is good, no matter from what quarter it may
come."
Dr. Masaryk and his young republic have always been espe-
cially close to American hearts. Not only had he warm personal
connections with this country; the United States was, as he
said, the pattern for the new state in its laws, its mode of govern-
ment, even its business methods. The development of Czecho-
slovakia was the subject of two special issues of our own publica-
tion, one on the Prague survey in 1921; the other in 1930 at
the time of Dr. Masaryk's eightieth birthday, when the constitu-
tion of Czechoslovakia was ten years old. The man and the
land were one story. He was in truth father of his country.
OCTOBER 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 10
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Liberty in an Insecure World
I— THE TEMPER OF OUR TIMES
by HAROLD J. LASKI
In the first of two articles on the world-wide threat to democracy a distin-
guished student of human affairs discusses the decline of freedom in the
post-war years.
IN THE LAST SEVEN YEARS THE CONDITION OF LIBERTY HAS
visibly deteriorated over most of the civilized world. The
advent of Herr Hitler to power in Germany in 1933 is
only the most far-reaching example of a wide and pro-
found attack upon freedom and political democracy. Even
in countries like France there have been moments when
public liberty has been gravely threatened by the forces of
reaction; and if there has seemed a happier record in
Great Britain, Scandinavia and the United States, no one
is entitled to any certainty about the future of freedom
there. There are few serious thinkers who doubt that if
the present grave uncertainties in the international field
lead to a new major conflict, there is little prospect that
freedom will survive.
What H. G. Wells has termed the "raucous voices" seem
able, over vast areas of mankind, to dragoon men to their
will. They dismiss freedom of thought as worthless. They
forbid freedom of association. The normal rule of law is
bent to the service of their arbitrary discretion. They re-
fuse respect to international obligation. They impose re-
strictions, unthinkable a generation ago, upon freedom of
movement. They abandon ideals of social reform and indi-
vidual happiness in the search, at any cost, for power.
They have revived the law of hostages. They have been
guilty of cruelties so gross, of infamies so unspeakable, that
ordinary men have bowed their heads in shame at the very
mention of their crimes. In a sense far more profound
than any to which Louis XIV or Napoleon could venture
to claim they have exacted an admission that they are the
state; and they have compelled a worship of, and a service
to, its compulsions unknown to Western civilization since
the Dark Ages.
In large degree, their power has been built upon the
scientific organization of terror; men will not easily be led
to protest when death and torture and imprisonment are
the penalty for its utterance. But what has been singular
in these times is that admiration for the dictators has not
been confined to men who have little alternative but to
proffer it. Even in the countries where freedom has not
yet been overthrown, there have been found citizens either
willing to condone these outrages, or, at least, to insist
that they are not our concern. They have dismissed their
brutalities as trivial alongside the achievements they have
been able to organize. The methods of terrorism which,
when used in Soviet Russia, provoked them to war and
boycott, they watch without undue indignation as the
necessary price of a social order of which they approve
The destruction of German freedom is only the most
dramatic example of a general stream of tendency which
has swept over Europe in these years. Austria and Italy,
Greece and the Balkans have had a similar, if less intense,
experience. Japan has become, to all intents and purposes,
a fascist power driven by the lust of imperial dominion,
and in close spiritual alliance with Italy and Germany.
The South American countries remain, with the solitary
exception of Mexico, wedded to dictatorship in some more
or less extreme form. And even those countries which still
enjoy political democracy are exercised about its future.
There are significant fascist movements in France and
Belgium. It is not improbable that the avoidance of a seri-
ous fascist movement in Great Britain has meant not so
much devotion to freedom as that, since 1931, the Labor
movement has been unable, or unwilling, to threaten
seriously the present structure of social life.
IN THE UNITED STATES, A GRAVE BATTLE is BEING WAGED BE-
tween those who seek to maintain for property an un-
limited dominion over political power, and those who, like
the President, have sought to limit that dominion in the
interest of the masses. Not only has it subjected the Con-
stitution to immense strain, it has also produced, in men
like the late Senator Long and Father Coughlin, typical
examples of fascist demagogy whom a slight shift in the
political landscape might easily bring to positions of great
significance. It is important that the central battle in the
American scene turns upon the right of labor to bargain
collectively with its employers through organizations of its
own choosing; and it is further significant that, even after
more than four years' support for labor from the Presi-
dent of the United States, the outcome of the battle should
remain uncertain. Meanwhile, it is relevant to observe that
the enactment by Congress of social legislation most of
which has been a commonplace in Great Britain for two
or three decades has brought upon the President a volume
505
of hatred from the rich unequaled in its intensity since
the Civil War. His effort to make the power of property
subject to social control has opened abysses in American
life the crossing of which may yet involve a revolutionary
crisis in the history of the nation.
There are, no doubt, oases in this desert of declining
freedom. But nothing so much indicates the temper of our
times as the civil war, now just over a year old, in Spain.
It is not merely the savage ferocity with which it has been
waged. It is not merely, either, that the old privileged
classes, army, aristocracy, church, united in a conspiracy
to overthrow the democratically elected constitutional gov-
ernment of Spain. It is vital to realize that this conspiracy
has the support of Germany and Italy both of whom were
parties to its inception and development. It is vital, also,
that when, in an effort to stave off the threat, implicit in
the Spanish struggle, of European war, France and Great
Britain sought to impose a non-intervention agreement
upon the powers, the rulers of Italy and Germany who
accepted it have throughout evaded its fulfilment; the
only effective result has been the denial to democratic
Spain by the democratic powers of its right as a consti-
tutional government to purchase arms abroad. It has had
assistance from Soviet Russia in the period before the sig-
nature of the non-intervention agreement; and, in matters
like medical relief and similar humanitarian measures, it
has had the sympathetic encouragement of organized labor
in all the free countries of the world. In the ranks of its
armies, also, there have fought nobly some twenty thou-
sand volunteers who risked their lives for the cause of
freedom. But of organized aid from the democratic states
democratic Spain has had none. They have left it to be
the theater of a carefully planned and deliberately execu-
ted fascist maneuver.
IN 1919 IT APPEARED, NOT LESS TO THE VANQUISHED THAN TO
the victors, that democracy and international peace had
become part of the settled habits of mankind. Defeated
Germany took to itself in the Weimar Constitution a form
of state into which there was written every vital princi-
ple of liberal constitutionalism; and the covenant of the
League of Nations awakened the enthusiastic devotion
of the common people, not least of organized labor, all
over Europe. In the Germany of 1937 there is none to offer
the Weimar Constitution even the tribute of regretful .
memory; and none of the powers today has any confi-
dence that the covenant of the league is, on a realist view,
a serious protection against disaster. Internally, as exter-
nally, we have become involved in an intense conflict for
power which threatens our destruction. The veiled war-
fare of class within the state, the imminent threat of con-
flagration without, these are attendant upon every major
item of our policies. Never has economic nationalism been
so intense; never has the state control of individual action
been so pervasive. How can we explain so drastic a re-
versal of the hopes with which the post-war period began ?
This, at least, is certain. Ours is a period of which the
major characteristic is insecurity. As always, it has bred
in the hearts of men those fears and hates which are in-
compatible with freedom. For freedom can exist only
where there is tolerance; where there is room for, willing-
ness to admit, the prospect of compromise through rational
discussion. There has hardly been such an atmosphere in
our time. In part that is due to the still unquieted im-
pulses of violence to which the war gave its sanction.
It made power for millions synonymous with right.
Insecurity was not born of the war; the war was itself
a supreme expression of the insecurity which lay at the
basis of our social system. For the war was not the out-
come of a deliberately evil choice by the statesmen of any
country. It was born of what Lowes Dickinson has well
termed the international anarchy; and this, in its turn, was
rooted in competing economic systems driven by their
inner logic to obtain by war objectives they could not
reach, or could not reach rapidly enough, by peaceful
means. War in 1914, as now, had become the supreme
instrument of national policy; and what we have learned,
above all, from the experience of the league is that the
latter organization cannot fulfill any of its major purposes
so long as its members are sovereign states. For the su-
preme need of our time is cosmopolitan law-making; and
the essence of sovereignty is that those who possess it
remain, save by their own wills, bound by the law. This
they scrutinize in terms of their selfish interests merely;
whether it be tariff levels or labor standards, freedom of
migration or the volume of armament, they conceive their
policy in terms of the power they deem themselves to
require for the objectives, immediate or remote, they may
be called upon to defend. And these objectives, for the
most part, are set by the implications of an economic sys-
tem based upon the profit motive. The class in society
which owns the instruments of economic power uses the
state it dominates to facilitate its success to profit. Its
method may be direct, as when Italy deliberately wills
the conquest of Abyssinia, or Japan separates Manchukuo
by force from the empire of China; or it may be indirect,
as when Germany supports General Franco in order to
obtain access to the rich mineral deposits of Spain.
But the international anarchy is, in its turn, merely a
reflection of national malaise. The expansion of industry
had brought a new class to political power. They climbed
to authority in the name of freedom; and they were able
to ally themselves with the working class to obtain their
ends. The price of their victory was the establishment of
capitalist democracy. The revolution so affected meant
that the working class was able to use the franchise to
exact concessions of material well-being from the owners
of the instruments of production. The recognition of trade
unions, the right to workmen's compensation, the limi-
tation of the hours of labor, regulations seeking safety
and sanitation in mine and factory, systems of social in-
surance and national education, these, to take examples
only, were the price paid by capitalists to the working
class for their cooperation in the overthrow of a social
control exercised by a landed aristocracy. Broadly speak-
ing, the price was paid with relative cheerfulness so long
as the new society was in process of expansion. The prob-
lems of the new society became more complex when the
continuance of expansion, by each national state, became
increasingly difficult. At that stage every new popular
demand became a threat to privilege. Capitalism in-
creasingly found itself in a situation where every advance
in social well-being endangered the power of its owners
to compete in the markets of the world. It either had to
give way before the power of numbers seeking the demo-
cratic ownership and control of the means of production,
or it had to move to the suppression of democracy as a
principle of life incompatible with its own essence.
The war did not create this incompatability; it merely
sharpened its contours more intensely. Through the Rus-
506
SURVEY GRAPHIC
sian Revolution, it established a great national society
which stood as a decisive challenge to its own claims. It
reinforced economic nationalism, and thereby made the
ability to secure profit more difficult by the contradiction
it induced between the power to produce and the power
to penetrate the world market. The necessity of that pene-
tration, in its turn, involved an immense scientific revolu-
tion in the quest for cheaper costs; and this meant that
millions of men were thrown out of work and driven con-
sequently to look to the state for support. The war, fur-
ther, had two psychological repercussions of immense im-
portance. It awakened in the colonial peoples an intense
aspiration towards national freedom. The result of this
was a threat to imperial dominion which gravely sharp-
ened the insecurity of power. The need, moreover, to
win the war had led the belligerent states to offer great
promises of well-being at its close to the masses. They
created vast expectations which, after the war, the masses
not only expected to see fulfilled, but for the fulfillment of
which they were able strongly to press through the in-
stitutions of political democracy.
Reformist governments were costly; they nowhere com-
manded the confidence of business men habituated to
older ways of economic organization. It rapidly became
obvious that any serious steps to wholesale reconstruction
involved the abrogation of privileges inherent in the own-
ership of economic power. Those owners were no more
prepared to sacrifice their privileges than were their prede-
cessors in 1848 or 1789. They were driven increasingly
to throw overboard the principles of that liberalism they
had inherited from the expansionist phase of capitalism.
Trade unions became much more dangerous when they
were capable of embarking in a general strike. Socialist
parties were much more threatening when the masses
might be persuaded to entrust them with the direction of
the state. Freedom of speech, liberty of association, might
then easily mean not abstract argument only but actual
legislation. And that legislation would not only involve
a rising level of taxes, certain to fall mainly upon the
rich; it would mean, also, the continuous widening of
the field of socialized industry, the continuous abrogation
of privileges, the growth of an egalitarian society.
THE CONFLICT OF PARTIES IN THE DEMOCRATIC STATE, THAT IS,
changed both its nature and direction after the war. Un-
til 1919, socialist parties had either had no representation
of any moment in the legislatures of Western Europe,
or they had been appendages of liberal parties, able, as
in Great Britain, to exercise pressure upon their quasi-
allies but without the ability to determine policy in any
decisive way. The two major parties, whatever their dif-
ferences, were in agreement that the contours of economic
organization must remain fundamentally capitalist in char-
acter; that democratic government must always so operate
as to subordinate its objectives to the acceptance of this
major premise. After the war, the socialist party found
itself, if not the government, at least the alternative gov-
ernment; and since its demands set the pace of political
controversy, it followed that, so long as political democ-
racy was accepted, capitalist parties were counselled to
outbid the socialists by offering to the electorate costly
social reforms as the price of continuing in power. These
reforms were reflected in an increased cost of production
which threatened the power of capitalists to compete
abroad and even, in the absence of high tariff boundaries,
challenged their position in their own home market.
The result in Great Britain was the recognition of all
who lived by owning that, as against the menace of so-
cialism, their area of agreement far transcended their area
of difference. They were able to take advantage of finan-
cial panic to slip into power. From 1931 until the present
day they have used the machinery of the state to con-
solidate their position. Largely they have maintained
themselves in office by three means. Through a protective
tariff (at considerable cost to the export trades) they
have safeguarded the domestic market and, in a consider-
able degree, the imperial market also, for British pro-
ducers. They have slowed down the pace of social re-
form. They have utilized the deteriorating international
situation to embark upon a great program of rearma-
ment which is, in its economic effect, nothing so much
as an immense temporary expenditure upon public works.
They have, that is to say, temporarily stabilized the posi-
tion of capitalism. But they have wholly failed to cope
with the major causes of its contraction.
CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY IN GREAT BRITAIN is, AT LEAST, SOME-
thing like a century old; and the psychological condi-
tions are not yet present to permit of a surgical operation
to remove its contradictions being other than a dangerous
gamble. In Germany and Italy that was not the case.
Democracy was hardly rooted there. In each country, too,
there was profound economic disturbance after the war.
The rise of fascism in both countries was essentially the
expression by capitalism of its sense that it could not
arrest the danger of socialist transformation within the
framework of democracy. In each case, a group made
large promises to the masses of material welfare based on
anti-capitalist action. In each case, also, that group was
financed by big business and made its appropriate alli-
ances with the army and the aristocracy. In each case,
again, it proceeded to take power by what was virtually
a coup d'etat. It then proceeded to suppress all democratic
institutions, most notably the trade unions and the so-
cialist parties. All political power was then concentrated
in its hands. Freedom of speech and association were
rigorously prohibited; terror was used to compel obedi-
ence to the new regime.
Attention has been withdrawn from domestic griev-
ance by concentration on a spirited foreign policy abroad.
Italy has followed the path of imperialist adventure;
Germany, with a great armament program, has started
a race for international preparedness which threatens the
foundations of peace. She has (like Italy) withdrawn
from the League of Nations. She has broken interna-
tional treaties; and, at least twice in the four years since
the advent of Hitler to power, she has brought Europe
to the verge of war.
The dictatorships live by coercion; there is no way for
their overturn short of revolution. And it follows, logi-
cally, that since the purpose of the dictatorships has been
to suppress opposition to the claims of capitalism, their
disappearance will involve the transformation of the eco-
nomic system in which they have their being. No regime
which succeeds them may dare to risk the possibility of
counter-revolution. The violence by which capitalism has
overthrown democracy is certain to provoke in its turn
a proletarian dictatorship which will suffer no compro-
mise with its opponents. Italy and Germany may go
down, in a relatively brief period, in war; or, at long
OCTOBER 1937
507
last, they may be overthrown as a consequence of the in-
ability of their rulers to satisfy the material needs of the
masses. Whatever the occasion of their disruption, they
will have left, on both sides, a legacy of hate and passion
in the highest degree unlikely to render admissible for
a long period the normal habits of freedom.
A capitalist democracy, like Great Britain or the United
States, in each of which the democratic tradition has deep
historic roots, is clearly in a different position from coun-
tries in which, like Germany and Italy, it was both novel
and fragile. Yet it would be a dangerous prophecy to
urge that either will escape easily the fate that has attended
dictatorial countries. About nothing does passion accrete
so strongly as about matters of economic constitution. It
is not without significance that, in Great Britain and the
United States, hatred of, and affection for, the Soviet
Union has been largely a matter of economic status. It is
highly significant that both were impelled to seek the
overthrow of the Soviet Union in the first years of its
existence without having any such impulse in the case of
Germany or Italy, that neither has felt any obligation
to assist the democratic government of Spain. It is im-
portant, also, that in both of them the forces of capitalism
are highly integrated, that they have the self-confidence
which comes from the absence, so far, of serious chal-
lenge to their authority. Yet, in each of them, capitalists
remain in a state of nervous tension. Though all the
main instruments of power and propaganda are in their
hands, they are less able than at any time since the close
of the Napoleonic wars to discuss the issues calmly.
IN ENGLAND, MINISTERS OF THE CROWN HAVE OPENLY STATED
that a Labor victory would be followed by a deliberate
organization of a flight of capital abroad; though they
must have known that the coincidence of a Labor gov-
ernment with financial panic was the worst possible har-
binger of peace. Others in authority have even argued that
the veto of the Crown might be revived as a weapon in
the conflict with the Labor party. And to all this there
must be added the temper indicated by the Trades Dis-
putes Act of 1927 — the first legislation hostile to trade
unionism since 1799 — the Incitement to Disaffection Act
of 1934, the militarization of the police, the savage sen-
tences inflicted on the Haworth miners, the imprison-
ment of Tom Mann for refusal to find securities against
a disturbance for which, had it occurred, he would not
have been responsible. That it has been necessary to create
in these last years a special body to watch against the
invasion of civil liberties is significant.
In the United States, the dramatic experiment of Presi-
dent Roosevelt has made the inner conflict between capi-
talism and democracy more overt in character than it has
been in Great Britain. There has been nothing of socialist
innovation in his measures. What is remarkable about
them is not merely the volume of hate they have evoked
from members of the possessing class, though that is re-
markable enough. What is remarkable, rather, is the reve-
lation they have involved of the habits of American capi-
talists when their record as the controllers of the national
wealth is examined. It is not an exponent of socialism
but so eminent an economist as John Maynard Keynes
who writes of the habits of Wall Street that "when the
capital development of a country becomes the by-product
of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-
done." Anyone who reads the record of the American
508
labor spy, of the activities of the hired armies of thugs
employed by business men in industrial disputes, of the
gigantic scale upon which tax evasion is practiced by
eminent financial leaders, of the opposition of college
presidents and cardinals of the Church to such elemen-
tary decencies as the prohibition of child labor, will won-
der exactly what habits American capitalism will display
if and when its authority is seriously challenged. And to
all this must be added the grim fact that, for four years
at least of President Roosevelt's tenure of office, the Su-
preme Court acted as nothing so much as an annex of
Wall Street. "I cannot believe," wrote Mr. Justice Holmes
in 1930 of the way in which the Court treated the Four-
teenth Amendment, "that the amendment was intended
to give us carte blanche to embody our economic or moral
beliefs in its prohibitions." But the habits of the Court
in its handling of the New Deal legislation seemed to
suggest that the main intent of the Constitution was to
give authority to its judges to treat congressional statutes
in accordance with the "economic or moral beliefs" of
five out of its nine members.
The stark fact is that, both in Great Britain and in the
United States, so long as capitalism was in a prosperous
condition, the harmonization of its inner principle with
the logic of democracy was no difficult matter. There
was respect for liberty because there was no irresolvable
conflict between the demands of property and the inter-
ests of society. But so soon as that conflict came, so soon
even as it threatened, the inherent contradiction between
capitalism and democracy became apparent. The owners
of the instruments of production, there as elsewhere, are
not prepared to surrender the privileges dependent upon
ownership. If democracy stands in the way, for them it is
so much the worse for democracy. The liberties of democ-
racy, they say, mean a threat to law and order; they
put power in the hands of the unsuccessful; they mean
inefficiency, corruption, license.
ALL OF THESE ARE, OF COURSE, NO MORE THAN THE RATION-
alizations of passion in a panic. But do not let us forget
that they are the rationalizations of a panic at once con-
vinced and armed. Henry Ford's hostility to organized
labor, however ignorant, is sincere. And behind men like
Mr. Ford there are not only the great army of owners;
there are also the men like Mr. Hearst and his English
analogues to whom victory is more important than peace.
If democracy will not tolerate much longer the poverty
and unemployment which Mr. Keynes has told us is
"rightly associated with present-day capitalistic individu-
alism," then they are prepared for the destruction of
democracy. They will represent the demands of socialism
as incompatible with the national welfare. They will be
saving the people from itself.
Whatever the basis upon which they justify their action
two primary facts will remain. The working classes will
have been deprived of the institutions by and through
which they have defended their standard of life; and the
coercive power of the state will remain wholly at the dis-
posal of the possessing class. And it will be necessary, in
order to defend the new dispensation, to deprive its
critics of the right freely to persuade their fellows that
the democratic way is a better road to salvation. For any
people that has once enjoyed even a partial opportunity
to affirm its own essence can only be driven by coercion
into the acceptance of silence.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Harris and Ewing
Dr. Wang: Ambassador from China
by BEULAH AMIDON
/ know that birds fly! I know that fish swim! But who can measure the ways of the dragon? — Confucius
THE EMBASSY OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA AT WASHINGTON
is an imposing Victorian mansion, set in park-like grounds.
Its rooms are high and square, with tall, narrow windows,
many mirrors, elaborate mantels and moldings. Just such
a house, with just such heavy, cushioned furniture might
be pointed out as the home of the leading citizen in
almost any prosperous midwestern American city. And
yet the Embassy itself has ceased to be an American place.
Hangings of subtly colored silk, occasional ornaments of
porcelain, ivory and jade, some unusual screens and small
tables, the arrangement of the rooms — it is hard to say
what is "different," and yet the whole pattern of the rather
ugly house has been changed until it seems in fact — as well
as by courtesy — "the soil of China." It is a singularly ap-
propriate setting for Dr. Cheating T. Wang, the present
Ambassador from China. Almost all his life has been
touched by American influences. And yet in spite of his
occidental contacts and education, his easy familiarity
with our speech and customs, he has kept the "long view"
of his people.
"China is an old nation," he says. "She has seen seven-
teen dynasties come — and go. As each passed, there was a
period of chaos. That was true of the last, the Tsing
dynasty, otherwise known as the Manchu, as it was of all
the rest. But from that last time of disorder, instead of a
new dynasty came revolution and a republic. And now
China is again united."
Dr. Wang came as Ambassador to the United States in
June, less than a month before the Lukouchiao "incident"
put to bitter test the strength of this new unity. It was by
OCTOBER 1937
no means his first American journey. After attending a
mission school in Shanghai and Pei-Yang University, this
son of humble Christian parents went for a year to Tokyo
as student and YMCA worker. A Chinese friend says of
him, "Even as a boy he was known as one who would
devote his life to social as well as public service and who
would open many doors." In 1907 he came to the United
States as a student, first to the University of Michigan,
then to Yale, where he received his degree, and a Phi
Beta Kappa key, in 1910. He spent a year in the Yale
Graduate School, but in the spring of 1911 he had to
return to China, called home by the rumblings of revo-
lution. In October the storm broke. The Manchus were
driven from the Dragon throne, and on New Year's Day,
1912, the Republic of China was established.
BEFORE HE LEFT CHINA THE YOUNG WANG CHENG-T'ING (IN
this country he prefers to use an American rendering of
his name) had been a member of a revolutionary organiza-
tion established by Sun Yat-sen. On his return from his
four American college years, he immediately flung him-
self into party activities. To him the most significant force
in the China of 1911, as in the China of today, was the
influence of Sun Yat-sen. Though Sun Yat-sen stepped
aside, insisting that Yuan Shih-kai, who was an experi-
enced administrator, take over the actual reins of govern-
ment, it was Dr. Sun's vision and leadership which turned
an anti-Manchu drive into a republican movement. And
since his death in 1925, Dr. Sun's "Last Will" in which he
formulated his "Three Principles of the People" has been
509
the mainspring of the growing Nationalist Party. These
Three Principles Dr. Sun defined as Nationalism — "na-
tional emancipation and racial equality"; Democracy —
"political rights for the people"; Socialism — "economic
rights for the peasants and workers."
"We must organize our people into one strong organic
group," Dr. Sun urged as he lay dying. "We must revive
our creative power, the power which we once had in
inventing new things." And he added, "We must also
go out to learn what is best in the West."
C. T. Wang helped organize the provisional govern-
ment established in the winter of 1911-12, and was vice-
minister and acting minister of industry and commerce
when the first cabinet was formed. When finally a parlia-
ment was convoked in Peking, a year later, he was vice-
president of China's first senate. When Yuan Shih-kai
dissolved the Kuomintang (Dr. Sun's party) as seditious,
eliminating its parliamentary representatives, Dr. Wang
retired for four years from political affairs serving as sec-
retary of the national committee of the YMCA. With the
death of Yuan, Dr. Wang was recalled to public life, in
a country seemingly hopelessly split into "North China"
and "South China," and with smaller and often very vio-
lent factions creating still further division and uncertainty.
At this time he began the long diplomatic career which
has made him known as one of China's most skillful
representatives the world over.
During the World War he was a leading advocate of
Chinese participation on the side of the Allies. While his
government finally declared war and sent labor battalions,
the powerful northern militarists refused to dispatch
troops. Dr. Wang assisted in organizing three divisions in
Canton, and went to Washington to arrange for their
transport to the front. Before the plans were completed,
the armistice was declared. "I think it was one of the few
times in his entire life when Wang wept," a friend said;
"he felt that if Chinese troops could have fought in
Europe, it would have meant the end of the unequal
treaties."
China did not sign the Versailles treaty, though both
North and South were represented at the parley. It was
only at the conference table that China learned that in the
diplomatic horsetrading of the war, Japan had been
promised the German concessions in Shantung. China's
dismayed arguments were in vain, and both Lu Cheng-
hsiang, representing the North, and C. T. Wang, repre-
senting the South, refused to sign.
THE NEXT YEARS WERE CROWDED ONES. ON HIS RETURN TO
China, Dr. Wang founded an export and import com-
pany at Shanghai, and the Hua Feng Cotton Mill Com-
pany. He served as director general of the Shantung
Rehabilitation Commission; as China's chief representative
on the Sino-Japanese Joint Commission to settle the
Shantung question; as managing director of the Liu Ho
Kai Coal Mining Company; director general of the Lung-
Hai Railway; finance minister; member of the central
committee of the Kuomintang; president of Chung Kuo
University at Peiping.
Even in the midst of today's anxieties, Dr. Wang can
pause to speak with quiet enthusiasm of still another area
of activity — roadbuilding. One of the barriers to any na-
tional unity of China's vast territory has been inadequate
means of communication — not only a lack of railways, but
of highways, even of dirt roads. During the time Dr.
Wang was head of the national railway and road move-
ment, highway mileage in China doubled. Shensi province,
for example, built 2000 miles of new highways between
1932 and 1934, while relatively backward Hunan built or
rebuilt 2300 miles of motor roads. In September 1936,
according to the China Weekly Review, the Canton-
Hankow railroad opened, "comparable in economic and
cultural importance to the first transcontinental railway
of U.S.A." Dr. Wang explains: "The development of
railways and highways in China is planned as one unit.
They do not parallel one another as has happened in this
country, as a necessary result of the fact that railways came
first and then hard-surfaced roads. We can build main
railroad lines, and highways and smaller roads as feeders
to them, so that people and goods can travel short dis-
tances to and from the trains by cart or by motor. Such
a planned network does not drop upon the map of any
country, complete. China finds that no railroad under a
thousand miles pays. One thousand miles of railroad is
not built in a minute. China contemplates many thou-
sands. And how much toil and planning and progress can
be destroyed almost in the blink of an eye by a bombing
squadron or a long range gun!"
BUT BEYOND HIS WORK AS ROADBUILDER, INDUSTRIALIST, PARTY
leader, educator, Dr. Wang is chiefly known, at home and
abroad, for his achievements in the years he served as
foreign minister, the years in which the unequal treaties
were wiped out, the end of the extra-territoriality conces-
sions definitely set.
The "unequal treaties" go back to 1843, and the terms
exacted of China by Great Britain after the Opium War.
Under them, the treaty powers received most-favored-
nation treatment from China, without undertaking to
grant China equal privileges in return.
Such one-sided bargains would be resented by any peo-
ple as affronts to national dignity. But in China the "un-
equal treaties" cut deeper even than this, into the very
fabric of Chinese morality. Inwoven with Chinese philos-
ophy, explicit in the two great Chinese religions, Con-
fucianism and Taoism, is the idea of reciprocity, of give
and take in all human relations, individual and social.
Said Confucius, "A man who has jen [a sense of fellow-
ship] wishing to establish himself, will have others estab-
lished; wishing himself to succeed, will have others suc-
ceed." The ramifications of the philosophy are almost
without limit. But as Paul Monroe, American friend and
interpreter of China, has pointed out, one practical appli-
cation is that "the sense of violation of this feeling of
fellowship, of reciprocity, of these fundamental moral
qualities, gives a significance to the condemnation of un-
equal or unilateral treaties that is not apparent to the
westerner. To the Chinese, such action becomes the un-
pardonable social sin."
Immediately after the taking of Peiping by the Na-
tionalists in June 1928, the government demanded revision
of the unequal treaties. A statement by Dr. Wang as
foreign minister declared that the treaties already expired
were abrogated ipso facto; steps were to be taken to
abrogate unexpired treaties and to conclude new ones;
meanwhile, appropriate interim regulations would bridge
the gap between the expiration of the old treaties, the
conclusion of new agreements. Dr. Wang added that the
National Government had "always considered the abroga-
tion of all the unequal treaties and the conclusion of new
510
SURVEY GRAPHIC
treaties on the basis of equality and mutual responsibility
for territorial sovereignty as the most pressing problem of
the present time." One by one between 1928 and 1931 the
new treaties, making the most-favored nation clause recip-
rocal, were concluded. Japan was the only country which
resisted China's wishes.
Allied with the unequal treaties as a source of China's
resentment toward the western world was the privilege of
extra-territoriality which means, as first defined in a treaty
between China and the United States in 1844: "the for-
eign resident in China is subject to no provisions of the
law of China, either as to his person or his property
(except in the tenure of land the lex loci must apply) but
at all times and in all places is entitled to the protection
of his own national law administered by his own national
officials." This provision was broadened and reinforced
in succeeding treaties, and by the actual practices that grew
up under such treaty clauses. As a Foreign Policy Asso-
ciation report points out, the resulting system of foreign
law courts, postoffices and police in Chinese territory
"owes its legal existence to concessions made by China in
response to demands by the western powers." Twelve na-
tions signed the report of the Washington Conference
commission on extra-territoriality in 1926, agreeing that
as soon as China put into effect "the principal items"
recommended by the commission, these nations would
undertake "a progressive scheme" of abolishing their extra-
territorial rights. No effort was made at the time the
unequal treaties were abrogated to end extra-territoriality
abruptly. The Washington Conference commission's find-
ings had shown the unwisdom of such a step. But between
1928 and 1931 great progress was made by the national
government in codifying the laws, in establishing more
orderly and exact law-making procedure, and in extending
China's system of modern courts, prisons and detention
houses in line with the recommendations of the report.
Further, a definite time — 1949 — was fixed for the final
relinquishment of extra-territoriality by the treaty powers.
A few — notably Soviet Russia — voluntarily abandoned the
privilege as early as 1924.
Dr. Wang still held the foreign minister's portfolio in
the Nationalist Government at the time of the Man-
churian "incident" in 1931. He desired to take a strong
diplomatic position, but he was without military backing
at home, without moral backing from the League of
Nations. As China began to realize the full significance
of Tokyo's Manchurian program, popular resentment
against the government's attitude expressed itself in mis-
taken resentment against the foreign minister. Dr. Wang
was criticized, condemned, even attacked by a student
mob. His public career seemingly at a humiliating end, he
retired from office.
BY A SERIES OF THOSE TURNS IN EVENT AND IN POPULAR SENTI-
ment to which a statesman in China, as elsewhere, must
continually adapt himself, Dr. Wang was recently recalled
to the government service. The political scene had shifted,
time had clarified earlier judgment, the Nationalists
needed above all able and experienced diplomats. Dr.
Wang is today an influential leader of the Kuomintang,
a personal friend of Chiang Kai-shek and of the finance
minister, H. H. Kung. He is now accepted in the student
groups where only a few years ago he was bitterly
denounced. He was sent as the new Ambassador to the
United States, a leading Chinese journalist told me, "be-
cause he is one of the outstanding men of China, and the
government wishes to have the best possible representation
in Washington."
Interviewed by the Transradio Press Service in late
August, Dr. Wang stated his country's goal in interna-
tional relations thus:
"China's objective, as regards her foreign relations, can
be summarized in one word, and that is 'independence.'
China believes in the maintenance of friendly and cordial
relations with other nations on a footing of complete
equality and reciprocity. She desires to promote interna-
tional commerce and trade, but without any political
strings attached thereto. She advocates with the govern-
ment of the United States, as expressed by Secretary of
State Hull, 'maintenance of peace,' 'national and interna-
tional self-restraint,' and 'abstinence by all nations from
use of force in pursuit of policy and from interference in
the internal affairs of other nations.' "
HE REFERRED TO THAT FORMULATION WHEN I ASKED HIM
what, as he sees it, is the difference in direction of the
foreign policies of China and Japan, and added:
"Japan today wants a united China on her side; other-
wise a weak, divided China. China will never agree to
either alternative. The method Japan has taken to reach
her goal has had a third effect which was not expected.
It has ranged a unified China against Japan."
The Ambassador's quiet voice deepened as he spoke of
the developments of the past twenty-six years— the growth
of modern industry, the revival of trade, the plans for
education and public health and the heartening degree
to which they have already been put into effect, the new
railways and roads. With a weary little gesture he added :
"So many of the great gains of my country are in peril
today. China has a very long history. A great many times
she has seen the things she values threatened, and has
seen them survive. But modern methods of fighting mean
unprecedented peril to civilization — so much can be swept
away in one moment "
He gazed unseeingly for a moment at the ugly cold
fireplace before which he sat. Then his eyes lifted to the
windows, where green branches moved between hangings
of dull bronze silk.
"You have asked me about the relationship of your
country to mine as I see it at this time," he said. "Of
course on this I do not now speak as the representative of
my government, but as a free individual. My hope is that
the United States will throw her moral force on the side
of China. Of course, I and those of my countrymen who
share my point of view — we do not expect your country
to relieve us of our responsibility to fight Japan. But above
all things, we hope to see the United States take a stand
on the moral issues of this struggle."
Dr. Wang did not attempt to define for me these "moral
issues" as he sees them. He referred again to the progress
of the recent years, the interrupted plans, the task ahead.
But he spoke without bitterness and without dismay, as
though China's long past gave some serene hidden mean-
ing to the troubled present, the obscure future. "The ways
of the dragon" cannot be followed in the short view. And
I came away thinking that the Ambassador of the Repub-
lic of China sees for his country the direction marked out
by an emperor of the thirteenth century:
"Productivity without Possession; Activity without
Aggression; Development without Domination."
OCTOBER 1937
511
A Chinese Artist of Today
by MARJORIE H. E. BENEDICT
YANG LINC-FU, A CHINESE ARTIST AND POET OF DISTINCTION
who is now in Berkeley, Calif, for a time, is saddened by the
destruction of many of the art treasures in northern China
where she has lived most of her life. It is feared that many
of her own works of art, including her portraits of Chinese
rulers, owned by the government and hung in the National
Museum of Peiping during festivals, may have been con-
fiscated or. destroyed.
Miss Yang was in charge of the Chinese exhibition at the
Canadian Jubilee Exposition in Vancouver last year. Recently
a number of her paintings have been on exhibit in the
Berkeley Women's City Club and International House, where
they aroused great interest. Because of war conditions Miss
Yang's return to China has been delayed and she is assisting
the Chinese in America to raise funds for the relief of refugees
in China. In a letter sent late in August to Madame Chiang
Kai-shek she dwelt on the distress of her countrymen in the
United States over the situation in China and on their behalf
offered the suggestion:
"The war lines are spreading so widely that over here we
wonder if it is not desirable to remove as many as possible
of the refugees to some more remote place. Could not the
gunboats, river boats and buses be used for the transportation
of the people, with police protection from mobs?"
Miss Yang comes from a family of standing in Wusih.
She had an excellent education in Chinese literature, history
and philosophy. She studied the work of the great Chinese
artists in the museums. Most of her own painting is in water
color on silk or bamboo paper, but she has been instrumental
in preserving and stimulating the ancient Chinese art of
finger painting.
She has spent eight years in museum work. She was cura-
tor of the National Museum of Peiping. In 1929 she was
sent by the government to establish the museum at Mukden
and the following year became president of the Harbin
Museum, the richest in all China.
The government commissioned Miss Yang to paint ninety-
six life-size portraits of the ancient Chinese Emperors and
Empresses. Examples of these reproduced on the next three
pages show how faithfully she has followed the traditions of
Chinese painting.
The portrait of Tang Tai Tuo, on the opposite page, is
painted in the manner of the great art period of the Tang
Tai Dynasty. The portrait employs a bold style, with no em-
phasis on background. The figure in a vivid scarlet robe is
done with great vigor.
The portrait of Ming Tuu Chung, page 514, follows the
example of the luxurious art of the Ming Dynasty. The throne
is painted with great detail, the figure of the Emperor is
emphasized by the subtle use of color.
The portrait of the late Empress Dowager, page 515, is
impressive for the detailed design, minute yet strong paint-
ing of color, and the portrayal of character.
The artist spent the large sum of money received for the
portraits in establishing a College of Fine Arts in Peiping,
where teachers are trained in the traditional arts of China.
Miss Yang, president of the college, has devoted much of her
time in this country to the study of our methods of art
education.
Her landscapes are painted with delicacy and detail. Poems
accompany many of these paintings; and a volume of these
has been published. All her poems, like the two which appear
on this page, are filled with a philosophical understanding
of nature and express desire for a world at peace.
YANG LING-FU, ARTIST-POET
My Refuge — the Jade Mountain
I took refuge in the Jade Mountain,
wandering
plucking the fragrant grasses.
But my heart was sore
for others who suffered
the horrors of a cruel war,
the tortures of fire and water,
While I wandered in a Paradise
under the shadow of My Jade
Mountain.
To
The War Lords
Life is transient as a sunbeam.
Why should you hate each other?
You are brothers of the same blood —
Why harm each other?
Why bruise your wings?
You will need them for loftier flights —
Let there be peace.
512
TANG TAI TUO
513
MING TUU CHUNG
514
THE EMPRESS DOWAGER
515
Essence of the Steel Strike
by PIERCE WILLIAMS
Little Steel and CIO, and the lessons of their showdown, as seen by
an observer who visited most of the strike fronts during and immedi-
ately after the midsummer conflict.
1919, MAY 20. JUDGE ELBERT H. GARY, CHAIRMAN, UNITED
States Steel Corporation, in reply to a request for a con-
ference from the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel
and Tin Workers: "As you %now, we do not confer, nego-
tiate with or combat labor unions as such."
1937, JULY 2. The special Federal Steel Mediation Board,
in its final report: "We further believe that the refusal
of the four companies [Bethlehem, Youngstown, Repub-
lic, Inland] to enter into any agreement with the Steel
Workers' Organizing Committee, regardless of the num-
ber of employes whom it actually represents, which could
be demonstrated by a secret ballot election, is not the way
to industrial peace." [Italics ours.]
In September 1919, failing to soften Judge Gary's anti-
union stand, the AF of L called a general steel strike.
Its objective was union recognition and the eight-hour
day, the twelve-hour day being then general. With the
calling off of the strike in January 1920, the federation
acknowledged defeat. The report of the special mediation
board, quoted above, summarizes its efforts to settle the
Midwest steel strike, launched on May 26 of this year and
called off on July 6. Again the issue was union recogni-
tion, and once more the outcome was defeat for the union
—this time, however, not the AF of L, but John L. Lewis'
rival Committee for Industrial Organization.
The failure of the two strikes, and the stand-off atti-
tude taken by steel company heads in both instances,
afford one of those deadly parallels that is deceptive in
gauging the distance travelled in our handling of labor
disputes over the eighteen years spanning the two epi-
sodes. That can best be measured in terms of changing
attitudes and behavior in dealing with problems. When
Judge Gary spoke, it was with authority not only for the
Colossus of the steel industry, but for its competitors, large
and small. Last summer, not only had the United States
Steel Corporation signed up with the SWOC and the
Amalgamated Association before the seven-state steel
strike began but so had some forty other companies,
among them one of the country's largest independent pro-
ducers, Jones and Laughlin.
The Inland Steel Company strike ended with a settle-
ment arranged through Governor Townsend of Indiana.
Inland Steel, unlike the other companies involved in the
strike, has nearly all its manufacturing operations con-
centrated at one location, Indiana Harbor, Ind. When the
strike was called on May 26 the CIO members walked
out, and the management closed down the plant until
the Townsend settlement became operative on July 18.
This provided only that the men would be reemployed
without discrimination between strikers and non-strikers,
and that when an employe has a grievance which cannot
be satisfactorily settled through the machinery set up by
the corporation's statement of labor policy (promulgated
before the strike began) the matter would be referred to
the Indiana Commissioner of Labor. As part of its labor
policy Inland, before the strike, had agreed to recognize
the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee as the collec-
tive bargaining agency for those of its employes who are
members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel
and Tin Workers, and not to interfere with the right
of its employes to join that association. Meanwhile, the
question whether refusal to sign a contract (as distinct
from willingness to negotiate on terms of agreement) is
an "unfair labor practice" under the Wagner Act has been
brought before the National Labor Relations Board, cre-
ated by that act.
Bethlehem Steel's anti-union attitude is another matter.
For example, at the Johnstown plant there has been no
union since 1885, when employes of the Cambria Steel
works were ruthlessly discharged for their temerity in
joining the Knights of Labor. Johnstown business men
have traditionally prided themselves on the fact that union
organizers were met at the railroad station and told to
keep moving.
ALTHOUGH BETHLEHEM HAS TWELVE STEEL PLANTS AT AS
many places in Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania,
only the Johnstown, Pa., plant was struck this spring, and
the walk-out there looks somewhat like a fluke, when
viewed in perspective. The cessation of work was not on
the issue of union recognition, as was the case with the
employes of Inland, Republic and Youngstown, but in
sympathy with the striking employes of the local rail-
road owned by the steel company. The evidence is that
no influential proportion of the Johnstown employes were
ready to strike, and the "back to work" movement was
apparently a strong and spontaneous one.
Bethlehem Steel's notion of collective bargaining, as
recorded in the Federal Steel Mediation Board's report,
shows how far its management has to go in order to be in
harmony with the spirit of the Wagner National Labor
Relations Act:
The Bethlehem Steel Corporation stated that under their
view of collective bargaining, they were required to meet with
the representatives of any of their employes; that they would
not question their authority, and that they would discuss with
them wages, hours and working conditions. The company
would later make its decision and if it involved a change in
any of these matters, they would give notice to all employes
through their printed bulletin, without any reference to the
union or other groups who had secured such a concession.
They stated that collective bargaining, in their judgment, did
not imply an arrival at any agreement, oral or written, with
any representatives of their employes.
This sort of "collective bargaining" is, of course, exactly
the kind which Bethlehem Steel has practiced for the last
516
SURVEY GRAPHIC
MONROE, MICH.,
JUNE 9-11
The photographs on this
page and the two pages
that follow show an agi-
tated community racked
by the dissension between
its pro- and anti-union
workers. Most of the public
took the side of the non-
strikers, organizing to rout
the CIO men and their
sympathizers. The imme-
diate situation was "han-
dled", but "that Monroe is
henceforth better prepared
to deal with its social
problems may be seriously
questioned"
Wide World
1. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee's picket line holds the road that is the only
approach to the mill of the Republic Steel Company
seventeen years with its own company union. It sounds
to the outside observer like saying "take it or leave it."
The relative ineffectiveness of the strike at the Ohio plants
of Youngstown Sheet and Tube and Republic Steel un-
questionably increased the difficulties of the Federal Steel
Mediation Board in dealing with the heads of the steel
companies. Whereas at Republic's four Cleveland plants
the strike was effective, its Buffalo plant was able to keep
working, and its two Alabama steel companies were not
"struck" at all. Its South Chicago plant, owing to the
presence of Chicago police under Captain Mooney in the
mills eight hours before the union even intended calling
the strike, was able to keep in partial operation. Investiga-
tion shows that it was the frustration of the strike by the
Chicago patrolmen that led to the Memorial Day demon-
stration in which unarmed workers were killed. Youngs-
town's small South Chicago plant, as
well as its large works adjoining Inland
Steel at Indiana Harbor, were com-
pletely shut down throughout the pe-
riod of the strike.
But there will be endless argument
among steel workers as to the effective-
ness of the strike at Youngstown's
plants at Youngstown and at Republic's
plants at Massillon, Canton and
Youngstown, and how much the pres-
ence of Ohio state militia interfered
with effective picketing by the SWOC
men. The determination expressed by
Tom Girdler and Frank Purnell to re-
open their Youngstown plants, not-
withstanding the formal request of the
Federal Steel Mediation Board to main-
tain the status quo for the twenty-four
or forty-eight hours that they believed
would prove vital to their efforts, is an
indication of the intransigent attitude
of these two companies in everything that had to do with
dealing with their employes.
Governor Townsend tried to help settle the strike in
the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant at Indiana Harbor.
Throughout these negotiations the company kept pro-
testing that it would make no agreement that involved
or affected the CIO and that conditions of employment
would be the same after the plant reopened. The governor
finally persuaded the CIO to withdraw the pickets, and
Youngstown resumed operations at Indiana Harbor.
Tom Girdler, as head of Republic, has been so much
publicized that it is easy to exaggerate his importance as
a spokesman. My belief is that he is neither more nor
less anti-union than Messrs. Grace, Weir or Purnell,
merely less guarded, more forthright in his pronounce-
ments. With the other companies Mr. Girdler protested
International News
2. The mayor's call for volunteers to break up the picket line is answered by
Legionnaires and other citizens
OCTOBER 1937
517
3. Non-union workers, police, deputies and vigilantes, with
union blockade of the road to the
against the "great amount of time that would be con-
sumed by grievance committees." Their real objection to
collective bargaining with bona fde unions was expressed
with engaging candor by Mr. Girdler to the Federal Steel
Mediation Board, when he said that he would not consent
to a term agreement because he believed it necessary for
the proper operation of his company that they should
be in position to meet the fluctuating price of steel by
wage variations if they became necessary. There you have
the "die-hard" attitude in a nutshell. Should prices of
steel go up, Mr. Girdler might concede wage increases;
should they go down, he would feel free to reduce wages,
without any time wasted conferring with the employes
whose earnings depended on the changes made.
In gauging the real difference in the behavior of steel
employers in the strikes of 1919 and 1937 it is necessary
to reckon with changes in the conduct of the labor forces
they have had to deal with. William Z. Foster, himself
active in the high command of the 1919 strike, was em-
phatic as its labor historian in blaming defeat on the
lukewarmness of the Amalgamated Association of Iron,
Steel and Tin Workers and the lack of zeal on the part
of the AF of L leadership. To his mind, the most
significant sign of its half-heartedness was the refusal of
the twenty-four unions which made up the National Com-
mittee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers to con-
tribute adequate funds. One explanation of the failure
to attempt any organization of the steel industry in the
next sixteen years lies in the structure of the AF of L
itself, in which power is retained in these affiliated na-
tional unions. It must be remembered that the craft
union cannot be twisted from a horizontal to a vertical
alignment without destroying it. The disunity in the 1919
strike was undoubtedly due to the inability of the leaders
of the twenty-four participating unions to discern how
they would incorporate newly won members into their
Acme
the help of gas, break up the
ill
respective unions. And it
may be doubted whethei
they ever fully accepted
the risk of creating a new
balance of power in the
AF of L itself by increas-
ing the Amalgamated's
membership by the 150,-
000 steel workers who
signed enrollment cards
in the course of the strike.
In the fall of 1935 John
L. Lewis decided that the
time had come to pick up
the challenge thrown
down by William Z. Fos-
ter after the 1919 steel
strike that American steel
workers could be union-
ized at any time the AF
of L sincerely wanted to
do so. Certain it is that
the logic of the recovery
situation called for large-
scale efforts to organize
the workers in the mass
production industries
along the same lines as
the United Mine Work-
ers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, that is, by
industry rather than by occupation or craft.
No one can charge the CIO conduct of the 1937 steel
strike with any lack of determined, enthusiastic and de-
voted leadership, either at the top, in the various regional
headquarters, or the local organizing offices. Why, then,
did the SWOC lose the strikes of 1937? Because once
•more there was a lack of unity in labor's ranks. In 1919
chis lay in the AF of L itself; in 1937 there has been
the wide-open split between the AF of L and the
CIO. True, many of the steel workers themselves re-
mained skeptical of the ability of the SWOC to win a
strike against the strong steel companies; they had recol-
lections of the crushing defeat of 1919, and memories of
many of the older men went back to the lost strikes of
1909 and 1901. My own observations, however, convince
me that it was the absence of AF of L support in
strategic steel centers — notably Youngstown, Massillon
and Canton— that brought about the weakening of the
strike and strengthened the "back to work" movement.
The split at the top ran down to cleavages between the
newer recruits to the CIO steel union and the older more
experienced craft unionists in their localities. I find it
difficult to believe that had the Ohio State Federation of
Labor and the local labor councils given the steel strike
whole-hearted support, it could have failed.
WHAT OF CHANGES IK GOVERNMENTAL ATTITUDES? HERE THE
contrast between the unfriendliness toward labor, verging
on hostility, of governors in the states affected by the steel
strikes of 1919, with the openly sympathetic moves made
by the 1937 governors of the same states, stands out
sharply. In the post-war strike, Pennsylvania and New
York state constabulary patrolled the steel towns with
the avowed purpose of helping the steel companies break
the strike. Not only were local "back to work" movements
518
SURVEY GRAPHIC
protected, but the importation of Negro strikebreakers
from the South was facilitated.
This year Governor Earle of Pennsylvania declared
martial law in Johnstown and sent state police there to
keep Bethlehem Steel's plant closed during the period of
federal mediation. Governor Davey of Ohio followed his
lead by detailing state militia to a similar task in the steel
town in which Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and
Tube plants were strike-bound. Both governors soon re-
versed their stand — Governor Earle by lifting the procla-
mation of martial law; Governor Davey by permitting
the troops to be used to protect the reopening of the plants
at Youngstown, Niles, Massillon and Canton — but their
initial action represented a veritable revolution in official
attitude. Governor Homer of Illinois contented him-
self with an invitation to the heads of the steel companies
with struck plants at South Chicago to confer with union
heads in his office; on the ground the striking steel work-
ers were left to the mercies of Mayor Kelly's Chicago
police. In Michigan the strike affected only one small
plant, that of Republic Steel at Monroe, and although
Governor Murphy sent state troops to Monroe to help
local officials protect the overwhelming majority of em-
ployes who wished to remain at work, his sympathetic
attitude toward collective bargaining had been demon-
strated in the motor strikes. In Indiana Governor Town-
send picked up the mediation issue where the federal
board had been compelled to drop it, finally helping bring
about the reopening of the large plants of Inland and
Youngstown located in his state, the Inland plants with
a pledge that there would be no discrimination in reem-
ployment as between strikers and non-strikers.
THE READER NEEDS NO REMINDER OF THE FRIENDLY ATTI-
tude of the Roosevelt administration towards labor. There
was President Roosevelt's suggestion early in the strike
that men willing to arrive at a bargain on any matter
ought not to object to putting their agreement into writ-
ing. But the reader may need to be reminded how little
President Wilson, notwith-
standing his philosophic
humanitarianism, was able
to effect in the strike of
1919. With all his presiden-
tial power, he could not
bring Judge Gary into a
conciliatory frame of mind.
Indeed, well-intentioned as
the wartime President in-
dubitably was toward the
AF of L, he unwit-
tingly contributed to the
hardening of public opin-
ion against the union side
when he requested the
postponement of the strike
until after his National In-
dustrial Conference, on
which he pinned his hopes
for settling issues between
capital and labor, had been
held. To this the AF of
L leader felt he could not
accede, as the "zero hour"
for the steel workers to
leave the mills all over the country had already been set.
Mr. Gompers' refusal was taken badly by the public, and
an unfriendly press played it up. Later on President Wil-
son felt constrained to authorize sending United States
troops, under General Leonard Wood, to Gary to patrol
the steel district. Their presence helped bolster up the steel
companies and the local authorities in the effort to keep
the mills running.
The Wagner National Labor Relations Act has been
discussed so much, particularly since its validation by the
Supreme Court last May, that it is easy to forget that it
is but the follower of earlier legislation evidencing the
Roosevelt administration's determination to strengthen
the bona fide unions in their efforts to extend collective
bargaining in unorganized industries. The labor relations
boards appointed by President Roosevelt under NRA
for the steel, textile and automobile industries did their
best to make section 7-a of the NRA "stick," but the in-
validation of the entire act by the Supreme Court ren-
dered their efforts futile.
The contrast in governmental attitudes between 1919
and 1937 may be summed up by saying that previous ad-
ministrations had taken the view that government was
bound to act as impartial umpire in a game in which the
rules as to the relative rights of capital and labor were
unalterably fixed; the attitude of the Roosevelt admin-
istration seems to be that under the changed conditions
of present-day capitalism, the rules need rewriting in
order to establish greater equality between the parties.
In conclusion, turn now to the behavior of communi-
ties directly affected by the strike of 1937 for clues to the
operation of that elusive but decisive factor in the settle-
ment of any major industrial dispute — public opinion.
Here some question marks will have to be erased before
we can be certain that real progress has been made
towards intellectual maturity in our handling of social
problems. First of all, the 1937 strike caused public opin-
ion to react differently in different places. Chicago and
Cleveland were but slightly (Continued on page 541)
Wide World
4. The approach to the mill now is in the hands of the non-union men and their sympathizers
and — the mill reopens
OCTOBER 1937
519
Combating Man's Destructive Urge
by KARL A. MENNINGER, M.D.
This brilliant explorer of the human mind, in a forthcoming book Man
Against Himself, discusses that catabolic half of man's nature, his will to die.
In the final chapter, here reproduced in part, he considers what psychiatry,
medicine and social science may do to help men combat their many forms of
self-destruction — war, crime, sickness, suicide.
IT WAS SIGMUND FREUD WHO FIRST STATED IN PSYCHOLOGICAL
terms the thesis of the life-and-death instincts — let us call
them the constructive and destructive tendencies of the
personality — which are in constant conflict and interaction
just as are similar forces in physics, chemistry and biology.
To create and to destroy, to build up and to tear down,
these are the anabolism and catabolism of the personality,
no less than of the cells and the corpuscles — the two direc-
tions in which the same energies exert themselves.
In the end each man kills himself in his own selected
way, fast or slow, soon or late. We all feel this, vaguely;
there are so many occasions to witness it before our eyes.
The methods are legion. Some of them interest surgeons,
some of them interest lawyers and priests, some of them
interest heart specialists, some of them interest sociologists.
All of them must interest the man who sees the person-
ality as a totality and medicine as the healing of the
nations.
I believe that our best defense against self-destructive-
ness lies in the courageous application of intelligence to
human phenomena. If such is our nature, it were better
that we knew it and knew it in all its protean manifes-
tations. To see all forms of self-destruction from the
standpoint of their dominant principles would seem to be
logical progress toward self-preservation and toward a
unified view of medical science.
My book (of which this is an abridged form of the final
chapter) is an attempt to synthesize and to carry forward
the work begun by Alexander, Ferenczi, Simmel, Grod-
deck, Jelliffe, White and others who have consistently ap-
plied this principle to the understanding of human sick-
ness and all those failures and capitulations that we pro-
pose to regard as variant forms of suicide. No one is more
aware than I of the unevenness of the evidence and of
the speculative nature of some of the theory, but in this
I beg the indulgence of the reader to whom I submit
that to have a theory, even a false one, is better than to
attribute events to pure chance.
Self-reconstruction, or the prevention of self-destructive-
ness, is a responsibility devolving upon the individual.
However, no individual lives in a vacuum; self-destruction
comes about as a result of (apparently) insuperable dif-
ficulties in adjusting one's self to the complexities of the
environment. We all know that living, in spite of all the
multiplying mechanical aids, grows daily more difficult,
complicated and restrictive.
It is therefore appropriate that we give some considera-
520
tion to another point of view, namely, that some change
in the organization or structure of society might accom-
plish something of benefit to the individuals who compose
it, in the direction of lessening the necessity for self-
destruction. This is the assumption of religion (in its
social aspects) ; it is also the assumption of certain politi-
cal programs which aim to decrease economic insecurity
and other fears so that aggressions, external and internal,
would be correspondingly decreased. Likewise it is the
assumption of various sociological programs, a few of
which have recently become objects of political contro-
versy. Psychiatry has been most interested in a special
form of such social applications, centering mainly about
the individual, and the sick individual in particular, but
with broad social implications and extensions. This aspect
of reconstruction in various forms constitutes the program
of the mental hygiene movement.
As TO THE NON-TECHNICAL SOCIAL CHANGES REPRESENTED BY
the ideals of religions, or socialism, and what in America
we have come to call social security, it would seem at first
blush that we should defer to the sociologists, economists,
and political scientists in whose special sphere of interest
such mass phenomena belong. With such obviously close
relationship in the material studies, the cooperation of
these scientists with medical scientists, particularly psychi-
atrists, would seem to be most logical. It is to the credit
of neither group, however, that such cooperation does
not exist to any considerable degree either in theory or in
practice. The situation is somewhat comparable to the
conflict between the public health program and the pri-
vate practice of medicine; both have the same ideals but
neither side seems fully to understand the other. The social
scientists feel that psychiatrists (including psychoanalysts
and psychologists) cannot see the woods for the trees. On
the other hand, they are themselves accused by the mental
scientists of being imbued with ethereal, fabricated, Uto-
pian principles which may have descriptive validity ap-
plied to great masses of people but which are too far
divorced from the actual data of the individual unit of the
mass to have practical utility.
Now and then one sees efforts at liaison. Harold Lass-
well, for example, has demonstrated how politics and
politicians depend to a large extent upon the psychopatho-
logical impulses of certain individuals. Dr. Frankwood
MAN AGAINST HIMSELF, by Karl A. Menninger, M.D., will be pub-
lished in November by Harcourt, Brace.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Williams [see Can Russia Change Human Nature? Sur-
vey Graphic, March 1933; The Challenge of Red Medi-
cine, The Survey, March 1934] was profoundly impressed
with the reconstructive effect upon the individual of the
politico-social experiment in Russia and has recorded
these impressions. Recently J. F. Brown has assayed an
interpretation of the social order in terms of modern psy-
chological theory (Psychology and the Social Order, by
J. F. Brown, McGraw-Hill 1936. See also Robert Os-
born's Freud and Marx, Equinox Cooperative Press, New
York, 1937, and the symposium in the American Journal
of Sociology for May 1937) . And, of course, the profession
of the psychiatric social worker is an effective and work-
ing example of the possibility of a practical affiliation. It
is one of the prides of American medicine that the sug-
gestions of Richard Cabot (in regard to medical social
work) and Ernest Southard (in regard tp psychiatric
social work) were developed into the efficient utilization
of social techniques in personal rehabilitation.
The mental hygiene clinic, the child guidance clinic
and similar group forms of American psychiatric practice
all imply this: that the individual can be helped to a cer-
tain extent in the direction of reconstruction by the per-
sonal ministrations of the psychiatrists, the physicians, the
psychologists and the social workers operating as a unit.
Often, however, it is necessary to effect certain changes in
the environment, changes which are not always so im-
possible to make as is tacitly assumed by some or so easy
to make as is tacitly assumed by others. In a conflict be-
tween the individual and the environment, if there is too
great inflexibility one or the other must yield. That is,
either the personality breaks down or the environment has
injury wreaked upon it. It is the psychiatrist's task to study
the individual, detect his points of great sensitiveness and
inflexibility and attempt with the aid of the psychiatric
social order to alter those features of the environment to
which the individual finds it impossible to adjust himself.
He may caution an over-zealous mother, restrain an over-
severe father, enlist the help of a careless or thoughtless
teacher, enlighten a prejudiced or a perfunctory judge. The
environment is made up in large part of individuals, some
of whom possess a greater flexibility than the patient; by
proper effort they may be influenced so as to effect a de-
crease of friction and thus decrease the defensiveness and
aggressiveness of the patient to the greater happiness and
comfort of everyone. In other words, the vicious circle can
sometimes be broken up where the direct approach to the
patient himself would never have achieved such a result.
SUCH THINGS THE PSYCHIATRIST CAN SOMETIMES ACCOMPLISH
without the aid of the social worker but experience has
shown that many physicians who are skillful in their
work with a patient who comes to them for treatment
are very clumsy in their technique with those who are
conscious of no need for help and who must be appealed
to as adjuvants in the help of one who is afflicted. I would
not imply that this is the only function of the psychiatric
social worker but I do wish to give her credit for skill in
the accomplishment of a task, the particular difficulties
of which are often entirely missed by the physician. The
prejudice of some medical men against psychiatric social
workers derives, in part, from feelings of inferiority on
their own parts and sometimes from justified observa-
tions of presumptuousness on the part of certain indi-
OCTOBER 1937
vidual social workers. None of us is perfect, however; such
overassuming technicians are to be found in every field
and do not represent the ideal.
The mental hygiene clinic has developed largely upon
this idea and has depended for its success in great measure
upon these skillful and highly trained women who, be-
cause of their knowledge of "the good points" of both
the psychiatrists and sociologists, have been able to apply
psychiatric principles socially. The cooperation of experts
in medical, psychological, and social fields of science is
thus practically accomplished. And since "by their fruits
ye shall know them," it is unnecessary to expand upon
the accomplishments of such cooperative groups. None-
theless it may still be that we psychiatrists neglect at times
to give sufficient consideration to the social and economic
factors as such.
IT HAS BEEN POINTED OUT, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT HOWEVER IN-
teresting and satisfactory the results of psychiatric consul-
tations and mental hygiene clinic activities may have been
to a few individuals, these efforts remain so limited in
scope, so handicapped by the muddled and disparate social
and economic conditions that the net result is incon-
siderable.
"What good is it," asks the sociologist, "for you to help
a handful of individuals at an enormous expense to the
community when infinitely larger groups continue to
suffer irremediably as a result of conditions which no
mental hygiene clinic, no psychiatric consultation, no psy-
chiatric insight will ever change? With all you have said
about the desirability of socially valuable substitutes for
aggression and atonement, with which we fully concur,
the fact remains that our present socio-economic structure
does not permit John Doe or Jane Roe to make such sub-
stitutions. The psychiatrists admit that such help as they
can offer is expensive, too expensive. Yet a collective soci-
ety in which the majority of people would be permitted
and enabled to have such advantages is as yet regarded by
large numbers of people as a threat against their economic
or political existence. 'Red scares' are still endemic, and
epidemic. This would appear to bear out your theme that
a self-destructive impulse dominates all people, even to
the preventing of their acceptance of that which would
enable them to live more fully and normally. It should
not, however, blind the psychiatrists to the fact that under
our present system there can be no such thing as mental
hygiene but only some kind of therapeutic help for a
few of the more fortunate."
I do not dispute the truth of all this. Perhaps I have
seemed to neglect these considerations. But it is because
my scientific training has conditioned me to study the in-
dividual, to attempt an understanding of the world macro-
cosmos from an analysis of the human microcosmos.
It is no excuse to say, in reply to the charges of the
social scientists, that they, for their own part, have too
"much ignored the psychology of the individual. But I
think the odds are a little in our favor, not only because
of the practical exceptions cited above, and because some
psychiatrists have announced definite convictions and aspi-
rations in the direction of effecting radical social changes,
but because some of us have made definite proposals as to
how psychiatric principles might be applied to effecting
changes in social situations in a direction more favorable
for the comfortable and productive life of the individual.
521
Edward Glover, for example, director of scientific re-
search at the London Institute for Psychoanalysis, has out-
lined in a thoughtful way a program of research on the
problem of war. If poverty and unemployment seem less
remote than war (and this is questionable), I am sure it
would require little more than an invitation for psycho-
logically (psychiatrically) trained medical men to cooper-
ate with the national or local government or with univer-
sities or foundations in the direction of a more adequate
understanding of what conscious and unconscious psy-
chological factors enter into such an evil, for example,
as unemployment. It is a somewhat sardonic commentary
upon the blindness of somebody that the general public
is at the present time more awake to the existence of such
psychological factors than are those who so earnestly but
ineffectually propose and execute schemes for relief. Even
the medical profession itself may not have noticed what
one with the slightest taint of psychological conviction
must have noticed, namely, that no medical man, no psy-
chiatrist, no psychoanalyst, no psychologist has ever been
summoned to the councils of those who attempt to solve
the national sociological problems of our country.* (This is
not the case in Mexico, and perhaps some other countries.)
WHAT MIGHT APPEAR AT FIRST TO BE AN EXCEPTION is, IN-
deed, a most convincing substantiation of the relative iso-
lation of psychiatry. I refer to the matter of understand-
ing and dealing with crime. Not only does the general
public still believe that crime is chiefly a social problem,
but such an opinion likewise possesses most criminologists,
sociologists, lawyers, judges and legislatures. In spite of
some increasing popular discussion of the matter, it is still
radical if not actually heretical to consider that the study
of criminals is more important than the study of crime.
All programs for the elimination or decrease of crime
are based upon the conception that society is itself also
an individual and that the crime is a form of self-directed
injury which, in the terms of my book, Man Against
Himself, would be called focal self-destruction. By some it
is treated in the philosophical way as a necessary evil
which can be held to a minimum by certain general prin-
ciples of rigidity, severity, intimidation, and by promises.
The vast majority of people believes in the traditional
myth that punishment is the chief deterrent of further
crime, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, not
the least obvious of which is the fact that the bulk of the
prison population of the United States is recidivant.
To be sure, some gestures have been made in recent
years in the direction of the psychiatric, that is to say, the
medical point of view. The American Bar Association and
the American Medical Association have concurred with
the American Psychiatric Association, and joint resolu-
tions have been adopted by all of these bodies to the effect
that a medical man with special training in the psychology
of the individual should be attached to every court, pre-
sumably to have an advisory function in the disposition
of every criminal on the basis of an examination of his
motives, his capacities and his individual circumstances.
These brave resolutions have now been in effect some
years without, however, anyone taking serious notice of
them. There are, indeed, a few such psychiatrically
equipped courts and, of course, a few outstandingly in-
telligent judges who have proclaimed the advantages and
successes of such a revised attitude toward the criminal
but these individuals are heard by few and the effect of
their example is minimal, opposed as they are by the rig-
idity of the law, on the one hand, the stupidity of legisla-
tors, on the other, and in the background the lethargy,
indifference and suspicion of the public.
FINALLY, TO RETURN TO THE MAIN POINT, IT SHOULD BE POINTED
oat that the sociologists themselves cannot give more than
lip service to any such plan for the reason that they are
committed to principles of mass reorganization and can-
not become interested in the psychological study of the
individual. And because they ignore this more penetrating
psychological examination of the individual they fail to
understand certain aspects of mass action.
I do not know whether or not it is true that society as
a whole reenacts the ontogeny of the units of its composi-
tion; in other words, whether or not society can be thought
of as an individual with any degree of logical validity.
If it be true, then perhaps the social scientists will be able
to discover for themselves from the study of society as a
whole all that we medical men discover from a study of
the individual, so that after the passage of many years
we may arrive at the same conclusions and the same ob-
jectives. In the meantime, while we medical men must not
recant our confession that we have too much ignored soci-
ological factors, it continues to be the task for which we
are best equipped to examine in as careful and complete
a way as possible the details of the instinctual expressions
and repressions of the individual.
FOR ALL ITS SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PHASES, THE PHENOMENON
of war impresses one as the most dramatic exemplification
of my main thesis. It surely is no longer doubted by any
thinking person that there is no such thing as victory
in war, that the conqueror like the conquered suffers irre-
parable loss. In this sense war, contrary to appearances, is
virtually self-destruction. This suicidal bent of nations
is coldly exploited by elements within each country whose
international organization constitutes a grimly anomalous
cancer thriving under the official patronage of the people
whom it exists to destroy. It has been pointed out that in
the World War, Germans were butchered with hand
grenades fired by German-made fuses, that British battle-
ships were sunk with British mines which had been sold
to the Turks. In the battle of Jutland the German sailors
hurled their missiles against defensive armor-plate which
had been manufactured in their own country, by the same
company that manufactured the guns which they were
firing. Throughout the war, men of all countries were
slaughtered by weapons invented, developed, and distribu-
ted to the foe by their own countrymen.*
No better example could be found of partial suicide
on a grand scale than that of Germany who, excited to
unendurable but helpless rage by the cruelty of the Ver-
sailles Treaty, has turned a part of her destructive hostility
, the CCC camps, the program of reforestation and conservation, and. in
the case of the Indians, self-government.
•See MERCHANTS OF DEATH, A STUDY OF THE INTERNA-
TIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS, by H. C. Engclbrecht and F. C. Finighen.
Dodd, Mead. 1934; IRON, BLOOD AND PROFITS, AN EXPOSURE OF
THE WORLD-WIDE MUNITIONS RACKET, by George Seldes. Harper. 1934;
and ARMS AND THE MEN, Fortune, March 1934.
522
SURVEY GRAPHIC
into focal self-destruction through the elimination and
persecution of several of her most interesting and intel-
ligent elements. But it would be fallacious indeed to as-
sume that Germany, because she is the most conspicuous
in doing so, is the only nation whose politicians are direct-
ing some form of focal self-destruction, or arranging some
program for more complete disaster.
Indeed, the shadow of universal war looms before us
as I write, threatening to substitute for the petty indi-
vidualistic and nationalistic self-destruction another con-
vulsive effort at world suicide more violent even than that
represented by the war of 1914 to 1918. The spectacle of
such almost joyous preparation for mass suicide as is even
now in progress cannot but fill the reflective observer with
awe, and cost the stoutest heart some qualms. The recent
brave pronunciamento of the psychiatrists of The Nether-
lands pointing out the antithesis of medical science to such
destructiveness is so sensible and so obvious that it would
seem to answer all arguments, yet we realize how utterly
futile and vague such feeble protests are against the un-
reasoning mass of hatred so easily aroused and released
in mob action. For the solution of such world difficulties
it would seem an absurd presumption for the scientist to
make suggestions were it not for the conviction that in
the deeper study of the psychology of the individual, the
analysis of the origins and manipulations of the destruc-
tive tendencies, one may expect to find the key to the sal-
vation of mankind.
We are aware, even at this crisis, of weak but insistent
opposition to war on the part of single voices and intelli-
gent minorities. To such intelligent minorities should be-
long all physicians, since their daily lives consist in a
participation in innumerable miniature wars between life
and death, and their constant striving is to increase their
power in the opposing of self-destruction. Unfortunately,
however, not all physicians fully perceive this struggle,
either in the patient or in the world at large.
It IS ENTIRELY COMPATIBLE WITH HIS GENIUS THAT IT SHOULD
have occurred to Albert Einstein to address a formal in-
quiry to Sigmund Freud (1933) regarding the psychologi-
cal principles involved in war.
"How is it possible," he asked, "for the ruling minority
to force the masses to observe a purpose which rewards
them only with suffering and loss? Why do the masses
permit themselves to be inflamed to the point of madness
and self-sacrifice by these means ? Do hatred and destruc-
tion satisfy an innate human drive which ordinarily re-
mains latent but which can easily be aroused and inten-
sified to the point of mass psychosis? And is it possible to
modify human psychic development in such a way as to
produce an increasing resistance to these psychoses of
hatred and destruction?"
And to this Freud replied with a recapitulation of the
conclusions drawn from long years of clinical observation.
It is an error in judgment, he pointed out, to overlook the
fact that right was originally might and cannot even now
survive without the support of power. As to whether there
is an instinct to hate and destroy. Freud replied, of course,
in the affirmative.
"The willingness to fight may depend upon a variety of
motives which may be lofty, frankly outspoken, or un-
mentionable. The pleasure in aggression and destruction
is certainly one of them. The satisfaction derived from
these destructive tendencies is, of course, modified by
others which are erotic and ideational in nature. At times
we are under the impression that idealistic motives have
simply been a screen for the atrocities of nature; at other
times, that they were more prominent and that the de-
structive drives came to their assistance for unconscious
reasons, as in the cruelties perpetrated during the Holy
Inquisition. . . .
"The death instinct," he goes on to say, "would destroy
the individual were it not turned upon objects other than
the self so that the individual saves his own life by de-
stroying something external to himself. Let this be the
biological excuse for all the ugly and dangerous strivings
against which we struggle. They are more natural than
the resistance we offer them.
"For our present purposes then it is useless to try to
eliminate the aggressive tendencies in man."
THIS HAS BEEN — BUT SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED PESSI-
mistically. Such a view conforms neither with Freud's the-
ory nor with his practice. He has not lived as if he be-
lieved it "useless to try to eliminate the aggressive ten-
dencies in man," or at least to redirect them. And the
same perspicacity that recognized that death instinct, ex-
amined and demonstrated some of the devices for com-
bating it. It is on the basis of Freud's work that others
have proposed applications of our psychological knowl-
edge to the elimination of war; and among those Ameri-
cans who have carried forward the scientific study of the
psychology of crime with an eye to its more humane and
effective control followers of Freud include such names as
Alexander, Healy, White, Glueck and others.
But most significant of all, the therapeutic efficacy of
psychoanalysis itself disputes such pessimistic interpreta-
tions. For if it be possible to change one individual, no
matter how laboriously — if one person can be helped by
any of the methods which I have described to be less
destructive — there is hope for the human race. The special
encouragement of the psychoanalytic method is that the
individual's own intelligence can be utilized to direct his
better adaptation, a diminution in his self-destructiveness.
Granted that it may be a slow process, such a transforma-
tion of self-destructive energy into constructive channels
can gradually spread over the entire human world. "A
little leaven leaveneth the whole."
AND so OUR FINAL CONCLUSION MUST BE THAT A CONSIDERA-
tion of war and crime, no less than of sickness and suicide,
leads us back to a reiteration and reaffirmation of the hypo-
thesis of Freud that man is a creature dominated by an
instinct in the direction of death, but blessed with an
opposing instinct which battles heroically with varying
success against its ultimate conqueror. This magnificent
tragedy of life sets our highest ideal — spiritual nobility in
the face of certain defeat. But there is a lesser victory in
the mere prolonging of the game with a zest not born of
illusion, and in this game within a game some win, some
lose; the relentlessness of self-destruction never ceases. And
it is here that medicine has replaced magic as the serpent
held high in the wilderness for the saving of what there is
of life for us. Toward the temporary staying of the ma-
lignancy of the self-destructive impulse, toward the thwart-
ing of premature capitulation to death we may some-
times, by prodigious labors, lend an effective hand.
OCTOBER 1937
523
The zinc plant, copper refineries and wire mill of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Great Falls
Shutdown on the Hill
by KINSEY HOWARD
When a dust storm sweeps the country a power drought hits the town.
A resident newspaperman in Great Falls, Mont., tells what that means in
the workaday life of his community.
DAILY NEWSPAPERS OF GREAT FALLS, MONT., ON APRIL 2,
1937, recorded precipitation, rain and snow, of .14 of an
inch. For more than two months thereafter the 33,000 citi-
zens of the community scanned the limitless Montana sky
for rain clouds, and saw none; but they dodged indoors,
locked their windows, cursed despairingly as other clouds
blotted out the silhouette of the Rockies sixty miles west.
These clouds were dust, borne on forty-mile-an-hour gales
— the new "black blizzards" of the West.
To be sure, there had been a few recordings of precipi-
tation— "trace," or ".01 of an inch" — within this period;
but this moisture, too, had ridden the wings of wind: it
literally had not had time to fall, and motorists watched
chains of raindrops driven across the plains almost in a
horizontal line. The wind which swept it over the city
persisted long after the rain was gone, and its brief bene-
fit yielded in an hour to the desiccating prairie gale, and
the dust.
June 4 and 5 the city's morning daily, betraying symp-
toms of hysteria, "bannered" local rain stories on the
first page. These exulted with a hollow heartiness over
rainfall in distant counties which, soberly computed,
proved to be negligible; and they omitted mention of
precipitation in Great Falls. ... It was .02 of an inch.
Not until June 11 did real storm clouds mass and break:
that day Great Falls received .64 of an inch. Eleven days
later another quarter-inch soaked rapidly into the parched
soil, and more rain followed. Providence, it seemed, had
524
given Montana a fresh chance: now it could hold out for
another year.
IT WOULD BE DRAMATIC TO REPORT THAT THE CITY WENT WILD
with joy, or knelt in thankful prayer. . . . For had not
the stores started laying off help, were not consumers re-
trenching, newspapers dwindling, farmers moving "to the
Coast"?
All these things had been happening; but even though
it had rained at last, there was no assurance they would
not continue to happen. It is true that new hope, cheer-
fulness, good fellowship lighted the faces of Great Falls'
citizens; and there were a few incurable victims of west-
ern romantic optimism who diffidently predicted "the end
of the dry cycle" — that hopeful hypothesis to which they
had clung for five years as prayerfully as laissez-faire
economists held to the inevitability of the upswing in
business cycles.
But it was also true that the rain had come too late to
save a large part of the crop: one month later the state
division of crop estimates was to report, "wheat produc-
tion will be below average, though considerably better
than the very short crop of 1936." And the division's chart
was to show that while precipitation in many sections of
Montana was approaching normal, that in the Great
Falls vicinity was only about 50 percent of normal.
Still, this could be borne. Great Falls was not thinking
solely of the 50,000 or 60,000 rural population the Chamber
SURVEY GRAPHIC
of Commerce estimates is included m its trade territory,
when it scanned the skies for rain. There had been short
crops before, and there had been no crops at all— Great
Falls was used to that. But now a new frightening specter
of doom swept over this community which had come to
recognize its approach and to curse the dingy billows of
dust which were its robes.
The specter's name was power exhaustion. The same
day's issue of the newspaper which had chronicled with
forced gaiety the meager shower of the previous day also
recorded (less conspicuously) the closing of several units
of the zinc plant of the Anaconda Copper Mining Com-
pany because of lack of power: the Missouri River, re-
duced by drought and burdened with erosion silt, could
no longer turn the turbines which operate the plant. The
Anaconda Company's zinc plant, copper refineries and
wire mill, located across the river and just outside the city
limits, constitute Great Falls' only large industry. This
was the fourth such shutdown since the fall of 1936, when
a shocked and unbelieving community had learned for the
first time that its historic "Big Muddy," one of America's
greatest rivers, could fail it. There had been curtailments
in a nation-wide depression, or during infrequent labor
disputes, but never because of lack of power.
The momentary alarm occasioned by the first shut-
down quickly passed: it was regarded as an inexplicable
phenomenon, but temporary. After a second, however, the
community began watching daily precipitation records
with new appreciation of their importance to its economic
life, and sensed the gravity of the state weather bureau's
announcement that winter snows had left an inch less
moisture than the Montana average. And after a third
and fourth shutdown, the city's social and cultural stand-
ards as well as its economic life began to be fashioned —
for the most part without the community's conscious rec-
ognition— by the fluctuating
levels of the murky river
which slips reluctantly
through the gates of Great
Falls' four power dams.
MARCH 3, 1937, PRESIDENT F.
M. Kerr of the Montana
Power Company, an operat-
ing subsidiary of Electric
Bond and Share, testified in
Great Falls at a hearing be-
fore army engineers sent to
investigate the advisability
of developing power at the
government's great Fort Peck
dam on the Missouri in north-
eastern Montana. Mr. Kerr
said:
I will admit that for the
moment it [adequate power]
doesn't exist, but just as soon
as the sun shines again and
gets the temperature up to 40
degrees, there will be plenty of
water in the Missouri river, and
we will get plenty of power,
and I don't anticipate another
shortage; I don't see how there Gauge of a community's life
can be one. power
OCTOBER 1937
Since Mr. Kerr's testimony, power shortages which
his company "did not anticipate" three times have closed
various units of the Anaconda Company's Great Falls
plant, throwing hundreds of men out of work.
Mr. Kerr, as spokesman for the private utility, op-
posed Fort Peck power development on the ground that
such facilities were unjustified by potential demand, and
pointed out that Fort Peck itself was draining his com-
pany's resources through the contract by which his firm
was supplying the electricity for construction of the dam.
In their report of the hearings, issued in July, the army
engineers agreed with Mr. Kerr, but Montana's Senator
Burton K. Wheeler and Congressman J. J. O'Connell
quickly challenged their findings. The fight for Fort
Peck power goes on, its scene shifted from the Army En-
gineers' Corps to the Federal Power Commission, which,
on the mayor's appeal, sent out an investigator in July,
and to Congress where Wheeler and O'Connell spon-
sored bills for the power project.
Mr. Kerr, by convincing the engineers, scored his sec-
ond triumph of the same sort within a few years: in June
1933, then representing Rocky Mountain Power Com-
pany, a Montana Power affiliate, he had pleaded surplus
of power to demand and obtain postponement of that
company's contract to build a dam at Poison, Mont. This
project, on Indian lands, had been started in May 1930,
and had stopped a year later. It was finally resumed in
July 1936, after the drought's threat to water reserves
had become apparent and after widespread agitation for
governmental erection of the dam as a public works
project. In the year which followed the second start on
the Poison span (not yet completed), Great Falls units
of the Anaconda Company have curtailed operations five
times because of lack of power.
Mr. Kerr maintained that the company's appeal for
delay in construction of the
Poison project was justified
by the fact that in those de-
pression years its supply had
far exceeded the demand; in
1933, when the Poison post-
ponement was granted, the
Montana Power Company
reported a surplus of a bil-
lion kilowatt hours of elec-
tricity. But the Federal Power
Commission in August 1937,
after its investigator's visit to
Great Falls, advised Senator
Wheeler that the serious
shortage of power in Mon-
tana was due to water defi-
ciency and to failure of
private utilities "to provide
additional dependable power
facilities in anticipation of
such a water deficiency."
The Montana Power Com-
pany now rates its installed
capacity at 294,000 kilowatts,
and current requirements at
only 240,000; but the present
river flow upon which this
; the water level scale at the "installed capacity" depends is
plant only capable of producing
525
115,000 kilowatts, which is being supplemented by 40,000
purchased from Washington State. The apparent surplus
of "capacity" over requirements is rendered worthless by
the fact that most of this generating equipment is located
on the same river or its tributaries. The Poison project,
across the Continental Divide, drains a different water-
shed.
The company insists that with completion of Fort Peck
and release of its 35,000 kilowatts, and operation of Poison
(not before July 1938) — and with the annual "flood pe-
riod" due next March — it will be able to supply all of
Montana's needs. In the meantime it offers sympathy, but
nothing else. In August, however, the Anaconda Com-
pany at Great Falls began installation of three steam gen-
erators to be fired by natural gas in an effort to maintain
some production, although the costly installation could
only provide a tenth or less of the power needed. The util-
ity's assertion that it will be able to supply future demand
is challenged by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce
in its report on Senator Wheeler's Fort Peck bill. The com-
mittee says:
Under the most favorable conditions, present facilities of
the Montana Power Company, which serves about 93 percent
of the load in Montana, are reputedly capable of carrying
some 294,000 kilowatts. However, their peak load is 240,000.
. . . Less than 73 percent of the current demand for electricity
in Montana is being supplied. . . .
Completion of another hydro-electric unit by the Montana
Power Company in 1938 will increase the available supply
of power by nearly 60,000 kilowatts, but with the natural
increase in use of electrical energy the ability of the Mon-
tana Power Company, notwithstanding completion of the
new unit, to adequately serve and well serve its users may
be doubted and challenged.
The army engineers' March hearings on the Fort Peck
development had been brought about on demand of the
county labor assembly, supported by Montana's influen-
tial senior Senator, after the second shutdown of the zinc
plant in a few months had moved the angry smeltermen
to public protest against the uncertainty of their lot. Prod-
ded by its most powerful union, the assembly defied com-
munity tradition ("boost, don't knock it!") to carry the
power issue to the people, awaktr> the community and the
government to the potential seriousness of Great Falls'
plight. Union volunteers and unemployed delivered, doqr-
to-door, the assembly's own newspaper, in which the
private utility was accused of "lack of social responsi-
bility" and its rates were compared unfavorably with
TVA's "yardstick" schedules. The assembly then drafted
speakers to present its case to the army engineers
and drew a capacity audience for the hearing,
where labor's spokesmen and the city engineer pleaded for
power.
Nor was the issue limited to supply. Mr. Kerr's plea
that Fort Peck would serve only as a competitive agency
because the facilities of his company were "adequate,"
were met by the city engineer with this:
We have got to have development of industry or this city
and state will go down. ... It is true our census has been a
decreasing census, where other states are being increased. We
are penalized in that we are forced to ship our products thou-
sands of miles to have them processed and sold back to us
from there. We feel there should be a proper rate level that
would promote development of industry sufficient to take care
of the people of this city, and we feel that Fort Peck power
is the method of inducing these people [the private utilities]
to realize that the set-up must be changed and brought down
to where they are a competitor and not a dictator!
Great Falls labor lost the first round; but it has not
been slow to point out the parallel between Poison and
Fort Peck, nor slow to demand, as its latest strategic ges-
ture, either power development at Fort Peck or curtail-
ment of construction there to relieve the drain on present
power installations. Senator Wheeler speaks out for fur-
ther inquiry; Congressman O'Connell charges indignantly
that the army's report "was written by utilities' executives."
So the city's struggle for the right to direct its own des-
tiny and to use its own resources continues. The smelter-
men have proclaimed their right to work.
WHO, THEN, ARE THESE SMELTERMEN WHOSE SLOW WRATH
moves eminent senators to quick protest, who treat their
community to the unprecedented sight of a great and
hitherto impregnable power monopoly put on the defen-
sive for the first time in its life?
They are the employes of the Anaconda in its copper,
zinc and wire plants "on the hill," and in number they
are not great. Twelve hundred of them are members of
the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smeltermen,
a CIO affiliate. In speaking of them the community also
includes another couple of hundred who belong to vari-
ous craft unions or who are employed as office workers,
unorganized.
Anaconda's copper is mined in Butte, smelted in Ana-
conda, refined in Great Falls, but the Great Falls plant is
called the "smelter" nevertheless. In 1932 it' was closed;
there was no market for copper and Montana's production
plunged from 196 million pounds to 63 million. In that
dark year, some of the few community boosters who still
could raise their voices in the panic wilderness, shouted
defiant willingness to relinquish the metal industry for-
ever, and to make Great Falls "a great agricultural
center."
Five years of relentless drought, two or three of blacker
and grittier dust, soaring relief costs — after that even the
hardiest of boosters (western optimism, frontier-born, is
hard to kill!) were, agreeing grimly with Will Rogers'
suggestion that the country be given back to the Indians,
if they'd take it. Montana wheat production had slumped
from 35 million to 14 million bushels, climbed again to
55, and tobogganed to 26. So by 1937 Great Falls looked
with friendlier eye upon the great plant across the river:
the smoke was rolling from its 500-foot stack and 1400
persons were employed.
These workers are the unseen masters of this commu-
nity of 33,000, the unconscious dictators of its economic,
social, and cultural life. Their numerical proportion to
the rural population upon which the city draws is not
large; but they are neighbors. The farmers are distant,
"you can't satisfy them," and the chain stores get the bulk
of their business. Great Falls is still hostile to chains. But
when a smelterman is laid off, his neighbor (who works
downtown) knows it that evening and plans accordingly;
so does his corner grocer. Brief notice of a shutdown ap-
pears in the papers, and rumor informs those who did
not see it.
So, paradoxically, these 1400 who "run the city" — with-
out knowing it — are the community's most helpless pawns
in its slavery to that one element upon which its economic
526
SURVEY GRAPHIC
life depends, water; the element it cannot use
efficiently because the means for harnessing its
mountain-bred power are owned by a New
York City holding company.
Four shutdowns and John L. Lewis have
changed the temper of these pawns. Tradition-
ally conservative and often chided by brother
unionists in Butte for friendliness to the bosses
(who, to do them justice, are probably friend-
lier to the men than those in Butte), within
vhe last few months Great Falls smeltermen
have become a militant force in the city's labor
movement.
Because the "hill's" unionists are affiliated with
Lewis' CIO, Great Falls' aggressive county labor
assembly, although it is ostensibly craft-con-
trolled, tables William Green's pronouncements
excommunicating industrial unionists; partly
because of them, the assembly pursues a vig-
orous "closed town" union policy equalled in
few communities of this size. Forty unions are
represented in the assembly and it has fraternal
delegates from the Farmers' Union, the railroad
organizations, and the leftist Workers' Alliance,
union of unemployed. On its executive board is
a delegate from one of the Northwest's first
newspaper guilds. Office employes and teachers
are virtually the only sizable groups still unor-
ganized, and the assembly has started work on
the teachers.
This body "speaks for" 65 to 70 percent of the
city's population. Sixty percent of Great Falls
people are industrial workers and their families,
according to the Chamber of Commerce esti-
mate; and almost without exception they are
union members. The craft and white collar
unions, including the large retail clerks' organi-
zation, boost the total.
The leaven of CIO in the county labor move-
ment and reluctance of both craft and indus-
trial unionists to divide the community's work-
ers at a time of unprecedented union strength,
have made Great Falls labor a force to be reck-
oned with in every field of economic activity.
Some merchants are secretly bitter toward union-
ism, but the city has no organized anti-union
movement or "employers' association." On the
other hand, many merchants (including the
largest store) and miscellaneous employers have
expressed their satisfaction with the operations
of the "closed town." One such employer, desir-
ing to buy a building, discovered that it had
been erected by a contractor against whom the
building trades had lodged frequent complaints.
Although his business was handicapped by tem-
porary, unsatisfactory quarters, this executive
held up the deal until he could be assured of
labor's acquiescence.
Serious disputes have been surprisingly in-
frequent, and usually were won by the unions.
Bakers, currently striking against two corporate
employers, have gone into independent shops to
supply the city's needs, and have established a
plant of their own. Until this strike, any at-
tempt to operate a "struck" business was un-
Fifteen years ago a tumbling torrent poured over the Black Eagle Dam
Five years of relentless drought, two or three years of black blizzards
sent dingy billows of dust scudding over fields and highways . . .
until the specter of power exhaustion rose from the dry and rocky bed
of the Missouri, no longer the turbulent "Big Muddy" of the top picture
OCTOBER 1937
527
/
The "big stack" and the power plant which serves the smelter, as seen from what was once the river bed
j.Loqan
The dam. All the water of the river has been compressed into the tail-race leading out of the power plant
James Logan, who made the sketches on this page and that as an artist in the pages of a magazine. He laid off work-
on the page opposite, is a pipefitter at the Anaconda com- ing on that job of installation in the boiler house (see
pany's plant. He is 22, and herewith makes his first bow drawing on page 529) just long enough to make the sketch
528
heard of for many years but the two bakery managers,
disposed to fight it out, joined forces in one plant and
produced a small quantity of bread, doing the baking
themselves.
A lone picket before each of two large chain stores
forced union recognition upon these companies whose
open shop policy was nation-wide.
Occasional insistence of CIO adherents in the assembly,
when in impish mood, upon calling attention to various
be suicidal to make long term buying commitments; the
smelter may shut down tomorrow. And so general retail
practice is to buy in small quantities, seek quick turn-
over; but this penalizes the merchant severely because
he may be caught understocked (and from the view-
point of the discriminating consumer, nearly always is),
may have difficulty getting his rush orders filled, and may
be forced to pay premium prices.
Effect of a shutdown is out of proportion to the com-
When water power fails. In an old boiler house workmen now are installing new fittings to adapt coal-
fired boilers to natural gas and place turbines for the generation of electric power from steam
AF of L executive council rulings which might conflict
with inter-union cooperation, have brought from craft
delegates an impatient rejoinder: "We can run our own
business!" They are doing it.
IN A COMMUNITY THE SIZE OF GREAT FALLS, ANY ATTEMPT
to evaluate cultural standards or examine the effect upon
them of the community's unique problem, must start
where in the opinion of the bulk of the population cul-
ture starts — in the stores.
Some Great Falls merchants (chains, mostly, in this
group) say they could "get along without the smelter";
but most of them admit they could not live without the
hill plant and its nearly 1400 weekly pay checks. Most of
them have confronted bleak disaster with each shutdown,
and the experience has harried them and profoundly af-
fected their merchandising practice.
There has been a progressive cheapening of merchan-
dise available in Great Falls stores, attributable to three
influences: style consciousness, leading the buyer to prefer
cheaper articles and more of them; depression habit; and
drought.
The Great Falls merchant's lot when the salesman calls
or when the buyer goes east is not a happy one. It may
munity's actual wage loss; this is the "panic psychology"
of the small town where the misfortunes of a few hun-
dred men or a few score immediately become the com-
mon problem of thousands of friends and neighbors. The
biggest department store, a "quality" establishment which
does not get the bulk of the smeltermen's trade, never-
theless has found that a shutdown will directly reduce its
gross business 15 percent. If the suspension is prolonged,
more serious curtailment will result from the psychologi-
cal effect upon other consumers. Full effect of the calamity
is not felt for a month, but if the plant stays down this
consumers' panic may continue indefinitely.
And the smelter's misfortunes are felt downtown in
more tangible ways than psychological distress; one mer-
chant estimates 10 to 15 percent wage loss to clerks
through layoffs or part-time work as a result of each
major curtailment of operations '^on the hill."
Scores of the smeltermen have bolstered their uncertain
economic position by taking up small garden plots in
suburban districts and building their own homes there
during idle periods. Few if any of the downtown white
collar workers have had the manual skill, time or money
(for when working the smelterman is paid far better than
the average clerk) to do this. (Continued on page 546)
529
Shy Guy
"SHY GUY!" TAUNTED THE LITTLE LADY
of eleven, all dressed up in a pink hair
ribbon and a frock of Hamburg lace.
"Shy Guy! Shy Guy!"
She could have kept on forever and
still Shy Guy would not have gone with
her into that dark hallway. He'd been
made to come to this party, but he just
wouldn't play postoffice.
o
And he was so scared of girls he never
did go to another party. Unless you call
what happened to him twelve years later
a party.
For twelve years later Shy Guy found
himself the only man in a class of eighty
women.
o
It was as an undergraduate at a man's
college that Shy Guy had decided to be-
come a social worker. He was the editor
of a literary monthly that nobody read
but the staff, and one day, sitting in his
office, he read in a newspaper something
Walter Lippmann had said in a speech
in 1932:
"When the history of these times
comes to be written it will be said of the
social workers of America that they did
their duty without flinching and that
they deserved well of their country."
So he decided to become one even
though he knew nothing about social
work. He didn't even know that the
Russell Sage Foundation was not a
corset.
o
Shy Guy became a student at the
School of Social Work on Beacon Hill
in Boston, just around 'the corner from
the Old Howard, which is a burlesque
theater, and the State House, where
there is a lot of burlesque, too.
"Between," he used to say but not out
loud, "the dolls and the pols."
Once in a while the faculty asked one
of the pols over to tell the class about the
Shy Guy
by NICHOLAS WELLS
Drawings by Helen B. Phelps
kind of work he was doing, but they
never asked one of the dolls to tell about
her work.
Of course when he signed up at the
School of Social Work, he didn't know
he was going to be the only man in the
class. He knew, vaguely, that men in
social work were rare. But not that rare.
Things began to happen to Shy Guy
that made him suspect he wouldn't
show up at the School someday and they
would find him making funny noises
out at the Psychopathic. Things like that
bulletin, posted on the board at the time
of the class dinner: "Students Assigned
As Waitresses," with Shy Guy's name
halfway down the list.
Or that bill from the bursar address-
ing him as "Miss." Or, worst of all, that
awful habit he acquired of referring to
the rest of the class as "the other
girls". . . .
"A lone wolf," one of the professors
called him. But she was wrong. He was
in no way a wolf.
o
In class Shy Guy felt so nervous
among all those women he never did get
around to paying much attention to
what the professors were saying. Except
one professor whom he liked to listen to
a lot. He liked her for the masterful
knowledge she had of social forces.
That is to say, he liked her for the
masterful knowledge she had of social
forces until after the first semester when,
for a couple of B's and an A, she gave
him an average of B— .
After that he liked her for her taste in
hats.
o
When the professor gave Shy Guy
that A, she publicly commended him to
the class. That made the girls jealous.
But when she gave him the B — , the
girls forgave him. They even stopped
calling him "Hey!" and started calling
him chummily by his last name,
o
The Director of the School was the
one person Shy Guy used to wish he
had got high marks for. She recom-
mended people for jobs.
Sometimes Shy Guy would be coming
down the old wooden stairs outside her
office and she would be standing by the
door sticking her tongue out at him.
Of course it wasn't the Director really.
It was the little vase on the bookcase
outside her door, the little vase she used
to throw her hat on.
It was also Shy Guy's conscience.
Lone Wolf
Right across the street from the
School of Social Work was a clink and
a paddy wagon. Shortly after School
opened the clink was torn down. But
not by Shy Guy. All Shy Guy did was
run away with the paddy wagon.
It was all right, of course, for those
girls to want to get a little social experi-
ence by riding in the paddy wagon, but
they never should have piled in and
dared Shy Guy to mount the driver's
seat. He'd never driven a pair of horses
before. He'd never driven even one
horse.
So it wasn't really his fault that the
horses shot up Somerset Street, along
Beacon, down Park, and then, missing
Tremont, went tearing through the
Common. It wasn't his fault that the
paddy wagon full of girls went sailing
into the Frog Pond.
It wasn't his fault even that the girls
got away with only their feet wet while
he got his picture in the paper. HERO,
it said over the picture. . . .
"Police horses, startled by a bunch of
irresponsible girls who piled into a
patrol wagon, ran away in mid-Boston.
Above student who leaped to the
driver's seat, stopped the runaways be-
fore serious damage was done."
•
He liked his studies at the School of
Social Work. Studies like Social Case
Work and Community Organization
and Clinical Psychiatry and Social Legis-
lation and How To Be Happy Though
Married On Ten Dollars A Week If
Only You Could Get It. But mostly he
liked the field trips.
It was regular school of social work
routine to take the class to every sort of
"social" institution except a prison. They
used to take the girls to see even a
prison, Shy Guy was told, but it got so
that when they paraded through, the
men behind the bars seemed to think
530
SURVEY GRAPHIC
they were at a baseball game and there
arose a curious clamor about curves.
Still, the class did go to see a reform
school. And the day they were there a
judge who had been sentencing boys to
the institution for thirty-five years had
come for a visit, too. It was the first
time the judge had ever seen the place.
He had always thought of it as a build-
ing and a wall, and what was his amaze-
ment to see about half a hundred build-
ings and no wall!
There was a campus, too, and a foot-
ball team, and ivy on the buildings.
•
One day the class went to a school for
the feeble-minded. For a visit, that is.
The first place they were taken to was a
workshop for the older feeble-minded
girls. And right away that group of
feeble-minded girls smiled for Shy Guy
so sweetly, showing him so proudly their
sewing and weaving and embroidery,
that they made him feel that here, at
long last, was heaven.
The school was a vast place out in the
country, and the class had but three
hours to get a glimpse of it all, so that
they stayed in this particular workshop
for only a few minutes. Except Shy Guy.
The girls with the low I.Q.'s rated
high with Shy Guy. Shy Guy was the
sort of fellow no girl had ever looked
at twice. These girls looked at him twice
and he stayed on, thrilling so to the
pride they displayed in showing their
handiwork that when he finally found
himself outside, he found himself quite
alone. And what was worse, without the
slightest notion of what direction the
other — the rest of the class had taken.
One More Woman
OCTOBER 1937
Man to Man
"But over there," he said to himself,
"are some little tots playing on the green.
I'll ask them. Poor little girls! They're
mostly mongoloids, but maybe they can
understand me."
They understood him, all right. They
understood him as he'd never been un-
derstood before.
Hearing his voice and watching him
gesticulate, they danced merrily about
him.
"How," he told them, "you chortle
and cavort!"
They hadn't any idea what he was
talking about and he hadn't any idea
what they were talking about and per-
haps that is why they got along so
splendidly. For the next thing Shy Guy
knew, he was picking each one of those
tikes up, holding her under the arms,
swinging her in ever wider, ever faster,
ever more breathtaking circles!
But he came near dropping the tot he
was swinging when he saw trooping
out a doorway on the far end of the
green the girls from the School of Social
Work. He had just enough time to set
her down gently and hurry across the
green as unconcernedly as he could. The
girls from the School had almost seen
him and it was certainly a narrow
escape.
If the girls had ever seen him play-
ing with those kids, they'd have thought
him a Sentimentalist. And he certainly
didn't want people to go around think-
ing he was a Sentimentalist.
•
Another day the class went to a
mental hospital. Not to be observed, but
to observe. The most remarkable thing
that Shy Guy observed was how most of
the patients looked like people he knew.
Indeed, as Shy Guy and the girls left
the institution, one of the patients in the
women's ward, who had been sitting
under a wicker table, silently arose and
slipped in between two of the girls. She
would have climbed with them into the
bus and been taken back to Boston if
Shy Guy hadn't told her that the visitors
were social workers.
"Holy Mother!" shrieked the poor
woman. And fled back into the in-
stitution.
•
Of all the places Shy Guy visited he
liked one of the state farms best. It was
a potpourri sort of place and everybody
was there, from illegitimate infants who
were sane to aged adults who were in-
sane.
The old man in the corduroy cap, for
instance, who had lost his mind in the
Civil War and got religion. He told the
girls he could see they were very sweet,
and the girls told him if he was smart
enough to see that, he was too smart to
be wasting his time where he was.
"Time?" said the old man in the
corduroy cap. "Time? I am in the womb
of time. I am waiting to be born again.
To be born into the Kingdom. This is a
place of Darkness and Death. But the
Kingdom is Beautiful and Bright."
The old man may not have had any
mind, but he certainly had manners. He
kept his cap off all the time the girls
were talking to him.
•
Shy Guy had never seen an illegiti-
mate infant before and now it seemed he
and the girls were looking at a
thousand.
The first they saw were screaming
little creatures who had only just been
born and were red as lobsters.
"They're terribly embarrassed," Shy
Guy said. "That's why they're blushing
from head to foot like that."
He meant it as a figure of speech, but
S-S-Semitn?ntaIist
551
the girls thought it was just another
Little Audrey story and they laughed
and laughed.
•
When the girls stopped to exclaim
delightedly over a group of little chil-
dren playing games in a nursery, Shy
Guy wandered off by himself. If he
hung around a place like that, the next
thing he knew the girls would get to
thinking he was a Sentimentalist.
That was how he happened to arrive
alone at a large room replete with cribs.
And more infants.
No nurse was around and the impish
impulse of a psychologist took posses-
sion of Shy Guy. He walked up and
down between the cribs tickling tiny
toes.
As a psychologist he made two pro-
found discoveries.
The first thing he found out was that
an infant's response to such a silly stimu-
lus is to gurgle. The second thing he
found out was that a gurgle is some-
thing that should never be done solo.
That is why, as infant after infant
gave out with a gurgle, Shy Guy gave
out with a gurgle too.
•
Safe from the scrutiny of the girls he
then found himself in a little room con-
taining only eight or ten cribs. He was
standing at a crib and contemplating for
the moment not the occupant of the
crib but an extremely pretty nurse, al-
most as pretty as the girls from the
School of Social Work. But unlike the
girls from the School she was frankly a
flirt for she was smiling at him shame-
lessly.
Without looking at the occupant of
the crib, Shy Guy set himself for flight.
It was a terrifying moment. And not
until well into the next did he realize
that the nurse's smile wasn't the sort of
smile he thought it was at all. And the
look in her eyes was not only for him,
but for the occupant of the crib as well.
Shy Guy looked down.
A young lady with roguish dimples
was looking up at him and laughing. A
young lady of about six months.
"I've never seen such an odd little
man before," Shy Guy imagined she was
saying. "But I think you're nice."
He reached down to tickle her toes for
her. Then didn't.
His hand remained poised in mid-air.
The young lady in the crib had no
toes to tickle. She hadn't even legs.
It was all Shy Guy could do to remem-
ber that he was a gentleman and a
gentleman doesn't keep a young lady
waiting with his hand poised in mid-
air like that.
He reached down and tickled her
under the chin.
"I think you're pretty nice too," he
said.
•
Shy Guy was looking at the nurse.
She said, indicating all the infants in
the little room, "Congenital defectives."
Shy Guy stopped at the second crib.
He saw a little boy this time, wrapped
not in a mother's arms but in a doctor's
bandages. A little boy, tossing cease-
lessly, his blonde curls now at the head
of the crib, now at the foot, his tiny face
never at rest, quivering little muscles re-
flecting a thousand points of pain.
The nurse answered the question in
Shy Guy's eyes.
"Syphilis," she said.
Shy Guy gazed down at the infant
in the third crib. There was something
about her eyes. . . .
"Blind," the nurse said.
Only a Sentimentalist may cry and in
Shy Guy's throat was that scalding feel-
ing he had whenever inhibited tears
were turbulent in his eyes.
The nurse went out of the room, but
Shy Guy was not aware of it. The only
thing Shy Guy was aware of was that
he was bending over a crib, stroking
gently the forehead of a baby born
blind, thinking about the old man in the
corduroy cap, thinking maybe the little
one didn't even know she was blind,
thinking maybe she was still waiting to
be born, not into a Kingdom but into a
World.
Shy Guy stayed there quite a while,
but he never did find out what was go-
ing on in the little one's mind. All he
found out was that a baby born blind
likes to have her forehead gently stroked
by a little man. She likes to play with
the fingers of a little man. She even
likes to hang on the fingers of a little
man and be lifted clear of the crib!
e
As Shy Guy stood there, holding an
infant in his arms, and the girls from
the School of Social Work began to
come into the room, the tears in his eyes
were so turbulent he could scarcely see,
and there swept over him the certainty
that now, with an infant in his arms,
the girls had found him out, now they
knew him for what he really was.
He was sure about that. Even from
himself he could hide it no longer.
There it was, seared into the very depths
of his soul, the scarlet letter S.
Well, that was all right. Somehow, as
he looked down at this baby born blind,
it didn't seem to matter much that the
girls would go around thinking he was
a Sentimentalist.
Somehow, as he thought of all he'd
seen in this little room, and all he was
still to see, nothing the girls could ever
think he was seemed to matter much.
All that mattered was that a baby
born blind thought he was pretty swell.
All that mattered was that a baby born
blind had lifted sightless eyes and called
him "Goo."
Hero
532
SURVEY GRAPHIC
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Of Brains Piscatorial — And Other
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
"I SEE BE THE PA-APERs" (wE MAY IMAGINE MR. HfiNNESSY OB-
serving) "that thim science fellers is claimin" now that fishes
has the same kind iv brains as us human bein's. In this piece
I was readin' some professor says a fish can learn be bumpin'
his nose an' remember, an" put two an' two togither makin'
five — "
"Iv'ry dog-race gambler does that," Philosopher Dooley
doubtless would interject, "but he don't learn nothin'."
"I don't believe it, meself," continues Mr. Hennessy;
"though to be sure there's bullheads, an' lobsters, an' crabs.
An' sharks, in human form."
"Yes, an' suckers, as I was sayin'. But I dunno about it.
Ye'd better ask George Thomas — him as sells fish, an' smells
iv th' company he keeps. I was nivver much iv a fisherman;
I've not associated much wid thim in th'r native habitat as
Father Duffy would say. Me own acquaintance wid thim has
been mostly fried. Had they been smart like y'r professor says,
they'd ha' kep' out iv the pan. I have heerd tell iv doctors
sayin' that a man could git more brains be eatin' fish, but I
nivver seen it proved. Iv'ry good Catholic is beholden to eat
fish iv a Friday — I nivver noticed it addin' to the naked eye
to th' gineral intelligence iv Catholics. Still-an'-all, I will say
that up to now the human race hasn't got far past th' intilli-
gence iv fish. It may well be that whin I call yerself a 'poor
fish,' I'm payin' ye a little-deserved complimint. Leavin' out
any insult to th' fish!"
PERSONALLY, I HAVE NO DOUBT OF WHAT THOSE "SCIENCE
fellers" infer as to the intelligence of fish. Mind is mind,
wherever you find it, whether in an amoeba or an Einstein;
its manifestations depend upon the complexity of organiza-
tion, of the equipment the organism has to use as awareness-
mechanism and means of reaction. The process of education,
individual, generic, or cosmic for that matter, is the develop-
ment of aptitude in awareness, self-understanding and self-
command, in adaptation to and conquest of environment; to-
gether with observation, memory and profit from experience.
Only by realizing that this process is tediously slow in the
mass can we have due patience with man himself, as he adds
infinitesimally through the centuries, the ages, to the fruits
of his adventures in trial-and-error. Just now we are having
tragically dramatic demonstration all over the world — with
special irruption in Spain and the Far East — of the fact that
regardless of the fish comparison we have not advanced far
if at all beyond the stage of the savage. However dressed up
in uniforms — less garish than of old only in order to be more
deadly — and equipped with diabolical "scientific" devices only
to make our warfare more horribly murderous but in no
essential respect different or better in kind or motive, we are
still in the Neolithic, in the culture-stage of the tomahawk
and the scalping knife. Still ravaging the earth, still butcher-
ing women and children in defenseless homes and villages, in
the fields and on the pathways, after the manner of the troglo-
dytes, and at home wasting our substance in preparations for
still greater butchery and destruction. In the mass we have
learned little if anything from the experience of the ages.
What do you mean — "Civilization"?
Now, quite appropriately in the picture, cholera has
broken out on an epidemic scale in and about Hongkong,
the British treaty-port at the southeastern corner of China,
doorway to nearby Canton, cheek-by-jowl with Portuguese
OCTOBER 1937
Macao and close neighbor to French Tonking and French-
leased Kwang-Chau-Wan; just as that great city is jammed
with refugees from war-wrecked Shanghai, itself now re-
porting a dangerous outbreak of the pest. Already Japanese
troops have died there — of cholera. That is only the begin-
ning, as Japan fills the back country with corpses and desola-
tion, and by blockading the whole Chinese coast seeks to
impoverish and demoralize whatever there may be of admin-
istrative organization and capacity. At the same time im-
poverishing itself at home by stupendous waste of men and
treasure in this unholy business. Poverty and squalor are the
principal fertilizers of the soil — they are the soil — in which
flourishes Pestilence, that inevitable by-product of large scale
warfare, especially in the Orient, and generic name for cholera,
typhus, bubonic plague. Doubtless in due and time-honored
course we shall be hearing from all of them. The Far East
has been from time immemorial their starting point for
their grim relentless march across the world, and it's not so
far away as it used to be. Thence in the middle of the four-
teenth century marched the infamous Black Death (bubonic
plague none other, and it is by no means extinct) which
desolated and all but depopulated the then known world of
Asia and Europe. Before it spent its force it had destroyed
upward of a hundred million people; twenty-five million in
Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. Italy lost half
its population; in London alone died one hundred thousand.
It sneaked by caravan through the back doors of China, as
many refugees will be slipping now, across to the Black Sea
and Constantinople; thence to the Mediterranean seaports
and so through Europe as far as Sweden and back into
Russia. Incidentally it overturned the economic and social life
of Europe. Those of all opinions who affect solicitude about
the spread of revolution, of communist and fascist dictator-
ship in these days will do well to study the sequelae of that
historic global massacre and to consider the possible aftermath
for all of us of the economic ruin toward which Japan and
China are rushing headlong; at which tortured Spain already
has arrived, and on the brink of which the Western nations
totter dangerously.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS, HIGH TIDE OF MODERN CIVILIZED
common sense, embodies the dream of enlightened inter-
national cooperation, not only against war and all its by-
products but positively for the measures of all kinds calcu-
lated to conserve and to advance the common welfare. But the
dream is, for the time being at least, at the mercy of folk
who do not believe in it because they foresee and fear the
effect of its fulfillment upon their own selfish interests. The
nations, conspicuously including the United States, from with-
out and within have done all in their power by neglect, con-
tempt, treachery to its ideals and intent, and outright sabotage,
to reduce the effectiveness and prestige of the league to the
vanishing point. These have not vanished by any means. Sneer
as they may and do, the gangsters and gun-men who at
presept terrorize the world community are plainly afraid of it.
At this moment there is sitting in Geneva the committee
studying reform of the league covenant, with a view of some-
how achieving universality; playing with the idea, urged by
Chili, of consultation with non-members. By the time this
article is printed some progress may have been registered;
but the outstanding fact is that the league idea refuses to die.
All men know that it is too late in history for every-nation-
for-itself. Only together can the people demonstrate what an
Irish girl said to me once. . . . That "no man has a right
on another man's land with a gun on his shoulder."
One of the most beneficent activities of the league has been
533
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the creation and hitherto successful operation, especially in the
Orient, of a cordon sanitaire against the spread of pestilence,
with a world-wide system of alarm signals by radio and other-
wise. China and Japan were cooperating eagerly — now they
are too busy, spending themselves in a cooperation of mutual
hate and destruction. And the other members of this enlight-
ened partnership are snarling at each other, fearfully prepared
to complete the debacle of civilization opening the door wide
to chaos. I am not prophesying; I yield to none in hope that
the basic sanity in the masses of the peoples, none of whom
desire war, will somehow win through the present crisis.
Yet this picture is no outburst of lurid fancy. Even now, who
will be on guard in wrecked and penniless Spain, within
itself already fertile ground for the sweep of pestilence and
ringed with seaports which after the present uproar — indeed
because of it — may well expose open doors for the infection
of Europe? Only shoulder to shoulder, with common purpose
and undiverted attention, can mankind deal with the mighty
problems of today, such especially as interpenetrating mass
disease, laughing at man's imaginary political lines. Let us
not forget how near a thing was the sweep of typhus out of
Russia after the World War; barely stopped by intensive
international effort in which some of our own distinguished
doctors gave their lives. World epidemics do not loudly herald
their coming . . . into the abodes of complacent safety they
sneak like the thief in the night. Conditions favoring just
that are in the making now. This far-off, fantastically "unde-
clared" Sino-Japanese horror "none of our business"? Aye,
precisely no more than would be a fire, or an outbreak of
smallpox, typhus or cholera — or all of these at once — in some
remote corner of a crowded tenement-house in which we
might be living! How many lives throughout the world, to
say nothing of fabulous treasure, must be sacrificed in teaching
to self-styled Homo Sapiens (save the mark!) the cost of this
fish-brained folly?
FOOD. IN THE LAST ANALYSIS THAT IS WHAT ALL THE SHOOTING,
present, past and contemplated, is supposed to be about . . .
how the peoples shall have the wherewithal to live. To that
end, if we can swallow the preposterous, topsy-turvy philos-
ophy of all this, hundreds of thousands of potential producers
of food and other necessaries of living have been withdrawn
from the business of producing them, and are trampling the
fields, destroying the means and results of production, and
are murdering each other by wholesale, including the families
whose bread they are turning into lethal weapons for their
mutually suicidal slaughter.
Timely reminding of this basic common interest in food,
the League of Nations, functioning at its best despite the riot
among its members actual and renegade, just now has put
forth its report on "Nutrition"; summary of elaborate study
of the world's food-supply and distribution by the mixed com-
mittee of experts (under the chairmanship of Lord Astor and
including a notable group of Americans) on that subject.
The New Yoi'/( Times editorially appraises it rightly as "the
most important book of the year." Only under international
auspices, by cooperation among the nations with whose most
vital duty and interest it is concerned, could such a study
have been made. It illuminates the picture of this crazy
world, of some countries destroying "surplus" food while in
others thousands starve for lack of it; of blather about "over
production" and the "problem of abundance" against con-
trapuntal cries and threatened revolt of the undernourished.
Among other things this report reminds us that the developed
means of communication have brought to the chronically
underfed in remote parts the news of plenty and higher
standards of life in other regions, awakening them to resent-
ment and determination no longer to starve quietly.
HERE is A TEXTBOOK CHALLENGING WHATEVER THE WORLD HAS
of constructive statesmanship to the primary problem of civil-
ization. It makes clear by relentless facts and figures that
under-nutrition and malnutrition, due to the cost of food,
underlie most of the world's troubles and conflicts. Even in
the "prosperous" United States of America, it appears that
thirteen separate investigations between 1906 and 1924, in-
volving clinical examination of thousands of children, com-
bined to show an average percentage suffering from mal-
nutrition of about 22.3 . . . more than one in five!
The Manchester Guardian recently took note of a quota-
tion read during debate on the wages and hours bill:
"Surely there never was such fragile chinaware as that of
which the millers of Coketown were made. They were ruined
when they were required to send laboring children to school;
they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into
their works; they were ruined when such inspectors con-
sidered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chop-
ping people up in their machinery; they were utterly undone
when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make
quite so much smoke."
This was quoted, not from any speech by President Roose-
velt, John L. Lewis or any Red Radical; but from a book
called Hard Times, written some eighty-five years ago by one
Charles Dickens. It is such brains as those of the "millers
of Coketown" — by no means all in the skulls of militarists —
that perpetuate the conditions with which those who would
solve the Problem of Food must contend. To solve that prob-
lem will take all mankind has of vision and intelligence —
and goodwill. It is worthy of our best, and cheap at any price.
Nor would it cost a tithe of the wealth, energy and organiz-
ing genius — yes, and real patriotism — now being tossed into
the sewer in insane slaughter and contusion. It calls for the
kind of enterprise and courage that have gone into the con-
quest of the wildernesses and the challenging obduracy of
Nature. As for the subjection of the world's savages — the
chief savage to be subdued resides within ourselves of the
self-entitled "superior races." And classes. Only so may we
create a world fit for the abode of creatures above the level
of mutually predatory fish.
534
SURVEY GRAPHIC
LIFE AND LETTERS
War Is People
by LEON WHIPPLE
YOUR CHILD FACES WAR, by Nelson Antrim Crawford. Coward-
McCann. 120 pp. Price $1.25.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A SPANISH TOWN, by Elliot Paul
Random House. 458 pp. Price $2.50.
. . . AND SPAIN SINGS, edited by M. J. Benardete and Rolfe Hum-
phries. Vanguard. 123 pp. Price $1.
THE SIEGE OF ALCAZAR, by Major Geoffrey McNeill-Moss Knopf.
313 pp. Price $3.50.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE ABSTRACT TERM, WAR, WAS ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS
discoveries in symbolism ever made by the human race. The
word is a supreme rationalization of evils. Under its camou-
flage we deceive ourselves into believing we can reason about
war, the phenomena of unreason. We think about war as a
problem in the mathematics of energy, human and machine,
and number. On this view the statesman can reckon up the
cost of using war as an instrument of policy, and the generals
can justify their intellectual enthusiasm for strategy and tech-
nology, their sporting contests of maps with colored pins,
their tanks and bombers. The abstraction serves our general
emotions, too: it can be used to fire our patriotism, our hero-
worship, our tribal hatreds, even our devotions to an ideal
such as democracy or communism. It can help preserve our
sanity, free us of blood-guilt, and persuade us that it will be
some other unit of the statistics that will be killed. The French
have summed the value of the abstraction in the omnibus,
"C'est la guerre."
One way in which we can serve peace, then, is to translate
the word war into concrete terms. We need to exchange the
deceiving formulas such as "we have declared war" for the
truth — "We are sending our men to kill Japanese or Mexican
or English men and destroy their homes and cities, and they
will kill many of us." We need a new vocabulary of realism
with which to lay bare the truth about inter-human killing
for our children. Grim service has been done since 1918 in
books and plays, and by the camera, to destroy the old illu-
sions. The horrors of war are on record as never before. But
people still do not want to be made sick by looking at them;
nor do they want to look within for the urges that are the
ancient roots of war. They hate war but they want it wished
out of the world. They are not yet ready to think and sacrifice
war out of the mind and heart. They need primers.
In Your Child Faces War, Nelson Crawford offers just
that, a clear and simple and deeply-felt primer or catechism
for plain parents to help answer the question: How shall I
educate my child against war? As editor of a family magazine
of nearly two million circulation, Mr. Crawford found that
this question was one of those most frequently asked by par-
ents. He sets down his advice first as answer to your ques-
tions, such as — What training should the young child receive
regarding violence? Do combative sports foster war? Should
a youth be encouraged to pledge himself never to take part
in war? — and second some answers to your child's questions
—Isn't it ever right to fight? Is not war for the sake of
"national honor" justifiable? Isn't warfare natural as part of
the struggle to survive?
The parent who is confronted by such difficult challenges
will find real help in Mr. Crawford's suggestions for he deals
with those powerful everyday influences that do direct our
emotions, will, and ideas. He musters all our resources: the
value of home influences and an atmosphere of domestic
peace, the amelioration of race prejudices, the provision of
OCTOBER 1937
creative outlets for young emotions, ways of sublimating our
instincts, the services of religion, organizations, and books in
fostering peace attitudes. He offers an admirable reading-list;
and he points out how some of the dangers of the news-
papers, radio, and cinema may be met. His answer is that
parents must use every social and psychological instrument to
establish peace-loving inner attitudes for he knows that war
comes from within people. If the tools he offers seem few,
and if parents, having been told what to do, are still be-
wildered as to how to do these difficult simple things, it is
because all that we have seems too little. But the average
parent who does face the stark fact that "If war comes in
three years my son will be old enough to go" will welcome
this book of wisdom and courage.
WAR IS PEOPLE, AND RARELY HAS THIS TRUTH BEEN REVEALED
with the warmth, humanity, and hatred of suffering that
informs and makes beautiful Elliot Paul's story of The Life
and Death of a Spanish Town. For five years he had lived
with the 3000 people of the little town of Santa Eulalia on
an island off the Spanish mainland. He learned how this
fisherman and that bus driver and that liberal innkeeper and
that exploiting landowner lived and felt, as only a man can
who shares in a way of life he loves. He drank with them,
learned their music and played in their band, saw the comedy
and tragedy of pride, love-making, births and deaths. So
figure after figure comes alive in streets and rooms and along
shores that we seem to have visited ourselves, so delicately
luminous is the warm prose in which they are rendered. We
know Santa Eulalia as well as the hometown. The transfer
of mood and character is so real that we almost forget the
tender sympathy and the gift of words that created this pic-
ture of a place, unsurpassed in recent literature.
The economics, politics, sociology are revealed, not as ab-
stractions, but as the day's work of the carpenter or potter.
The fishermen were democrats perhaps because they were
fishermen; the Civil Guards military because that was their
business; the doctor a fascist because he was ambitious. So
Mr. Paul can trace the filaments of war spreading into this
primitive serenity of sun and sea day by day, man by man,
emotion by emotion. War comes not as an abstraction, but
as the fate of simple folks. Silence falls on the town; one
rebels in drink; one whispers; another gloats; two old people
commit suicide; an old gratitude saves a life; violence breaks
here and there. The local rebels hold power; then the govern-
ment brigade conquers and kills and leaves; blood and de-
struction descend on the island. Death has taken the name of
war, and war ends the gay people and the way of life that
was Santa Eulalia. The two pictures are a moving plea for
peace that will endure because it is also a noble piece of
writing.
When the people make their own war they make their own
songs. Here are fifty ballads that the Spanish loyalists sing
on the march, turned into free English verse by a kind of
American Brigade of Poets. The royalties will be given to
the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.
The translators — or interpreters — include such well-known
poets as Genevieve Taggard, William Carlos Williams, John
Peale Bishop, and Katherine Anne Porter. Edna Millay has
taken a lament by Emilio Prados for Federico Lorca, the
poet executed by the Rebels at Granada, and turned it into
a rich and moving memorial. Some of the best versions are
by the editor, Rolfe Humphries. The score or more of con-
tributors have reached a high level of singing forms. This
is poetry, not propaganda unless it is propaganda to express
535
Recommended !
TO GRAPHIC READERS
BY GRAPHIC REVIEWERS
A new text on an increasingly
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HOW TO USE
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By Rudolf Modley
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a wide audience in a way that is both dramatic and
efficient is described in this manual. The author bases his
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and has shown how this technic can be adapted to American
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As SURVEY GRAPHIC says, "Medley's lucid little book
will show laymen, statisticians and artists who reach out for
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HEALTH UNDER THE "EL"
The Story of the Bellevue-Yorkville Health Demonstration in
Mid-Town New York
By C. E. A. Winslow
Professor of Public Health, Yale University School of Medicine
and Savel Zimand
Formerly Administrative Director of the Bellevtte-Yorki-ille
Health Demonstration
!TERE is an absorbing account of a successful experi-
*• ment in public health which has been organizing for
more than ten years the health provisions of the Bellevue-
Yorkville district.
As Dr. Charles F. Bolduan, Director of the Bureau of
Health Education, New York, said in the SURVEY
GRAPHIC—
"This book is far more than merely a record of local
interest; for the authors utilize the local experiences for
searching discussions of public health administration gen-
erally, discussions which deserve to be widely read by
health administrators, municipal administrators and leaders
in health and social welfare throughout the country."
Mayor La Guardia in the Foreword to this book tells how
the methods here described have already been applied to
nine new health centers, now under construction or just
finished. Illustrated. $2.25
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536
the grim devotion of a people to their country and a cause.
The poets of the Spanish people — from the militia, the
countryside, the world of literature — found a mold into
which to pour their emotions in the old Spanish ballad once
sung by a whole nation when Spain was great. So when
they had found words for their defiance, their bitter irony,
their tales of heroic men and women, their griefs, the simple
rhythms had waiting a singing chorus in the trench, along
the road. As Lorenzo Varela says in his introduction: "This
presence of the people is tantamount to collaboration." These
romanceros were not created to make a book, or a dollar,
but to voice the feelings of a folk. And they are, as ballads
always are, a kind of journalism. They tell what happened
in Spain far more realistically than any reporter's cables or
official communique.
The people know the elementals of war — earth, blood,
courage, 'sorrow — and so they sing of Sylvestre who led the
village to seize the arms of the marquess, of the fire in the
olive grove "that is spreading through all Spain," and they
reveal the weather-wisdom of peasants in the lovely appeal:
O September wind and rain,
Be compassionate for Spain.
The imagery is folk-born as in the lines:
Life is drunk over and over
And death is one swallow only.
You do not have to be on one side or the other, but only on
the side of plain people in war, to feel that here is poetry —
of an old and sad kind.
The heroic defenders of Alcazar, that massive castle-
fortress-academy of cadets towering over Toledo, sang no
songs but they left diaries, reports, and observations from
which Major McNeill-Moss has written the grim history of
how some thousand men with five hundred women and chil-
dren held out for seventy days against siege, cannon, famine,
and death until relieved by the Franco army. From a sense
of duty, tradition, political faith or self-interest they cast their
lot with the rebels, but the stubborn fortitude with which
they endured shells, air-bombs, mines, and assaults until the
giant walls were rubble around them, arose above party. It
won some strange victory of the spirit in which all men can
share. The defense of Alcazar was "a military incident" that
became a symbol, a symbol perhaps of how even courage is
made barren by war.
Since war is people, from war we learn of people. Some
grim process of education may be going on in our day. Where
the red spotlight falls we see with new eyes and new sym-
pathy. Spain for most of us was a kind of sentimental dream-
land like the South of our own popular songs; a land of
wine and bullfights, of senoritas playing guitars in the moon-
light; a castle in Spain meant golden peace. No leap of the
imagination foresaw Spain as the battleground of rival world
forces. That dream Spain is gone. We are learning of a Spain
of blood and death and terror. The Spanish are just people
who suffer and die. They are scourged with the old scourge.
We pray that this may be the last lesson we need to teach us
that all of us are people and that people can live at peace.
A Biographer's History
THE MIRACLE OF ENGLAND, by Andre Maurois. Harper. 500pp. Price
$3.75 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
FELIX QUI POTUIT RERUM COGNOSCERE CAUSAS; CERTAINLY M.
Maurois's book offers little help to those who wish to know
why England has attained greatness, but perhaps that task was
too difficult. Miracles, surely, are by nature inexplicable, and
M. Maurois (or his publisher) might have prudently refrained
from any claim to explain them. This is a book of events and
persons, of simple unsophisticated story-telling which seeks no
basic causes, but taking it for what it is one can ask no better.
At the end M. Maurois gives a list of the books to which
he has had constant recourse. He points out that it is too brief
to be regarded as a bibliography, but his selection, which has
a certain uniform character, is significant. He has for the mo-
ment abandoned biography as his medium, but a very consid-
erable proportion of the books he has used are biographies:
Chesterton's William Cobbett finds a place, but Cobbett's
Rural Rides does not.
As a result one discovers, as might be expected, an empha-
sis on the influence of individuals without sufficient explana-
tion of the forces which threw them into prominence or of
their relationship to their own times. Nevertheless tribute
should be paid to some of the excellent digressions from the
straight chronological development which deal with the insti-
tutions of the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and so
on; even though one can clearly discern here a fact from
Powicke or Coulton, and there a summary of Ashley or Cun-
ningham, it must be confessed that M. Maurois has an excel-
lent digestion.
There is a danger of disconnection in writing history from
secondary sources which M. Maurois has not succeeded in
avoiding, even though he lays emphasis on certain long stand-
ing principles of British policy like the defense of the Low
Countries, or compares the events of one century with those
of another. Periods of history do not, in the lives of men who
live through the transition, begin or end abruptly, and in
England continuity is particularly important, as he himself
recognizes.
Although there are a few errors of fact, like his derivation
of the word Quaker or his description of the financial terms of
the 1911 Parliament Act, the author's reliance on sound
sources has served him well. His book will please and not
seriously mislead many people.
New Yor^ ALAN DUDLEY
Whitney of the Trainmen
HISTORY OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF RAILROAD TRAINMEN,
by Walter F. McCaleb. Boni. 273 pp. Price $2.50 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
IT ISN'T PROFOUND, BUT MCCALEB'S WORK MERITS ATTENTION
as a case study of a well organized labor union's half-century
struggle for effective collective bargaining in one of the coun-
try's basic industries.
To call the book a history of the Brotherhood of Railroad
Trainmen, however, is misleading. It really is a biography of
Alexander F. Whitney, who joined the organization soon after
it was born in a caboose at Oneonta, N. Y., in 1883, and served
his brother trainmen in a variety of positions including the
presidency, which he has held since 1928. A persistent ex-
ponent of a redistribution of job opportunities to take up the
slack in employment, Whitney, through his biographer, pre-
sents visions of an imminent six-hour-day and an eventual
working day of four hours or less.
The old question of government ownership of railroads —
a matter of vital interest to the brotherhoods since the post-
war days when some of them backed the Plum Plan for pur-
chasing the roads at unwatered value and leasing them to
non-profit corporations — again is revived for discussion. Whit-
ney's predecessor, W. G. Lee, attempted to spike the plan in
its infancy, but Whitney lets none doubt the firmness of his
stand on the issue. "The railroads now owe the government
$400 million," he said, "part of which will never be paid. . . .
Railroad workers are fed up with an industry that is over-
capitalized and waterlogged. They feel that if the government
took over the railroads their jobs would be more secure and
they would not have to thresh out the wage matter again and
again."
As president of the brotherhood during the dismal depres-
sion years, Whitney evolved an economic philosophy decrying
the high cost of low wages. His ideas, preached from conven-
tion platforms throughout the country, are not new but still
they would have the effect of a recently discovered tonic if
ever swallowed by industrial executives. The chief trouble, the
(In answering advertisements please
537
"Miss Calkins' book is better
than a detective story and chal-
lenges the Lords of Creation
besides."
—CHARLES A. BEARD
Spy Overhead
THE STORY OF
INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE
by Clinch Calkins
Author of "Some Folks Won't Work"
The story of the American industrial worker
caught in a trap of commercialized espionage
and violence — an appallingly true story as
seen in the mass of evidence uncovered by
the La Follette Committee.
No book was ever more timely. The temper
of the outside world is shortening our temper
at home. Men are having to choose sides, and
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mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
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(In answering advertisements
trainmen's president argues, lies in attempts to solve difficul-
ties by reducing payrolls, for "it is not bad business which
creates unemployment but unemployment which creates bad
business."
The book fails to qualify as an accurate history of the
brotherhood; it omits too much information concerning Whit-
ney's fellow leaders and all the martyrs in the railway men's
battle for security, but the volume is nevertheless an impor-
tant contribution to the literature of labor.
Washington, D. C. FRANK M. KLEILER
Anthropological Viewpoints
ANTHROPOLOGY— AN INTRODUCTION TO PRIMITIVE CULTURE, by Alex-
ander Gt>ldenweiser. Crofts. 550 pp. Price $5.
PRIMITIVE BEHAVIOR, by William I. Thomas. McGraw-Hill. 93 pp.
Price $2.
COOPERATION AND COMPETITION AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES,
by Margaret Mead. McGraw-Hill. 531 pp. Price $4.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic.
DR. GOLDENWEISER'S BOOK is DIFFICULT TO APPRAISE BECAUSE
it is neither flesh nor fowl. In part he seems to be writing for
the most naive of lay readers and again he dwells upon intri-
cate detail which can be of interest only to certain highly
specialized professional anthropologists. For example, the
first part of the book deals with man as a biological phe-
nomenon. Here the author abstracts in markedly simple
form more difficult arguments such as those contained in
Hooton's Up from the Ape. His rephrasing is excellent in
its simplicity, in the ease with which it can be read and re-
membered. Then for no apparent reason the writer plunges
into the complexities of Eskimo material culture. There is a
minimum of preparation or explanation for the volte face.
This vacillation between the simple and the abstruse makes
the book difficult to recommend. In addition there is little
which is new in the way of data or interpretation. These
characteristics mark this volume off sharply from the two
others under review.
Primitive Behavior is a compilation of excellently selected
anthropological material. It is strung together with a mini-
mum of comment by the author and arranged under a series
of conventional topical headings such as Language Behavior,
Puberty Ceremonies, Primitive Law, and so forth. This book
belongs essentially to the school of Frazer's Golden Bough.
There is, however, an important difference. Dr. Thomas's
orientation is not in the older social evolutionary school but
rather in the more recent school of historical reconstruction-
ists. His one important contribution is to furnish the his-
torical anthropologist with a psychology which they too often
ignore. That psychology, quite fittingly, is selected from the
conditioned reflex school. Some of these selections are among
the most interesting.
The volume can be recommended to laymen who have
either some background in anthropology or else a very real
interest in the scope and data of the field. It is not a book
to be read quickly or digested easily. It is suited rather for
an hour's reading now and then over a period of weeks or
months.
Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples is
a more challenging volume than Primitive Behavior. It con-
sists of thirteen well rounded descriptions of primitive cul-
tures written by different authors. Some of these are publish-
ing original field material for the first time. The volume is
an outgrowth of a seminar at Columbia University which
gives the book more cohesiveness than most compilations.
The whole subject was undertaken at the request of a sub-
committee on Competitive Cooperative Habits under the
Committee on Personality and Culture which is sponsored by
the Social Science Research Council.
The title implies the central theme but does not indicate
its stress on varied character formations under different cul-
tural situations which forms an important part of the volume.
Dr. Mead's introduction and final interpretive statements are
please mention SURVEY GUAPIIICJ
538
provocative. They contain in general terms one of the best
statements to date on the specific interrelationships between
culture and personality from the anthropologists' viewpoint.
It was found necessary to distinguish three types of adjust
ments: cooperative, competitive and individualistic. Various
cultures are ranged more or less satisfactorily along the sides
of a triangle formed by these three distinctions. To so evalu-
ate the cultures not only economic factors were studied but
also social and political organization, the cultural aims and
the socialization of the child. Dr. Mead in her interpretive
statement attempts to summarize the character formations of
the thirteen cultures in terms of two parallel columns. In
one ego development is expressed in terms of achievement,
attitudes toward property, external sanctions and suicide. In
the opposite column security is estimated in terms of rela-
tionship to kin, religious emphasis, internal sanctions and
attitudes toward children and the aged. I stress this sum-
marizing statement less because it is definitive — with which
Dr. Mead would be the first to agree — than because it gives
the best idea of the implications of the volume. It is cer-
tainly a book which anyone interested in the social sciences,
whether applied or theoretic, should not miss pondering. Also
it would be unfair to the many collaborators not to stress the
high standard of description and interpretation contained in
many of the cultural sketches. They form a firm basis for any
speculation the reader may choose to make on his own score.
This is a book which may not give the reader a sense of the
whole scope of anthropology, but it does bring out the im-
portance of an anthropological orientation in psychological
and social disciplines.
Hunter College CORA Du Bois
Custom-made Architecture
MODERN BUILDING— ITS NATURE, PROBLEMS AND FORMS, by Walter Curt
Behrendt. Harcourt, Brace. 241 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IN THE COMPLEXITIES OF MODERN LIFE, ALL OF US ARE LAYMEN
except in our own specialty and the subjects related to it. It
is a function of paramount importance to inform the lay-
man's mind in fields in which he is a layman. The usual way
of doing this is to compile more or less spectacular facts
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man aware of the issues involved and of current progress in
solving them, which, finally, makes the layman aware of his
relation to such issues and of how they impinge on his life
and thought. Such a one is Behrendt's book, Modern Build-
ing. Everyone has a pragmatic relation to architecture. Either
he builds his. own house or buys one, selects an apartment,
buys furniture; he lives in a community which is constantly
deciding what public works and schools to build, where to
build them and how to build them. To a satisfactory solution
of these daily personal and civic problems he brings little
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of satisfactions or of shortcomings gives him any authority.
He is hemmed in by vague essentials, snobbish concepts of
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sion that it is all a mystery whose key is in the exclusive
possession of the architect.
Behrendt shows that it is precisely the finest, most power-
ful, most sensitive architectural minds of the last century
who want to restore the house, the environment, the city, the
region, to fit the needs of man. Instead of adjusting man to
the deqd rules and forms of an architecture in which modern
(In answering advertisements please
539
Of special importance to all social
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specific cultural factors of today.
THE
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technique was unknown, we as modern architects must strive
to achieve form and beauty around the requirements and de-
sires of men and women and in accordance with the enhanced
possibilities of modern technique — we do not discard the
small rigidly placed dormer window and in its place use wide
glass areas because we want to replace one cliche with
another, but because engineering technique of construction
and heating has proceeded to a point where we can safely
gratify the desire for sunlight and view.
A close study of Modern Building enables the citizen to
weigh the issues and to take a self-respecting cooperative part
in the creation of the new, the fitting environment which we
hope to see. Though Behrendt states the political and eco-
nomic difficulties in the way of achieving a new and logical
frame for our lives, he perhaps stresses them too little. The
intelligent reader will fill this gap himself. But the book is
an inspiring guide which the technician will study to vivify
his whole outlook, and can recommend to the layman with-
out reservation.
New Yor^ ALBERT MAYER
How Mexico Does It
THE EJIDO: MEXICO'S WAY OUT, by Eyler N. Simpson. Foreword by Lie.
Ramon Beteta. University of North Carolina Press. 849 pp. Price $5 post-
paid of Survey Graphic.
THIS IS AN AMAZING BOOK! A DOZEN ARTISTIC ILLUSTRATIONS,
chapters of legal and historical research, case studies of actual
communities, keen analyses of current social and economic
conditions, bits of poetry, well rounded, adequately defended
suggestions as to next steps, and in an appendix 133 pages
of tables that combine from many sources the pertinent sup-
porting statistics, are combined in this attractively produced
work.
The integrating theme is the ejido, the land restored or
granted to agricultural communities under the land reforms
initiated in 1915. Part I gives the origins of the system, por-
trays the struggle for land in Mexico, the coming of the revo-
lution and its relation to agrarian reform. Part II deals with
the present, its problems, disappointments and progress. Here
come three of the six case studies, discussions of land and
water, tenure, credit, political organization and three excellent
chapters on education. Part III is concerned with the future.
It is rare indeed for a foreigner to spend eight years in a
study of another land, rarer for him to win such praise,
though not uncritical, as he has from the distinguished Mexi-
can writer of his foreword, but most rare for the social scien-
tist, while never forgetting the precepts of his profession, to
show as well some of the artist and the poet and also of the
sane social planner and seer.
The book is in a class by itself in the increasing numbers
of volumes on Mexico. Its methods and its style are also com-
mended to social scientists for study and, perhaps, emulation.
Teachers College EDMUND DES. BRUNNER
Every Man a Whole Man
THE LASTING ELEMENTS OF INDIVIDUALISM, by William Ernest
Hocking. Yale University Press. 187 pp. Price $2 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
EVERYONE INTERESTED IN A CLARIFICATION OF THE GENERAL
ideas underlying the thinking of modern society will value
this book. It is an examination of the whole concept of the
nineteenth century liberal individualism in relation to the
conditions and needs of the twentieth century. Both on its
critical and constructive sides it offers ideas which need all
the possible examination and dissemination they can get.
The defects of a philosophy of liberal individualism are
shown to be three — its incapacity by itself to achieve social
unity, its separation of individual duties from rights and its
weakness in influencing behavior. The equal but different
limitations of the contributions of Mill and Marx arc in-
(ln answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
540
terestingly examined; and the elements of a more adequate
and positive social philosophy for our own day are outlined.
Professor Hocking joins with every other sensitive stu-
dent of modern society in pleading for a sense of what he
calls "the whole-interest" in society. Democracy to survive
has to think in "we" terms rather than "I" terms. "The prin-
ciple of every future state must be this, that every man shall
be a whole man." The state is to minister to this wholeness.
But "he must be free to set his conscience against community
and state, just because he is not free to manipulate it nor to
disregard it." The judgments of his conscience come "from
the nature of things."
The individual's fruitful relation to the state is best as-
sured in the author's view "along the line of his own spe-
cial interest and capacity." This I take to mean a justifica-
tion of fuller participation by the individual in a democracy
through channels of vocational organization.
The author believes that the older liberalism suffered by
assuming a "once-born" human nature which was "unaware
of moral costs." He does, however, fail to give his sugges-
tions as to how the true individualism of the twice-born per-
son is to be attained but affirms the need for an "inner bond
to the ultimate object."
One could have wished that more had been said by way
of characterizing the "ultimate object" in modern terms and
as to how this "inner bond" was to be attained for indi-
viduals in the modern world.
New Yor{ ORDWAY TEAD
ESSENCE OF THE STEEL STRIKE
(Continued from page 519)
disturbed. Of approximately 25,000 steel workers living in
South Chicago, not over 4500 were on strike. The large
works of the Carnegie Illinois Company were of course not
struck; neither were those of International Harvester and
Interlake Iron; the first having officially recognized an "inde-
pendent employes union"; the latter being in negotiation
with the SWOC. On the sluggish mass of public opinion
in the city of Chicago the strike made little dent. Aside from
protests, notably at the nearby University of Chicago, the
Memorial Day "massacre" by the Chicago police caused little
indignation — a disturbing sign of the increasing difficulty
in our large cities of arousing public opinion to positive ac-
tion against political interference with the rights of citizens.
Of Cleveland's 450,000 gainful workers, not over 15,000
were involved in the strike at the four local plants of Republic
Steel. On the whole, Cleveland's citizens were indifferent.
The most significant manifestations of public opinion came
in two places widely separated from each other — Monroe,
Mich, and Johnstown, Pa. In the former, "vigilantism" stuck
up an ugly head; in the latter, there appeared a recrudescence
of the anti-union local citizens' industrial associations which
characterized the period following the defeat of the Amalga-
mated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers in 1901.
The Monroe "vigilantism" unquestionably stemmed di-
rectly out of the labor unrest in the automotive centers of the
state. There was, first, the large number of unauthorized
stoppages of production in the General Motors plants (not-
withstanding the provision in the collective bargaining agree-
ment that no strike should be called without reference to the
officials of the United Automobile Workers); second, the
outlaw strike of the employes of electric lighting and power
in the Saginaw Valley, with the threat to the security and
comfort of thousands of families in the central part of the
state; third, the general "labor holiday" in Lansing. The out-
side observer may find explanation for the tying up of all
business in Lansing for nearly a whole day by the leaders of
(In answering advertisements please
541
The Ejido
MEXICO'S WAY OUT
By Eyler N. Simpson
today — her land problems from
pre-Conquest times to the present — sug-
gestions for her future economic and social
organization, brilliantly presented by a man who
spent eight years in Mexico studying the agrari-
an question.
• "... it is the most informative and stimulating book on
Mexico the present reviewer has ever seen. It contains, in
addition to its main theme, more of Mexican politics, his-
tory, ethnology, geography, and even of tourist lore, than
most popular books which deal with these subjects in-
dividually." — Christian Science Monitor.
850 pages. Illustrated. $5.00
U. N. C. PRESS • CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
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NAME...
ADDRESS
CITY STATE
local organized labor, in the stupidity of the local sheriff who
decided that two o'clock in the morning was a good time to
arrest a few pickets against whom warrants had been sworn
out several hours before in connection with an insignificant
local strike. But the resort to "direct action," with its menace
to the community's commercial life, frightened local citizens,
and the organized counter-action against the unions was not
long in developing. In Monroe the appearace of the SWOC
organizers, and the establishment of a picket line at the
small sheet-rolling plant of Republic Steel, in the face of the
plain fact that nothing like a majority of the employes wanted
to strike, touched off the fuse of community discontent, and
the expulsion of the organizers and the breaking of the picket
line promptly followed. A few days afterward a correspondent
of the New Yor/^ Times reported that the citizens of Monroe
"were proud of the American way in which the community
had handled its first major labor problem." The business
interests may have "put the fear of the Lord" into steel union
organizers for the time being, but that Monroe is hence-
forth better prepared to deal with its social problems may be
seriously questioned.
Johnstown's reaction was directed more against the indig-
nity of Governor Earle's putting the city under martial law
than against the strike as such, which never had any real
strength. Regardless of the governor's action, it appears im-
probable that the walk-out of the Cambria workers would have
assumed important proportions. In telling its story to the
rest of the country, the twentieth-century American technique
of community advertising was resorted to by the Johnstown
Citizens Committee. Paid full page ads were taken in large
city newspapers on two separate days. The first, entitled "We
Protest," denounced the violence and intimidation which it
alleged had marked the organizing tactics of the CIO in
Johnstown, and appealed to Americans everywhere to help
it make its views heard. Vehemently the committee protested
it was not against unions, but revealed the average citizen's
difficulty in finding firm ground under his feet when he tries
to reconcile the admitted right to strike of certain employes
with the equally sacred right of certain of their fellow em-
ployes in the same industrial establishment to keep on
working.
In the second full page ad (published ten days after the
strike had ended everywhere) the Citizens Committee re-
ported it had received 159,000 in over 5000 separate con-
tributions and that representative delegates from 73 other
American communities had met in Johnstown under the
auspices of the committee and adopted resolutions project-
ing "a national organization whose function it shall be to re-
store and protect those constitutional rights that have been
taken from American citizens by certain [unnamed] com-
munity officials." A familiar attitude was voiced in another
resolution in which the meeting promised to "oppose activi-
ties that are un-American, communistic, and destructive of
the welfare of our nation."
It is easy to dismiss what happened as the aberration of a
business group that regarded its community as unjustifiably
pestered by a strike which did not have the support of local
workers. The behavior of Johnstown, taken in conjunction
with Monroe's vigilantism, however, and corresponding ac-
tivities in the Ohio steel towns, proves to be the most con-
sistently held attitude over the eighteen years bridging the
two steel strikes. While the 1919 strike was in progress the
Russian bolshevist revolution was engaged in reorganizing
the social, political and economic life of the former empire
of the Czars, and even if those most outspoken against the
steel strike of the time did not really see in it the American
counterpart of the Russian overturn, it constituted, in their
eyes, a serious threat to the stability of business. The World
War had been over for a year, and while the country — to the
astonishment of the most competent prophets — was still pros-
perous, there were signs of approaching decline. Anything
tin answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
542
that hastened the inevitable slump was feared, and the men
responsible for any interruption to business were hated.
Likewise, in June 1937, the business world was enjoying
prosperity, but it was (and still is) depression-conscious.
Business men believe that rising labor costs, attributed in part
to the CIO success in unionizing previously unorganized
industries, threaten business profits. The resulting hostility
of business constitutes perhaps the key to the unsympathetic
and unfriendly behavior on the part of local communities
which every major American strike must contend with, and
explains the ease with which the leaders of strikes are charged
with unpatriotic, even subversive, activities.
RECAPITULATING THE ESSENCE OF THE MID-WEST STEEL STRIKES:
Of some 600,000 steel workers, about 250,000 (the great ma-
jority of them in the four companies affected by the 1937
strike, plus E. T. Weir's two concerns) are still denied genu-
ine collective bargaining through bona fide unions. Will it
require further strikes to win this right, or will majority votes
in favor of the SWOC in employe elections in the Bethlehem,
Inland, Republic, Youngstown and Weirtown companies
peaceably bring about recognition of the union? No predic-
tion can be ventured. Moreover, it is by no means certain that
one union will ever take in all of the wage earners in the
steel industry. There are thousands of American wage earn-
ers who are not interested in belonging to any union, no
matter how cogently its advantages to them may be pre-
sented by union leaders.
The Wagner National Labor Relations Act represents the
attempt on the part of the federal government to equalize
the bargaining power of the two parties chiefly concerned —
the employers and the employes. But for the workers to win
collective bargaining in fact as well as in law, will not end
the matter. It is improbable that the government can leave
it to the two parties by themselves to come to agreements
regarding the respective shares of each in the total income
produced by a particular industry, in view of the magnitude
and importance of the public interests involved. The stronger
the two principal parties to industrial disputes grow, the
more necessary will state interference become — to preserve
democracy no less than to curb capitalism. The unions can-
not fail to be drawn into this transformation, and they will
inevitably find it desirable to try to influence government in
its efforts to regulate industry. The vertical union will be as
much concerned with bargaining with government as with
bargaining with its industry. The ultimate enactment of
legislation along the lines of the wages and hours bill left
swinging by Congress this past summer may prove to be the
starting point for direct and continuing governmental inter-
vention in a field which labor leaders are inclined to regard
as the prerogative of collective bargaining. This, inciden-
tally, may prove to be the core of the conflict between the
CIO and the AF of L, the former being animated by a
recognition of the increasing importance of governmental
interference in production; the latter by more of a laissez-
faire attitude of dealing with specific local or vocational ques-
tions as they arise.
The appearance of vigilantism in communities affected by
the steel strike is the disturbing element in the picture; it is
evidence of community immaturity, of a tendency to revert
to emotional attitudes in situations demanding cool-headed-
ness and clear thinking. The important thing, of course, is
not which side wins strikes; neither should we be concerned
with the extension of collective bargaining into industry
merely as an end in itself. Its importance is rather as an in-
dispensable part of the process and goal of industrial democ-
racy. During the years to come our nation will need all the
self-control and wisdom it can command to inform and im-
plement rational governmental intervention in the domain
of industrial relations. This is why our twentieth century
vigilantism is so menacing.
(In answering advertisements
s
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THE NEW BOOKS
will be reviewed in the
November Number of Survey Graphic
Among the distinguished reviewers in this number
will be the following:
Hastings Lyon
John Palmer Gavit
Professor Edwin S. Corwin (Princtton)
Professor Phillips Bradley (Amherst)
Professor Eduard C. Lindeman
David Cushman Coyle
Professor Frank Tannenbaum (Columbia)
A. A. Berle, Jr.
Arthur Garfield Hays
Dr. Adolf Meyer
Ordway Tead
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Professor Leon Whipple (N.Y.U.)
Important books received too late for review in
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numbers, will be listed.
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543
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A Significant Publication in the Field of Community Life
NEW AMERICANS
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ALLEGHENY COUNTY
A Cultural Study
by
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This pamphlet comes at a time when the interest of social
workers in the cultural and psychological background of
nationality groups is being increasingly aroused. The con-
tents include interviews revealing attitudes both of our
older population and our new, also chapters on Population
Trends, Nationality Communities, Citizenship Training,
Naturalization, Case Work for the foreign Born Family, and
The Program of International Institutes.
114 pages 75c per copy
Order from
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(In answering advertisements
SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE
V At the Children's Bureau
by HILLIER KRIEGHBAUM
CHILDREN, LIKE THEIR ELDERS, HAVE CERTAIN INALIENABLE
rights. A juvenile triumvirate exists which might be described
as the right to live, to be healthy and to be happy. Agitation
for a federal Children's Bureau to carry out these aims be-
came powerful a century and a quarter after the Declaration
of Independence. In 1906 Lillian D. Wald, founder of the
Henry Street Settlement in New York City, interested Presi-
dent Theodore Roosevelt. This champion of natural resources
turned to battle for conservation of the country's human re-
sources.
Pleas for congressional action from two Presidents were
necessary before the bureau eventually was created. President
William Howard Taft, on April 9, 1912, signed a bill spon-
sored by Senator William E. Borah. Thus came into being
the first public agency in the world which considered as a
whole "the welfare of children and child life among all classes
of our people."
From the first, the Children's Bureau served as a central
office where information about child life could be collected,
reviewed and interpreted so that facts might be passed on to
those groups and individuals whose intelligent action thus
could reduce needless experimentation and duplication.
It is not strange that one of the first phases of such a pro-
gram was to compile data so that mothers could obtain in
ready form the information necessary to guard their children
in the prenatal state and to aid well-rounded development
after birth. To do this efficiently, the Children's Bureau com-
piled a series of pamphlets which over the years have become
the most popular of all Uncle Sam's literature.
Figures as of June 30, 1937, show that 9,529,220 copies of
Infant Care have been distributed since it first appeared in
1914. Employes of the Government Printing Office have
christened it "Uncle Sam's best seller." Runner-up is Prenatal
Care, of which 4,151,032 copies have been dispensed since
1913. The booklet, The Child from One to Six, has been
given to 3,507,690 persons and Child Management to 1,162,-
167. Any one of these four pamphlets, it is seen, has surpassed
all but the most exceptional best selling novels.
On comparison with the birthrate during recent years,
these statistics indicate that approximately one out of every
five mothers has been helped to rear her children along
healthful, scientific channels because of this governmental
activity. Possibly no other phase of federal assistance touches
so wide a field as this work of the Children's Bureau.
Requests for these booklets have been received on the
neatly engraved stationery of Park Avenue, on the plain letter
paper of Main Street and on the brown wrapping paper of
the rural backwoods. The 400,000 letters that are received
annually at the Children's Bureau represent a typical cross-
section of the nation and most of them are requests for pub-
lications.
Members of Congress regard these booklets highly; many
of them carry a supply while visiting constituents and give
away copies to all young or expectant mothers as part of their
vote-getting campaign. Anyone may obtain a free copy as
long as the supply is available. Occasionally a heavy demand
will take all the free copies allotted for that year by Congress
and then the bureau has to refer requests to the Government
Printing Office's sales division.
Regardless of how impersonal any project may seem at
first glance, there is always a human guide behind it. In the
case of Infant Care, most popular of all the Children's Bu-
reau publications, it is Dr. Martha M. Eliot, now assistant
chief of the bureau. She has completely revised the original
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC.)
544
publication twice to bring it up to date with recent scientific
advances.
Since 1924, when she came to the bureau as director of
the child and maternal health division, Dr. Eliot has sought
to share her own extensive knowledge in pediatrics with the
nation's mothers. An internationally recognized expert her-
self, she obtained the cooperation of the leading pediatricians
on the bureau's advisory groups. Yet Dr. Eliot has never
forgotten the human element in raising children. In the in-
troduction of Infant Care she writes:
"Baby care is a great art. It is the most important task any
woman ever undertakes, and she should apply to this work
the same diligence, intelligence, and sustained effort that she
would give to the most exacting profession."
A plump, motherly person with graying hair, Dr. Eliot has
made it her profession to see that the nation's children have
a fair chance to life, health and happiness. After graduation
from Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins Medical School, she
served at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, the
St. Louis Children's Hospital and the New Haven Hospital.
As a member of the staffs of both the Yale University School
of Medicine and the Children's Bureau, Dr. Eliot was able
to advance research in rickets and child mortality. When the
opportunity came in 1934 to give even further aid as assis-
tant bureau chief, she gave up her university post and trans-
ferred her home from New Haven to Washington.
Possibly more than any other individual in the country,
Dr. Eliot through her revisions of Infant Care and in super-
vising the preparation of other popular pamphlets has given
mothers the information necessary for their children to live.
Her inquiry into rickets and other childhood ailments has
helped to dissolve the clouds around the diseases of infancy.
She has put her technical, professional medical knowledge
to work for the betterment of America's children.
Dr. Eliot agrees with Julia C. Lathrop, first director of the
Children's Bureau, who said, "Children are not safe and
happy if their parents are miserable, and parents must be
miserable if they cannot protect a home against poverty."
Recently the assistant director expressed another facet of the
same thought when she wrote of investigations undertaken
during the twenty-five years of the bureau's existence:
"If any one fact has emerged from these studies that is of
more significance than others to the welfare of children, it is
that an adequate standard of living for the family is basic to
all other factors. Such a standard of living to be adequate
must include, in addition to food, shelter and clothing, pro-
vision for medical care and for health supervision. Without
such provision, a vicious cycle is established, for inadequate
medical care and lack of preventive health services increase
the economic burden while poverty itself is responsible for
much undernutrition and in large measure for insufficient
and inadequate treatment of sickness. To raise the standard
of living for families to a level at which children may grow
and develop properly, should be the ultimate goal."
With aching heart, Dr. Eliot watched the depression eat
at the morale of so many American homes. But she did more
than simply watch. When politicians glibly looked at incom-
plete statistics and proclaimed that hard times had been good
for children, she helped mobilize the experts of the nation.
She marshalled the statistics which showed that there was
a cumulative effect on children who suffered because of the
depression.
Under the social security act, the Children's Bureau is
charged with annually granting and supervising $3,800,000
for maternal and child health, $2,850,000 for crippled children
and $1,500,000 for child welfare. These funds make it pos-
sible to extend activities which twenty-five years of experience
have demonstrated are needed. The federal Children's Bu-
reau and the states are cooperating on a new frontal assault
to protect the health of our children as the most priceless gift
that the present generation may hand over to its successors.
(In answering advertisements please
545
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
A Graduate Professional School Offering Courses
Leading to the Degree of Master of Social Science.
Academic Year Opens July, 1938
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for September, 1937
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW FOR
CHILD GUIDANCE
I. The Prognostic Value of the First Interview
Harriette Mills
II. The First Interview as a Guide to Treatment
Louise Ritterskampf
III. Comments in Conclusion Helen L. Witmer
Single Copies, 75c
Annual Subscription (four issues), $2.00
F»r further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL •
Northampton. Massachusetts
The
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
AFFILIATED WITH
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Announces the beginning of the 1937-
1938 session on Tuesday, September
twenty-eighth. Bulletins of the Graduate
Department, Extension Department, and
Advanced Curriculum will be sent upon
request.
311 SOUTH JUNIPER STREET, PHILADELPHIA
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
SHUTDOWN ON THE HILL
(Continued from page 529)
Great Falls employers report the result of unionism to have
been better, but fewer, employes. Higher wage standards have
forced an increase in individual efficiency, and have encour-
aged strong competitive bidding by merchants for expert
salespeople; but they have resulted in dropping the less ef-
ficient from payrolls altogether. One industrialist whose em-
ployes are almost completely unionized and who pays, in
consequence, a scale considerably higher than that prevailing
in other Montana cities in his business, admits that he has
"the best employes in the Northwest."
Direct selling cost (wages) of the largest department store
is computed at 10.6 percent of gross sales, against a national
average for stores its size of 7.8 percent. Its other operating
expenses are approximately average, and although Great Falls
prices are high, this establishment insists its "markup" is about
one percent under the average for stores of similar business
volume. In order to balance these costs and still make money
(which this store is doing satisfactorily) the merchant must
take a little less profit, cut the corners considerably. He spends
less on advertising, promotion, and perhaps on good-will
services.
One of his greatest problems is "balancing his stock"; pro-
viding standard quality and price merchandise for ordinary
demands, cheap goods for the unpredictable slumps, higher
priced merchandise for the sudden spurts in community spirit
when everything is running and it has rained, or when some-
one has made a killing in the gambling houses or the brokers'
offices.
THESE GAMBLING HOUSES WERE BECOMING AN IMPORTANT Busi-
ness factor until in mid-August, after a fifth shutdown had
tightened local money conditions, police suddenly closed lot-
teries and ousted slot machines, "pin games," and other
mechanical devices. Within the previous few months, ostensi-
bly under authorization of a state law permitting "small"
games as "trade stimulators," Chinese lotteries and book-
making had taken firm root. Gamblers estimated the "take"
of two lottery establishments, one bookmaker, and a few
minor games at about $1200 a day. But the "overhead" was
high; operators were paid $7 and $8 a day and each place
used four to six, and the prizes (reputedly trade tokens but
redeemed for cash) ran from a few cents to $2000. Operators
insisted the games actually were trade stimulators, that lot-
tery or racing profits were negligible compared to increased
bar or tobacco business. One establishment boosted its bar's
gross receipts 90 percent.
Despite the police shutdown, lottery equipment remained in
place^ and there were rumors of plans to reopen on a "legiti-
mate" trade token basis in which the prizes could only be
redeemed in merchandise.
Merchants ascribed a plunge in sales a few days after indus-
trial pay days to the theory that the few dollars the wage
earner might have retained until next pay day or spent on
some store article which caught his fancy, went instead for
lottery or race tickets, or drinks.
Gambling on this scale was relatively new to the city. Great
Falls supports two brokerage houses in addition to the
brokerage departments in the banks; and it always has been
a grain trading center. Lotteries, where the average ticket
was purchased for 15 cents, provided the chance-taker who
had but a few dollars to risk the opportunity for gain, there-
tofore largely limited to the player who could afford a few
hundred. Its popularity stemmed partly from the collapse of
the thrift ideal during the depression, but most of its hold
upon an amazing cross-section of the population— from
stenographers to hodcarriers — reasonably could be attributed
to the growing uncertainties of Great Falls life. Periodical
shutdowns do not contribute to cultural investment; rather
they encourage taking a chance in the hope of sudden
riches. This reckless temper has earned decades of notoriety
for historic Butte, 150 miles south of Great Falls; it is char-
acteristic of mining towns and other such communities
wherein life is dependent upon the whims of ore vein or
foreign market. But in Great Falls, it's water.
STRICTLY "CULTURAL" ACTIVITIES IN GREAT FALLS, AS IN ANY
other isolated small city, are virtually non-existent. It has no
orchestra aside from school organizations; one bookshop
(which seldom buys a book selling at $3 except on special
order) and book departments in a department store and a
stationery shop; a free public library (wherein circulation of
non-fiction books grows steadily); one legitimate theater
which has not had a stage show for ten years except one
starring Walker Whiteside; one Community Concert Asso-
ciation which, after terrific struggle, manages to raise the
guarantee for three or four performances a season; one public
forum which held one session (on city manager form of
government) and recessed for the summer; one very small
college (Catholic); three motion picture theaters, one wholly
and one partially second-run; one radio station connected
(sometimes) with the Columbia Broadcasting System; two
daily newspapers, one Republican and one Democratic, and
both owned by the same corporation — Democratic.
But it has about 3000 radio receivers for its 7000 families,
and 6490 telephone subscribers. Its ratio of automobiles to
population is above the national average. In six years it has
drawn 961,000 people to its annual North Montana Fair. It
is sport-conscious: a recreation association supervises its chil-
dren's play, directs the athletic activities of thousands of
adults including girls' baseball teams. It has a million-dollar
highschool, already too small although built within the last
decade, with a flood-lighted stadium and a championship
football team to play in it; it has public tennis and golf
courses, and a country club.
THE FOURTH SHUTDOWN "ON THE HILL" IN MID-JULY JARRED
Great Falls severely, but though many were bewildered, the
city was not unhappy. It had been raining, hadn't it?
The newspapers and their small town practice (not limited
to Great Falls) of "playing up" good news, "playing down"
bad, are partly to blame for the bewilderment. A merchant,
announcing to department heads that he must curtail their
buying, is met by puzzled reference to the synthetic optimism
of the press, and finds himself branded a pessimist and a
piker. Unfamiliar with soil economy, city residents exaggerate
the benefit of the publicized "good rains."
But they know life is becoming more precarious, although
few know why. Some (like the city engineer quoted earlier)
are aware of the gradual economic demoralization forced
upon a community which sends all of its natural wealth away,
gets little of it back — a community which is, in effect, an
exploited, subject territory. The nitrogen in the soil which
brings high protein premiums for Great Falls wheat, the
metals, the oil, the nourishing grasses in the bellies of Mon-
tana livestock, the water from Montana's mountains — all go
east. Some of the soil has gone: two extensive areas near the
city, overcropped for rich wheat yields, are exhausted.
Once Indians roamed these plains. They killed the buffalo
where they stood, clothed themselves in the great beasts' hides,
ate their flesh — and left their bones to feed the soil with phos-
phorus. The buffalo are gone and beef steers have taken
their place; but of these the East gets even the bones.
THE INSTABILITY OF THE COMMUNITY ECONOMY CANNOT HELP
but be reflected in the morale of its people; but Great Falls
lacks mental clinics or fact-finding agencies, so there are no
(Continued on page 548)
546
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547
SHUTDOWN ON THE HILL
(Continued from page 546)
statistics on intangible distress. Insanity and suicide figures are
unreliable as an index because of their small totals; a lovers'
suicide pact, for instance, would add two to the year's total
and, because that total is so small, would make the year's
figure show a material increase over that of the previous
period. But one can perceive increasing distress which has not
reached the stage of official record; and the merchants see it
before the doctors.
One thing can save, rebuild this community: restitution
by the East of some of the tribute that has been exacted —
restitution in the form of expended tax moneys for public
works power dams, for reclamation, restoration of the soil
and resettlement of farmers. This frontier complaint of exploi-
tation was heard in Jackson's day: it bores America. But
now it is becoming a cry of desperation: this lush West
wherein one early visitor said, "You could pasture all the
cattle in the world," is approaching exhaustion. And unless
its soil can be restored and its dwindling waters used, its
people and its cities will perish. Great Falls, one such city, is
just fifty years old.
Meanwhile a perplexed people watch the grim process of
resource depletion. While this review of their problems was
being written, they read the following newspaper dispatch:
BUTTE, Mont., July 22 (AP) — Operations of the Anaconda
Copper Mining Co. have been sharply curtailed, its officials an-
nounced today, because of absence of water supply and resultant
lack of power from hydro-electric plants along the Missouri river.
The Orphan Girl mine here has been closed. A part of its crew
of 280 men will be retained to do development work, however.
Sand tailing operations at Anaconda have been suspended and
a slag plant at East Helena and the zinc concentrator at Anaconda
have been closed.
Operations also will be curtailed at the copper refineries, rolling
mill and wire mill at Great Falls.
Company officials said resumption of operations was dependent
on availability of an adequate supply of power. The lack of power,
they added, "threatens to grow more serious." . . .
This time the newspapers did not "play it down." It was
the fifth shutdown, and the worst. And the county's WPA
quota, 1059 last April, was set at 655 on July 15.
Few in Great Falls have read Stuart Chase's Rich Land,
Poor Land. Perhaps that is just as well; the conclusion of
one of Mr. Chase's chapters, if read immediately after per-
usal of the dispatch above, might present a disheartening pic-
ture of the city's possible future. It is the chapter on Duck-
town, and it ends thus:
Here is the whole story of the future — "if present trends con-
tinue"— highly simplified and very clear. Metaphorically speaking,
the smelter is industry, feeding on a declining resource. While
. . . that resource lasts, the people of Ducktown have jobs and
automobiles. The world congratulates Ducktown on its high
standard of living. Meanwhile the land crumbles away and the
waters become wild and useless. This does not matter — for men
without eyes — if other lands grow food and if copper keeps com-
ing out of the mines to exchange for it. But no mine can be
operated without power, and finally the outraged land and water
cut off the power. What happens then?...
Well, what?
AMONG OURSELVES
(Continued from page 503)
The porters form the largest Negro union
in the country. The Pullman Company is
both the most traditional and most selective
employer of Negroes in the country. That
the two have finally arrived at a written
understanding, twelve years after the porters
began to organize, is testimony to the char-
acter of the union, and to the ability of its
president, A. Philip Randolph, and likewise
to the progressiveness of the Pullman man-
agement which, when its vice-president,
Champ Carry, finally signed the detailed con-
tract, accepted wage increases for the porters
based on the then unknown rates to be estab-
lished by negotiations of the four non-operat-
ing Brotherhoods of Railroad Employes. The
union, with approximately 7000 members,
made the contract for all of the 8000 or more
porters, and also represents Filipino club car
attendants. Not only the men and the man-
agement, but the National Mediation Board,
acting under the provisions of the Railway
Labor Act, are to be commended for this
amicable outcome in a great American insti-
tution— travel by Pullman.
Housing Experts Meet
AT THE JOINT CONFERENCE OF THE INTER-
national Housing Association and the In-
ternational Federation of Housing and Town
Planning, in Paris, the two organizations
merged, with headquarters to be in Brus-
sels. In the host of 1000 delegates from 30
countries the United States was not officially
represented, but members of the National
Public Housing Conference, who were on
tour in Europe, attended. Despite the diver-
sion of public expenditures for armament,
the building of workers' houses continues.
The close attention given to slum clear-
ance, in contrast to past stressing of decen-
tralized garden cities, signified a realistic
approach to the cost of transportation from
suburban areas to industrial centers, and the
need of building within rather than outside
cities.
George L. Pepler of London continues as
provisional president of the merged inter-
national organization, with Donald C. L.
Murray of London and Paula Schafer of
Frankfort as secretaries. The next congress
will be held in Mexico, D.F., in August
1938.
Doctor of Letters
ONE OF THE MOST CHARMING CAMPUSES OF
New England, that at Middletown, Conn., of
an institution which has been a force for a
century, was the setting of an honor bestowed
on the editor of The Midmonthly Survey and
of Survey Graphic by Wesleyan University.
That it came in mid-June of our 25th year
emphasized above all things that this doc-
torate of letters was a tribute to Survey As-
sociates, to be shared with staff and board
and fellow members of our cooperative society.
In his introduction, Professor Kruse made
reference to activities "dedicated to the fost-
ering of international understanding, social
welfare, and humanitarianism." President
James L. McConaughy's citation in conferring
the degree, follows:
"Paul Kellogg, conspicuous example of
success attained without a college degree,
for twenty-five years editor of The Survey,
and of the Survey Graphic since its establish-
ment, creating and directing a new type of
548
magazine in the field of social welfare which
is international in influence, critical, construc-
tive and interpretative, honored as an editor
for your liberality and warmth — truly humane
in all your sympathies. By the authority of
this University to me committed, I admit
you to the honorary degree of Doctor of Let-
ters; and I give to you all rights, privileges,
honors, and distinctions which by custom
here or elsewhere pertain to that degree; in
testimony whereof I now present to you
your diploma."
Pro-Photo
THE CURRENT REVERSION TO PICTURE LAN-
guage has produced a new quarterly, Photo-
History. The first number, War in Spain,
appeared in the spring. The second, Labor's
Challenge, is now in circulation. Beginning
with the days of packet ships and home in-
dustries, the sixty-five large pages of the
magazine tell in a few words, many prints
and photographs the story of American work
and workers through the CIO steel strikes
and the new union drive in textiles. The
slant is definitely pro-union and pro-Lewis.
The magazine, published by Modern Age
Books, Inc., is edited by Richard Storrs
Childs, Ernest Galarza, and Sidney Pollatsek,
with Ed Levinson and John T. Bobbitt as
associate editors.
Communicable
IN A RECENT LISTING OF CASES AND DEATHS
due to communicable diseases in New York
City, we find the city health department in-
cluding among the more familiar ailments a
new malady — one of those mysterious occi-
dental diseases as the detective stories might
put it: automobiles.
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FREE
COPY. . . Jor^our Library
T THE NILE
By EMIL LUDWIG
RETAIL PRICE FIVE DOLLARS
"WHAT A RIVER! WHAT A LIFE STORY!"
/""HITICS are almost unanimously agreed
V_y that the resulting work, published early
this year, is Ludwig's greatest. As we follow
the course of the Nile, originating in a prim-
ordial land of wild beauty and maturing amidst
our ripest civilization, there arise before our
eyes all the shadows of the past: an endless
train of historical figures, the warring tribes,
the strange races, that have desperately fought
and struggled for existence along its shores.
The river nurtures and sustains them all— "men
of the mountains and men of the marsh, Arabs,
Christians and cannibals, pygmies and giants."
Here is the story of Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba ; of Alexander the Great ; of the Ptole-
mies ; of Abyssinian slave markets ; of Caesar,
Antony and Cleopatra; of Stanley's heroic
discovery of Livingstone and the Congo; of
Mehemet Ali and his murder in one day of all
the Mamelukes ; of how the dervishes cut down
General Gordon; of the romantic Colonel Mar-
chand's trek through the jungle ; of Lord Kitch-
ener—and countless other heroes, adventurers
and madmen who make up the splendid pag-
eant which has followed the course of the Nile.
Through it all the protagonist of the story
remains clear. The Nile, mighty artery of life
to land and people, flows majestically through
the ages while humanity grubs and claws on
its banks.
WHY WE OFFER TO GIVE YOU A FREE COPY
HERE is no reader of this magazine who would not find
it in many ways to his advantage to subscribe to the service
of the Book-of-the-Month Club; and we make this extra-
ordinary offer in order to demonstrate that this is the case.
What we here propose is this: mail the inquiry coupon, and
a copy of THE NILE tvill be put aside in your name, and held
until we hear whether or not you care to join. In the meantime, a
booklet will at once be sent to you outlining how the Club operates.
Study this booklet at your leisure; you may be surprised, for in-
stance, to learn that belonging to the Club does not mean you have
to pay any fixed sum each year; nor does it mean that you are obliged
to take one book every month, twelve a year (you may take as few
as four) ; nor are you ever obliged to take the specific book-of-the-
month selected by the judges. You have complete freedom of choice
at all times. You also participate in the Club's "book-dividends,"
which are valuable library volumes like THE NILE by Emil Ludwig.
In 1936, the retail value of the books distributed free among Club
members was over $1,450,000. For every two books its members
purchased, they received on the average one book free.
If, after reading the booklet referred to, you decide to join the
Club, a free copy of THE NILE will at once be shipped to you.
Here is a very interesting fact; over 150,000 families— composed
of discerning but busy readers like yourself— now get most of their
books through the Book-of-the-Month Club; and of these tens of
thousands of people not a single one was induced to join by a sales-
man; every one of them joined upon his own initiative, upon the
recommendation of friends who were members, or after simply read-
ing—as we ask you to do— the bare facts about the many ways in which
membership in the Club benefits you as a book-reader and book-buyer.
SOME TYPICAL OPINIONS
The Nile stands among the finest of Emil Ludwig's works
for its sheer exuberance in descriptive passage, its wise
weighing of historical factors, its recreation of famous
scenes and its deep human sympathies.
—HARRY HANSEN, N. Y. World Telegram
Is based on a magnificent conception and, I think, develops
it with extraordinary skill and passion. Few books that I
have read of late have afforded me more solid pleasure.
—CLIFTON FADIMAN, The New Yorker
Is not only one of the best things he has ever written but
also one of the most richly rewarding of recent serious
publications in any field.
HERSCHEL BRICKELL, N. Y. Evening Post
What a river! What a life story! Neither the Ganges nor
the Yangtse, the Amazon or our Mississippi carries such a
flood of story with its water. . . . The Nile is, I think,
Emil Ludwig's best book.
—LEWIS GANNETT, N. Y. Herald-Tribttnl
BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB.Inc. A 35 1 0
385 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y.
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SURVEY
NOVEMBER 1937
GRAPHIC
MAGAZINE OF SOCIAL INTERPRETATION
U. S. SCHOOL
POPULATION
1936
OTHER
EDUCATIONAL
INFLUENCES
Each red figure represents one million full-time students
l STATISTICS. NC •
Education That Informs
by H. G. WELLS
Sex Offenders
by IRA S. WILE, M. D.
If Freedom Matters
by HAROLD J. LASKI
Critiques Six Months After the Strikes
by PHIL S. HANNA— FOR INDUSTRY by EDWARD LEVINSON— FOR LABOR
An Angry City That Did More Than Talk. ..Wanted: Leaders For Labor... Fall Book Section
30 CENTS A COPY
$3.00 A YEAR
Bread, Butter, and Jam
for 13,000,000 People
ARE you one of these 13,000,000 people? Does
jL\. the income which supports you come from
making or selling automobiles, radios, electric
refrigerators, or movie films? If so, you are one
of them. You are one if that income comes from
the rayon or aluminum industry, or any of the
other industries which have grown up in a
single generation.
Automobiles, radios, gasoline, aluminum — these
and many other products exist today because
industry sought new products and better ways
of building old ones. And after unearthing these
new products, industry developed them, found
ways to build them better, means to sell them
at lower prices.
Today, these industries not only employ millions
but— through demands for steel, coal, cotton,
transportation — they help support millions
more.
Some of the greatest advances in this work
have been made through the use of electricity.
Through it new products have been developed,
and the efficiency of all industries has been
increased. In most of these modern electrical
developments, General Electric research and
engineering have pioneered.
G-E research has saved the public from ten to one hundred dollars
for every dollar it has earned jor General Electric
GENERAL HI ELECTRIC
LISTEN TO THE G-E HOUR OF CHARM. MONDAYS. 9:3O P.M., E.S.T.. NBC RED NETWORK
CONSUMERS UNION
Announces
AM I PAYING TOO MUCH FOR
MY LIFE INSURANCE?
WILL I SAVE OR LOSE BY CHANG-
ING MY POLICY?
HOW CAN I BE SURE THAT MY
INSURANCE AGENT IS NOT OVER-
SELLING ME?
These and similar questions will be
answered in the reports.
a series of reports on LIFE INSURANCE
Also in the current issue of
Consumers Union Reports:
Portable Typewriters
Despite the fact that most portable typewriters
cost the same, give the appearance of being
similarly constructed, and bear the names of
widely-known firms, tests run by Consumers
Union technicians on six of the leading makes
show that there are substantial differences in
quality. Some models are easier to operate, some
are more durable, some are better all-round
values. The results of these tests are given in
the current issue with ratings as "Best Buys,"
"Also Acceptable," and "Not Acceptable."
Men's Hats
Fourteen brands of men's hats, ranging in price
from $2.95 to $7.50, are rated on the basis of
laboratory tests and examinations. Some of the
brands tested are Knox, Stetson, Mallory, Dun-
lop, Truly-Warner, and Adams. Will one of the
cheaper hats serve as well as a more expensive
one? This report will help you to answer this
question.
Sewing Machines
Should an inexperienced operator buy aii elec-
trically-driven or a foot treadle machine? What
consideration should be given to second-hand
machines? This report answers these questions
and rates eight models of sewing machines as
"Best Buys," six as "Also Acceptable," and eight
as "Not Acceptable."
Anti-Freezes
Which anti-freeEe solutions are best for your car?
Which should never be used under any condi-
tions? Is a non-evaporating compound, the first
cost of which is high, preferable to one which
evaporates and needs frequent replenishing but
costs only about one-fourth as much? This re-
port answers these questions.
Planned For Early Issues
Cigarettes
A report on the nicotine content of cigarettes,
which will also give the results of blindfold tests
and rate leading brands on the basis of such fac-
tors as adulteration, mildness, etc.
Coffee
The results of chemical analyses and taste tests
of nationally advertised and widely-known
brands will be reported in full and ratings given
as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not
Acceptable." Decaffeinated coffees will also be
discussed.
Automobiles
The 1938 models will be compared and rated on
the basis of tests and engineers' examinations.
As in other reports brand recommendations will
be given by name.
Radios
A similar report will be published on the 1938
models of radios.
To make sure of receiving the reports
described above fill in and mail the
coupon at the right.
In response to numerous requests from its members for information on life insurance
Consumers Union of United States is publishing, beginning with the current November
issue of Consumers Union Reports, a series of reports evaluating life insurance policies,
life insurance companies, and life insurance systems. The introductory report is written
by Edward Berman, labor economist for the Works Progress Administration, former
piofessor of economics at the University of Illinois, author of "Life Insurance — A
Critical Examination," and a recognized authority on insurance problems. CU's in-
surance consultants will follow this up with a series of reports which will —
A compare different kinds of policies
A discuss leading insurance companies by name
A discuss individual insurance problems
If you find the problem of buying life insurance extremely complex and mystifying and also find that most
insurance agents promote rather than dissipate this mystification, read these reports. They will give you a
sound, reliable and simplified basis for judging the value of what is offered to you and for making a wise
purchase of a policy.
This same issue of the Reports, in addition to the introductory report on insurance, also gives the results of
tests and examinations for the comparative value of leading brands of portable typewriters, men's hats,
sewing machines, anti-freeze solutions, canned foods and other products. A fuller description of these
reports is given at the left.
To receive a copy of this issue fill in and mail the coupon below. The membership fee of $3 will bring you
12 issues of the Reports and, without extra charge, the 1937 240-page Consumers Union Annual Buying
Guide which gives brand recommendations on over 1000 products. You can start your membership with
the current issue or with any of the previous issues listed below.
WHAT CONSUMERS UNION IS — Consumers Union of United States is a non-profit membership
organization established to conduct research and tests on consumer goods and to piovide consumers with
information which will permit them to buy their food, clothing, household supplies and other products
most intelligently. Tests are conducted by expert staff technicians with the help of over 200 consultants
in university, government and private laboratories. In most cases, comparisons of the quality of products
are given in terms of brand names with ratings as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not Acceptable."
Information is also given on the labor conditions under which products are made. The sound, constructive
advice on buying contained in Consumers Union Reports can help keep expenses down at the present time
when living costs are going up.
Some of the Subjects Covered in Past Issues of the Reports
APR. — Autos, Shirts, Cold JULY — Miniature Cameras,
Creams, Radios, Ami- Gasolines, Golf Balls,
nopyrlne. Motor Oils.
MAY— Trailers, Washing Ma- AUG.- SEPT. — Refrigerators,
chines. Moth Preven- Films, Ice Cream, In-
tlves, Constipation. ner Tubes.
JUNE — Non-miniature Camer-
' as. Radio Tubes, Sani-
tary Napkins.
OCT. —Oil Burners and Coal
Stokers, Breakfast Cer-
eals, Auto Radios.
CONSUMERS UNION
OF UNITED STATES, INC.
55 Vandam Street, New York City
Colston E. Warne, President
Arthur Ksllet, Director
D. H. Palmer. Technical Supervisor
Send me CONSUMERS UNION REPORTS tor one
year (12 issues) starting with the
Issue. I enclose $3 for membership. $2.50 of which is
for subscription. I agree to keep confidential all ma-
terial sent to me which Is so designated.
\anif
Siren
CUV
SURVEY GRAPHIC, published monthly and copyright 1937 by SURVEY ASSOCIATES, Inc. Publication office. 762 E. 21 St., Brooklyn.
N. Y. Executive office, 112 East 19 Street, New York. Price: this issue (November 1937 ; Vol. XXVI. No. 11) 30 cts. ; $3 a year; foreign
postage, 50 cts. extra ; Canadian 30 cts. Entered as second class matter at the post office at Brooklyn, N. Y. ; under the Act of March 3. 1879.
Acceptance of mailing at a special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3. 1917; authorized December 21, 1921.
8 a national^,
Bell System a
national institution.
550
The Gist of It
FIRST OF TWO IMPORTANT ARTICLES BY
H. G. Wells, The Informative Content of
Education, (page 555) is the distillation of
a lifetime of thought on what children learn
in school about their relation to all life on
this planet. Mr. Wells — or Dr. Wells as he
should be called in his role of learned lec-
turer— read this article as the president of
Section L — Educational Science, British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science, at
Nottingham September 2. In his opening
remarks, accepting the honor of the presi-
dency of the section, he said: "I doubt if
there is any member of this section who has
not had five times as much teaching experi-
ence as I have, and who is not competent to
instruct me upon all questions of method
and educational organization and machinery.
So I will run no risks by embarking upon
questions of that sort. But on the other hand,
if I know very little of educational methods
and machinery I have had a certain amount
of special experience in what those methods
produce and what that machine turns out."
PHIL S. HANNA, WHO WRITES OF LABOR'S
tactics as he saw them (page 562) is editor
of the Chicago Journal of Commerce. Ed-
ward Levinson, who writes of industry's
tactics as he saw them (page 565) is indus-
trial reporter of the New York Post. Their
observations, and their conclusions, are al-
most, but not quite, irreconcilable — -for on
one thing they agree: the outcome of strikes
depends to an extraordinary degree upon the
public officials in an area of industrial con-
flict. This brace of articles is not a debate
(for neither Mr. Hanna nor Mr. Levinson
saw the other's article till he received a copy
of this issue of Survey Graphic) but a
forum. The authors were given complete
freedom of expression, limited only by edi-
torial space.
ALARMING HEADLINES DRAMATIZE THE
problem of coping with dangerous and un-
predictable sexual offenders. Ira S. Wile,
M.D., who explores this troublesome chal-
lenge to society (page 569), is a psychiatrist,
well known for his work and books in the
field of mental hygiene, sex education, mar-
riage and childhood. His latest book, The
Man Takes a Wife — a study of man's prob-
lems in and through marriage — has just been
published by Greenberg. $2.50.
HAROLD J. LASKI, LECTURER IN POLITICAL
science at the London School of Economics,
concludes his two articles on Liberty in an
Insecure World (page 573). He deals with
today's threat to democracy in Great Britain
and the United States.
FREDERICK BRYCE (PAGE 577) is THE nom
de plume of a prominent American attorney
who withholds his name, at the request of
his fellow board members.
How WEST VIRGINIA is REHABILITATING
some of its relief clients through the team-
play of the state's medical profession and the
public assistance department is told (page
582) by J. D. Ratcliff, an editor of Neirs-
week. Mr. Ratcliff discovered the story at
the A.M.A. convention at Atlantic City, and
NOVEMBER 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 11
World of Children
The Informative Content of Education
Steel and Coal: Drawings
Critiques from Both Sides: Six Months After the Strikes
Observer for Industry •
Observer for Labor
Society and Sex Offenders
Liberty in an Insecure World
II. If Freedom Matters .
Wanted: Leaders for Labor
Southern Handicrafts
Repair vs. Relief in West Virginia
An Angry City That Did More Than Talk
Through Neighbors' Doorways
Fair Play, in Football and So On ...
Life and Letters: Fall Book Section
Axis of Our Future
American Notes: Harlem — at Home
Civilizing Hallowe'en
© Survey Associates, Inc.
FRONTISPIECE
H. G. WELLS 555
HARRY STERNBERG 560
.PHIL S. HANNA 562
. . EDWARD LEVINSON 565
IRA S. WILE, M.D. 569
. . . . HAROLD J. LASKI 573
FREDERICK BRYCE 577
580
J. D. RATCLIFF 582
LOUISE STEVENS 583
.JOHN PALMER GAVIT 588
LEON WHIPPLE 590
ALFRED FRIENDLY 606
FRANCES SOMERS 611
went on down to West Virginia to write it
up first hand.
IN AN ANGRY CITY THAT DID MORE THAN
Talk (page 583), Louise Stevens tells how
Honolulu reformed its law enforcement agen-
cies without outside help, after the sensa-
tional Massie case. A malihini (newcomer)
to Hawaii Louise Stevens noticed when she
first arrived in Honolulu the unusually high
type of men on the police force, and decided
to investigate the reason for their superiority.
The result is her article. She comes from
New Orleans, is a graduate of Tulane, and
has done volunteer social work.
BEGINNING ON PAGE 590 is A SPECIAL SEC-
tion devoted to notable reviews of many out-
standing books of the fall publishing season.
FRANCES SOMERS, WHO WRITES OF AN IN-
teresting community experiment on page 611,
is connected with the National Youth Ad-
ministration in Minneapolis.
Among Ourselves
Looking at Look
WHEN VOL. 1 No. 1 OF Look, THE popu-
lar picture magazine appeared on the news-
stands, Leon Whipple, reviewing it in Sur-
vey Graphic, questioned the educational value
of its almost morbid realism — X-ray shots,
monstrosities, sensations designed to shock
the mass-mind with the strangeness of human
life when viewed through a cameraman's
eye. Gradually Look broadened its scope.
Three recent features bear witness to a candid
comprehension of social problems, worth
recording by way of congratulating a con-
temporary publication for burgeoning into
our own field. With a circulation of nearly
two million, Look could have clung to an
inane tabloid formula. Instead, it has pointed
the lens at some shameful blots on our na-
tional scene -- lynchings, vigilantism, the
Klan, the Black Legion, slums. Dramatic
pictures, with fearless captions, bring these
things home to the mass-mind with a candor
that refreshes our faith in education through
the optic nerve. Our hats are off to Look
for these features.
P.R. and City Government
THE FOLLOWING CORRESPONDENCE WAS
elicited by William Jay Schieffelin's article
in July Survey Graphic predicting the final
defeat of machine politics in New York City
through proportional representation which
goes into effect in November. Reprinted by
Reader's Digest, Mr. Schieffelin's article was
given wide currency throughout the country.
To THE EDITOR: IN AN INTERESTING ARTI-
cle Mr. Schieffelin discusses P.R. in New
551
York and expresses the hope that this system
of election will bring the abler men of the
community into control of the city, with a
consequent cleaning up of city administration.
That was the hope and expectation of its
sponsors when P.R. was adopted in Cincin-
nati in 1924. For a time it seemed that this
expectation would be realized. During the
first few years under P.R. the caliber of the
men in City Council was improved and the
city was cleaned up politically to a large ex-
tent. This change was attributed to P.R. by
its supporters, who always have insisted that
it is the essential device in obtaining good
government.
But six biennial municipal elections in suc-
cession have finally made it evident that it
was not P.R. primarily, but the mass weight
of a majority of the citizens demanding im-
proved administration, which was responsible.
The reform fervor was of such strength that
some of the ablest men in the city could be
drafted and elected. But now, with the re-
form crusade spent and the reform Charter
party shown as only a minority in the last
city election in 1935, it has become increas-
ingly difficult to induce the ablest men to
become candidates, though we still have P.R.
The reason is not obscure. The fact that a
P.R. race is notoriously a peculiarly unpleas-
ant political experience is known to every
able man in Cincinnati. They know, and
plead in their reluctance to become council
candidates on any ticket, that P.R. forces
every candidate to take part in what is ad-
mittedly nothing but a personal popularity
contest. Men who have demonstrated out-
standing ability in private life generally are
considered the most desirable timber for pub-
lic office, yet such men rarely are strong vote
getters. Consequently they are at a great dis-
advantage in a P.R. campaign against sea-
soned opponents who are adept in the arts
of back slapping, baby kissing and the ready
distribution of loose and impossible promises.
The net result has been that Cincinnati's
twelve years of experience with P.R. has dem-
onstrated pretty conclusively that this system
only accelerates the general drift toward
government by demagogues.
Another aspect of Cincinnati's political
situation is worthy of notice, both because of
its significance per se and because none of
the numerous magazine commentators on Cin-
cinnati's affairs apparently has seen fit to rec-
ognize it. This is the fact that Cincinnati,
which was used in New York as so brilliant
an example of the efficacy of P.R. in produc-
ing good government, seems about ripe to
abandon the system. The coming council
election in November is generally regarded
as likely to spell its doom.
Two years ago the Charter party lost con-
trol of council when it obtained only four of
the nine seats. The Republican party also got
four and Rev. Herbert S. Bigelow, then the
legate of Father Coughlin in Cincinnati, won
the ninth seat and with it the balance of
power. When he resigned a year later to go
to Congress he left behind him a deadlock
which still subsists owing to the provision of
the city charter which requires vacancies to
be filled by council. His seat still is vacant.
Now, it generally is agreed in Cincinnati
that the coming election will result in either
no majority for any party, or a majority for
the Republicans. In either case P.R. admit-
tedly would be doomed. In case of the former
eventuality, the people obviously would be
ripe to abandon P.R. because they already are
disgusted with seeing their city administra-
tion in the doldrums as a result of the dead-
lock. Confronted with the prospect of another
two years of this, they most certainly would
prefer a solid working majority to minority
representation without a majority.
On the other hand, if the Republicans win
a majority they undoubtedly would move to
abolish P.R. because they always have frankly
opposed it, even when only a weak minority.
It is generally conceded, except by a few
of their leaders who naturally try to conceal
their weak position from their followers on
the eve of battle, that the Charterites have
practically no hope of regaining control of
the city this fall. Their strength has fallen
slowly but with terrifying steadiness through-
out the years until in 1935 it was less than
that of the Republicans, whom they originally
defeated two to one.
Cincinnati DAVID S. AUSTIN
Gains Under P.R.
To THE EDITOR: THE FORECAST OF A FAIL-
ure of P.R. by David S. Austin will receive
more attention in New York than in Cincin-
nati where faith in his prophetic powers has
been weakened by the fact that his continu-
ously prophesied doom has failed to ma-
terialize.
Mr. Austin argues that "because the men
who have demonstrated outstanding ability
in private life are not as good vote getters
as back slappers and baby kissers," P.R. is
a failure. This is a regrettable weakness of
the electorate, but it is scarcely logical to
ascribe this to P.R., which, as a matter of
fact, minimizes this weakness. Prof. Thomas
Reed studied the last City Council of Cin-
cinnati elected before P.R. went into effect
and reported in the Upson Survey, page 193:
"Seven members of council were actively
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connected with the liquor business. Several
of them conducted resorts of disreputable
character. Only one member is a working-
man or in any sense represents labor.
"In general, it should be said that the
members of council are honest and well
meaning. Under the present system there is
almost no opportunity for a councilman to
graft. They have too little independence even
for that. There is, of course, very little in-
centive for any man of real ability to seek a
place in council. Such a man rarely wants to
spend his time pottering about with a lot
of dull routine business, only to be denied
the opportunity to express his real opinions
on matters of importance. With few excep-
tions, the professional members of council
are not leaders in their fields, and the busi-
ness men are neither successful nor pros-
perous.
"For a body to be controlled from the out-
side the personnel of the present Cincinnati
council is admirable. It would be impossible
for it as now constituted to be an inde-
pendent legislative body."
In no election under P.R. has the level
sunk so low.
Mr. Austin says the Charter party lost
control of council two years ago when the
Rev. Herbert S. Bigelow was elected. How-
ever, the same mayor, Russell Wilson, the
same city manager, C. A. Dykstra, and all
the city employes continued to hold office.
Mr. Austin uses the word "control" in the
Tammany sense as meaning "the right to use
the power of the city to help the fortunes of
a political party." In this sense the City
Charter Committee has refused to control
Cincinnati for twelve years. There has been
no deadlock in Cincinnati due to Mr. Bige-
low's election or to his resignation. A
council selected by P.R. proved itself to be
composed of men answerable to public opin-
ion. When C. A. Dykstra resigned as city
manager to accept the presidency of Wis-
consin University, Colonel C. O. Sherrill, the
first city manager, was re-elected by unani-
mous vote of the eight councilmen.
Defeat for P.R. was prophesied by Mr.
Austin in April 1936, when at the primary
flection the Republicans sought to amend
the Charter to repeal P.R. and employed
Mr. Austin as publicity agent. The citizens
were not impressed and voted the amendment
down and P.R. remains.
The type of men in council has been vastly
improved under P.R. The indirect gains of
P.R. are even greater than the direct gains,
as is evidenced by the character of candi-
dates the Republican machine has found it
necessary to nominate in order to stand a
chance of victory. From the beginning, the
City Charter Committee has openly pro-
claimed that its purpose in refusing to per-
mit city employes to work for any political
party was to make it easy for the voters to
defeat the party in power if it failed to fur-
nish good government. It has proclaimed
with equal vehemence that it could be beaten,
but that it could not be beaten by the kind
of candidates a political machine desired and
that if it could force the political machines
to nominate and elect men of a type as good
as the nominees presented by the City
Charter Committee, this would constitute vic-
tory and not defeat. New Yorkers need not
be worried by Mr. Austin's prophecies of
doom for P.R. These prophecies represent
wishful thinking.
Cincinnati HENRY BENTLEY
552
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Mrs. Ann Reed Brenner, Secretary, Survey Associates, 112 East 19 Street, New York.
ANNIVERSARY NUMBER, to be published as a special December issue of SURVEY GRAPHIC, What Takes
Shape in American Life? Articles by Charles A. Beard, Stuart Chase, Clarence A. Dykstra, Walton H.
Hamilton, Waldemar Kaempffert, Elton Mayo, Douglas Orr, H. G. Wells, William Allen White, the
SURVEY editors and others. Special Isotype features by Otto Neurath. Portfolios of pictorial material,
including the Survey's album over a quarter century of cooperative publishing. Extra copies at 50 cents
each should be reserved in advance. Address Circulation Department, Survey Associates, 112 East 1 9 Street.
WORLD OF CHILDREN
Panels in the Irving School at
Oak Park, Illinois, made under the
WPA Federal Art Project, Chicago
By HESTER MILLER MURRAY
Baby Domestic Animals
Baby Wild Animals
NOVEMBER 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 11
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Informative Content of Education
by H. G. WELLS
Do schools teach the facts that we must know to save ourselves, and our
world, from chaos? No, answers Citizen-at-Large H. G. Wells. Where-
upon he outlines the irreducible minimum of knowledge for a responsible
human being today.
I HAVE BEEN KEENLY INTERESTED FOR A NUMBER OF
years, and particularly since the war, in public thought
and public reactions, in what people know and think
and what they are ready to believe. What they know
and think and what they are ready to believe impresses
me as remarkably poor stuff. A general ignorance —
even in respectable quarters — of some of the most ele-
mentary realities of the political and social life of the
world is, I believe, mainly accountable for much of the
discomfort and menace of our times. The uninstructed
public intelligence of our community is feeble and con-
vulsive. It is still a herd intelligence. It tyrannizes here
and yields to tyranny there. What is called elementary
education throughout the world does not in fact edu-
cate, because it does not properly inform. I realized this
very acutely during the latter stages of the war and it
has been plain in my mind ever since. It led to my taking
an active part in the production of various outlines and
summaries of contemporary knowledge. Necessarily they
had the defects and limitations of a private adventure
but in making them I learnt a great deal about— what
shall I say? — the contents of the minds our schools are
turning out as taught.
And so now I propose to concentrate the attention of
this section for this meeting* on the question of what is
taught as fact, that is to say upon the informative side of
educational worl^. For this year I suggest we give the
questions of drill, skills, art, music, the teaching of
languages, mathematics and other symbols, physical,
aesthetic, moral and religious training and development,
a rest, and that we concentrate on the inquiry: What
are we telling young people directly about the world in
which they are to live? What is the world picture we are
presenting to their minds? What is the framework of
conceptions about reality and about obligation into which
"This is the presidential address to the educational science section of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, given on September 2,
1937. at Nottingham, as read by Mr. Wells.
the rest of their mental existences will have to be fitted?
I am proposing in fact a review of the informative side
of education, wholly and solely — informative in relation
to the needs of modern life.
And here the fact that I am an educational outsider —
which in every other relation would be a disqualification
— gives me certain very real advantages. I can talk with
exceptional frankness. And I am inclined to think that
in this matter of the informative side of education frank-
ness has not always been conspicuous. For what I say
I am responsible only to the hearer and my own self-
respect. I occupy no position from which I can be dis-
missed as unsound in my ideas. I follow no career that
can be affected by anything I say. I follow, indeed, no
career. That's all over. I have no party, no colleagues
or associates who can be embarrassed by any unorthodox
suggestions I make. Every schoolmaster, every teacher,
nearly every professor must, by the nature of his calling,
be wary, diplomatic, compromising — he has his gover-
nors to consider, his college to consider, his parents to
consider, the local press to consider; he must not say
too much nor say anything that might be misinterpreted
and misunderstood. I can. And so I think I can best
serve the purposes of the British Association and this
section by taking every advantage of my irresponsibility,
being as unorthodox and provocative as I can be, and
so possibly saying a thing or two which you are not
free to say but which some of you at any rate will be
more or less willing to have said.
NOW WHEN I SET MYSELF TO REVIEW THE FIELD OF IN-
quiry I have thus defined, I found it was necessary to
take a number of very practical preliminary issues into
account. As educators we are going to ask what is the
subject-matter of a general education? What do we want
known? And how do we want it known? What is the
essential framework of knowledge that should be estab-
555
lished in the normal citizen of our modern community?
What is the irreducible minimum of knowledge for a re-
sponsible human being today?
I say irreducible minimum — and I do so because I
know at least enough of school work to know the grim
significance of the school time table and of the leaving
school age. Under contemporary conditions our only
prospect of securing a mental accord throughout the
community is by laying a common foundation of knowl-
edge and ideas in the school years. No one believes today
as our grandparents — perhaps for most of you it would
be better to say great-grandparents — believed, that edu-
cation had an end somewhere about adolescence. Young
people then left school or college under the imputation
that no one could teach them any more. There has been
a quiet but complete revolution in people's ideas in this
respect and now it is recognized almost universally that
people in a modern community must be learners to the
end of their days. We shall be giving a considerable
amount of attention to continuation, adult and post-
graduate studies in this section, this year. It would be
wasting our opportunities not to do so. Here in Notting-
ham University College we have the only professorship
of adult education in England, and under Professor
Peers the adult education department which is in close
touch with the Workers' Educational Association has
broadened its scope far beyond the normal range of
adult education. Our modern idea seems to be a con-
tinuation of learning not only for university graduates,
and practitioners in the so-called intellectual professions,
but for the miner, the plough-boy, the taxicab driver,
and the out-of-work throughout life. Our ultimate aim
is an entirely educated population.
NEVERTHELESS IT is TRUE THAT WHAT I MAY CALL THE MAIN
beams and girders of the mental framework must be
laid down, soundly or unsoundly, before the close of ado-
lescence. We live under conditions where it seems we are
still only able to afford for the majority of our young
people, freedom from economic exploitation, teachers
even of the cheapest sort and some educational equip-
ment, up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, and we
have to fit our projects to that. And even if we were free
to carry on with unlimited time and unrestrained teach-
ing resources, it would still be in those opening years
that the framework of the mind would have to be made.
We have got to see, therefore, that whatever we propose
as this irreducible minimum of knowledge must be im-
parted between infancy and — at most, the fifteenth or six-
teenth year. Roughly, we have to get it into ten years at
the outside.
And next let us turn to another relentlessly inelastic
packing case and that is, the school time table. How
many hours in the week have we got for this job in
hand? The maximum school hours we have available
are something round about thirty, but out of this we
have to take time for what I may call the non-informa-
tive teaching, teaching to read, teaching to write clearly,
the native and foreign language teaching, basic mathe-
matical work, drawing, various forms of manual train-
ing, music, and so forth. A certain amount of informa-
tion may be mixed in with these subjects but not very
much. They are not what I mean by informative subjects.
By the time we are through with these non-informative
subjects, I doubt if at the most generous estimate we
556
can apportion more than six hours a week to essentially
informative work. Then let us, still erring on the side
of generosity, assume that there are forty weeks of school-
ing in the year. That gives us a maximum of 240 hours
in the year. And if we take ten years of schooling as an
average human being's preparation for life, and if we
disregard the ravages made upon our school time by
measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, coronations and
occasions of public rejoicing, we are given 2400 hours as
all that we can hope for as our time allowance for build-
ing up a coherent picture of the world, the essential
foundation of knowledge and ideas, in the minds of
our people. The complete framework of knowledge has
to be established in 200 dozen hours. It is plain that a
considerable austerity is indicated for us. We have no
time to waste, if our schools are not to go on delivering,
year by year, fresh hordes of fundamentally ignorant,
unbalanced, uncritical minds, at once suspicious and
credulous, weakly gregarious, easily baffled and easily
misled, into the monstrous responsibilities and dangers
of this present world. Mere cannon fodder and stuff for
massacres and stampedes.
Our question becomes therefore: "What should people
know — whatever else they don't know? Whatever else
we may leave over — for leisure time reading, for being
picked up or studied afterwards — what is the irreducible
minimum that we ought to teach as clearly, strongly and
conclusively as we know how?"
And now I — and you will remember my role is that of
the irresponsible outsider, the citizen at large — I am going
to set before you one scheme of instruction for your con-
sideration. For it I demand all those precious 2400 hours.
You will perceive, as I go on, the scheme is explicitly
exclusive of several contradictory and discursive subjects
that now find a place in most curricula, and you will
also find doubts arising in your mind about the supply
and competence of teachers, a difficulty about which I
hope to say something before my time is up. But teachers
are for the world and not the world for teachers. If the
teachers we have today are not equal to the task required
of them, then we have to recondition our teachers or
replace them. We live in an exacting world and a certain
minimum of performance is required of us all. If chil-
dren are not to be given at least this minimum of infor-
mation about the world into which they have come —
through no fault of their own — then I do think it would
be better for them and the world if they were not born
at all. And to make what I have to say as clear as possi-
ble I have had a diagram designed which I will unfold
to you as my explanation unfolds.
*
You HAVE ALREADY NOTED I HAVE EXPOSED THE OPENING
stage of my diagram. You see I make a three-fold division
of the child's impressions and the matters upon which its
questions are most lively and natural. I say nothing about
the child learning to count, scribble, handle things, talk
and learn the alphabet and so forth because all these
things are ruled out by my restriction of my address to
information only. Never mind now what it wants to do
— or wants to feel. This is what it wants to know. In all
these educational matters, there is, of course, an element of
overlap. As it learns about things and their relationship
and interaction its vocabulary increases and its ideas of
expression develop. You will make an allowance for that.
And now I bring down my diagram to expose the first
SURVEY GRAPHIC
GRADE F
NEW KNOWLEDGE
AND THOUGHT
BUSINESS . UTEBATU
DMINISTBATION . LAW, POLITICS
GRADE E.
ADULT LEARNING
POSTGRADUATE OB
ADULT SOGDLWORK
CRITICISM ^RESlAdC
SPECIAL COURSES F
E.G. :
RE NE WAL^-Sf-"KiOOE PN I
IVIDUAL NEEDS.
UNDEB DIRECTION .
ALTEPNATIVE SPECIALISED STUDIES, EG
1. HISTOQY 8, SOCIOLOGY
2. BIOLOGY. PHYSIOLOGY
CHIMICO PHYSICAL SCIE
3. PHYSICAL, GEOGPAP
SOCIAL SCIE.NC
HI'STOGY OF
5. LIIEPAD^^rrUDILS.
SO K>PTH
GRADE D.
UNOECGBADUATE
OB.
CON1INUATION5CHODI
WORK
S OF
GAN I SAT1ON
SOCIALISM.
.IATION TO DEMOCRACY
A, CHBI5TIAN.IT Y.
THE GBOWTH Of GOVERNMENT
CONTPOL OF ECONOMIC
LIFE IN : GPEAT BPITAIN.
ITALY , GERMANY . RUSSIA ,
MONETARY 8> FINANCIAL
OEGANISATION OT THEW0PLD
Q1JDDE-
)&yOQl/O* POLITIC
4 cciricAi si
OF THt/ GREAT
THE ^TORY OF 11HI
I"2>18 TO
C0NTEMPOCADY
ANIZATION
OF PDOPAbANDA
ADVERTISING AMT&ODS
A COCPECTIVE TO
NEWSWVDER REAlNG
ALTEB.NAT1VE
COUI2.SES.
PERSONAL
SOCIOLOGY
SOCIAL MECHANISM
MIC
GAPHY
OLOGY
E WOCLD.
ELEMENTS OF-
POLITICAL H
DEVELOPMENT OF EXISTIN
NATIONAL «v IMPERIAL
BOUNDARIES.
THE INCREASING IMDOR
OF- ECONOMIC CHANGE
HISTOQV A THE SE
FOR. CO/APETENT ECO
OlliECTION
GRADE C
SYSTEMATIC STUDY
WITHRESOBT TO
MUSEUM, LI EM2AKY
4 LAEXDEATOR.Y
ADVANCED
PHYSICS.
on.
ADVANCED
BIOLOGY 2)
PHYSIOLOGY
ASHORT HISTORY
Of GENERAL IDEAS.
COMPAEATIVE
RELIGION.
STUDY OF SOCIAL
TYPES.LEADING
TO CHOICE OF-
A R.6LE .
A SHOOT HISTORY OF-
COMMUNICATIONS &
TQADE-.
'AM1STOB.Y OF.
INNOVATIONS IN
PRODUCTION Si
MANUFAC.Tue.E- .
THE COLE OF PROPERTY
AND MONEY IN
ECONOMIC Llf-E
GRADE B.
INCBEASING
EXACTITUDE •
NOTE -60DKS.
TIME CHARTS.
MAPS S>
EECAPITULATION
PHYSIOLOGY
& ANATOMY.
INCLUDING CLEAR
GENERAL IDEAS OF
ANIMAL * PLANT
BE PRODUCTION
ELEMENTARY
PATHOLOGY.
BIOLOGY.
ZOOLOGY t, 6OTANV
INCLUDING EXTINCT FORMS
& THEIR SUCCiSSION
IN TIME.
GEOLOGICAL AGES.
GENEQAL IDEAS A6OUT
ECOLOGY &
EVOLUTION .
PHYSICS & CHEMISTRY.
HADING UP TO MODERN
CONCEPTS OF MATTER.
MECHANISM & PCWEB.
ELEMENTARY HISIO2.Y OF
INVENTION «, DISCOVERY.
GEOGRAPHY
& GEOLOGY.
TYPES Of COUNTRY
i FLOKAS ! ttUNAV
A GENERAL 51KVEY
OF THE WORLD AS A
HUMAN HABITAT
I, SOURCE Of
POWERS WEALTH.
GENERAL HI STOGY
BACES Of- MAN
EAQ-LY CIVILIZATIONS
GENEQAL SIGNIFICANCE OF--.
PERSIA. GREECE . CARTHAGE . COME-.
CHINA, ISLAM, CHRJSTENDOM, &
AMERICA IN HI5TOB.Y .
GENERAL IDEA OF THE BREAK-UP OF
CHRISTENDOM i. THE APPEARANCE OF
MODF.ON SOVEE.E.IGN STATES
ELEMENTAC.Y HISTOQ.Y Of
GEEAT BtilTAIN S FBANCt .
GRADE A.
DEFINITE TEACHING
BEGINS,
3jTATES\OF MATT EC./
ClSM POSITION O MATTB
IOGR/PHY
ELEMENTARY HISTORY.
ELEMENTAEV IDEAS ABOUT
HUMAN CULTURES & THEIR
DEVELOPMENT IN TIME- .
SAVAGE Lift , TOOLS 8. WEAPONS.
PRIMITIVE- HOMES, CAVES .
SHELTERS. HUTS. CLOTHING
AGRICULTURE * THE
DOMESTICATION OF- ANIMALS.
TRADE . TOWNS . SHIPS.
PBEDATOCY PEOPLES & WARFARE.
[NO DATES YfcT - NO DYNASTIES.]
BASI5 .
ABOUT VTHING5 * W 4AT CAN
BE EXONEl TO THEM
- TC|YS - BRICKS ETC.-
PHYSICAL
ABOUT SHELTERS /ACTIVITIES 8,
WYS OF
- - CUbbY/HOU5t5. --
PLAYING /6nops ETC .
DAWN g HUrAAN HISTORY
8, EiJONOMICS
THE- NATURAL CURIOSITY Of- THE- GUILD.
THE INFORMATIVE CONTENT OF EDUCATION
LANGUAGES AND SYMBOLS (MATHEMATICS) , SKILLS , MUSIC , MORAL . MANUAL t,
PHYSICAL TRAINING Attt NOT CONSIDERED HERE.
NOVEMBER 19)7
557
stage of positive and deliberate teaching. We begin telling
true stories of the past and of other lands. We open out
the child's mind to a realization that the sort of life it is
living is not the only life that has been lived and that
human life in the past has been different from what it is
today and on the whole that it has been progressive. We
shall have to teach a little about law and robbers, kings
and conquests, but I see no need at this stage to afflict the
growing mind with dates and dynastic particulars. I hope
the time is not far distant when children even of eight or
nine will be freed altogether from the persuasion that
history is a magic recital beginning "William the Con-
queror, 1066." Much has been done in that direction.
Much remains to be done. Concurrently, we ought to
make the weather and the mud pie our introduction to
what Huxley christened long ago Elementary Physiog-
raphy. We ought to build up simple and clear ideas from
natural experience.
WE START A STUDY OF THE STATES OF MATTER WITH THE
boiling, evaporation, freezing, and so on of water and
go on to elementary physics and chemistry. Local topog-
raphy can form the basis of geography. We shall have
to let our learner into the secret that the world is a globe
— and for a time I think that has to be a bit of dogmatic
teaching. It is not so easy as many people suppose to
prove that the world is spherical and that proof may
very well be left to make an exercise in logic later on in
the education. Then comes biology. Education I rejoice to
see is rapidly becoming more natural, more biological.
Most young children are ready to learn a great deal more
than most teachers can give them about animals. I think
we might easily turn the bear, the wolf, the tiger and the
ape from holy terrors and nightmare material into sym-
pathetic creatures, if we brought some realization of how
these creatures live, what their real excitements are, how
they are sometimes timid, into the teaching. I don't think
that descriptive botany is very suitable for young children.
Flowers and leaves and berries are bright and attractive,
a factor in aesthetic education, but I doubt if, in itself,
vegetation can hold the attention of the young. Some-
times I think we bore very young children with prema-
ture gardens. But directly we begin to deal with plants
as hiding places, homes and food for birds and beasts, the
little boy or girl lights up and learns. And with this nat-
ural elementary zoology and botany we should begin ele-
mentary physiology. How plants and animals live and
what health means for them.
There I think you have stuff enough for all the three or
four hundred hours we can afford for the foundation
stage of knowledge. Outside this substantial teaching of
school hours the child will be reading and indulging in
imaginative play — and making that clear distinction chil-
dren do learn to make between truth and fantasy — about
fairyland, magic carpets and seven league boots, and all
the rest of it. So far as my convictions go I think that the
less young children have either in or out of school of what
has hitherto figured as history, the better. I do not see
either the charm or the educational benefit of making
an important subject of and throwing a sort of halo of
prestige and glory about the criminal history of royalty,
the murder of the Princes in the Tower, the wives of
Henry VIII, the families of Edward I and James I, the
mistresses of Charles II, Sweet Nell of Old Drury, and all
the resjt of it. I suggest that the sooner we get all that un-
pleasant stuff out of schools, and the sooner that we forget
the border bickerings of England, France, Scotland, Ire-
land and Wales, Bannockburn, Flodden, Crecy and Agin-
court, the nearer our world will be to a sane outlook upon
life. In this survey of what a common citizen should
know I am doing my best to elbow the scandals and
revenges which once passed as English history into an
obscure corner or out of the picture altogether.
But I am not proposing to eliminate history from edu-
cation— far from it. Let me bring down my diagram a
stage further and you will see how large a proportion of
our treasure of 2400 hours I am proposing to give to his-
tory. The next section represents about 800 to 1000 pre-
adolescent hours. It is the schoolboy-schoolgirl stage. And
here the history is planned to bring home to the new
generation the reality that the world is now one com-
munity. I believe that the crazy combative patriotism that
plainly threatens to destroy civilization today is very large-
ly begotten in their school history lessons. Our schools
take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and
they inflame and fix its barbarism. I think we underrate
the formative effect of this perpetual reiteration of how
we won, how our Empire grew and how relatively splen-
did we have been in every department of life. We are
blinded by habit and custom to the way it infects these
growing minds with the chronic and nearly incurable dis-
ease of national egotism. Equally mischievous is the fur-
tive anti-patriotism of the leftish teacher. I suggest that
we take on our history from the simple descriptive an-
thropology of the elementary stage to the story of the
early civilizations.
WE ARE DEALING HERE WITH MATERIAL THAT WAS NOT EVEN
available for the schoolmasters and mistresses who taught
our fathers. It did not exist. But now we have the most
lovely stuff to hand, far more exciting and far more valu-
able than the quarrels of Henry II and a Becket or the
peculiar unpleasantnesses of King James or King John.
Archaeologists have been piecing together a record of the
growth of the primary civilizations and the developing
roles of priest, king, farmer, warrior, the succession of
stone and copper and iron, the appearance of horse and
road and shipping in the expansions of those primordial
communities. It is a far finer story to tell a boy or girl
and there is no reason why it should not be told. Swing-
ing down upon these early civilizations came first the
Semitic-speaking peoples and then the Aryan-speakers.
Persian, Macedonian, Roman, followed one another.
Christendom inherited from Rome and Islam from Per-
sia, and the world began to assume the shapes we know
today. This is great history and also in its broad lines it is
a simple history — upon it we can base a lively modern
intelligence, and now it can be put in a form just as com-
prehensible and exciting for the school phase as the story
of our English kings and their territorial, dynastic and
sexual entanglements. When at last we focus our attention
on the British Isles and France we shall have the affairs
of these regions in a proper proportion to the rest of the
human adventure. And our young people will be think-
ing less like gossiping court pages and more like horse
riders, seamen, artist-artisans, road makers and city build-
ers, which I take it is what in spirit we want them to be.
Measured by the great current of historical events, Eng-
lish history up to quite recent years is mere hole-and-
corner history.
568
SURVEY GRAPHIC
And I have to suggest another exclusion. We are tell-
ing our young people about the real past, the majestic
expansion of terrestrial events. In these events the little
region of Palestine is no more than a part of the highway
between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Is there any real reason
nowadays for exaggerating its importance in the past?
Nothing really began there, nothing was worked out
there. All the historical part of the Bible abounds in wild
exaggeration of the importance of this little strip of land.
We were all brought up to believe in the magnificence
of Solomon's temple and it is a startling thing for most
of us to read the account of its decorations over again and
turn its cubits into feet. It was smaller than most barns.
We all know the peculiar delight of devout people when
amidst the endless remains of the great empires of the
past some dubious fragment is found to confirm the exist-
ence of the Hebrews. Is it not time that we recognized the
relative historical insignificance of the events recorded in
Kings and Chronicles, and ceased to throw the historical
imagination of our young people out of perspective by
an over-emphasized magnification of the national history
of Judea? To me this lack of proportion in our contem-
porary historical teaching, seems largely responsible for
the present troubles of the world. The political imagina-
tion of our times is a hunchbacked imagination bent down
under an exaggeration. It is becoming a matter of life and
death to the world to straighten that backbone and reduce
that frightful nationalist hunch.
Look at our time table and what we have to teach. If
we give history four tenths of all the time we have for
imparting knowledge at this stage that still gives us at
most something a little short of 400 hours altogether. Even
if we think it desirable to perplex another generation with
the myths of the Creation, the Flood, the Chosen People,
and so forth, even if we want to bias it politically with
tales of battles and triumphs and ancient grievances, we
haven't got the time for it — any more than we have the
time for the really quite unedifying records of all the Kings
and Queens of England and their claims on this and that.
So far as the school time table goes we are faced with a
plain alternative. One thing or the other. Great history or
hole-and-corner history? The story of mankind or the
narrow, self-righteous, blinkered stories of the British
Islands and the Jews?
THERE is A LOT MORE WE HAVE TO PUT INTO THE HEADS OF
our young people over and above history. It is the main
subject of instruction, but even so it is not even half of the
informative work that ought to be got through in this
school stage. We have to consider the collateral subject of
geography and a general survey of the world. We want to
see our world in space as well as our world in time. We
may have a little map-making here, but I take it what is
needed most are reasonably precise ideas of the various
types of country and the distinctive floras and faunas of
the main regions of the world. We do not want our bud-
ding citizens to chant lists of capes and rivers, but we do
want them to have a real picture in their minds of the
Amazon forests, the pampas, the various phases in the
course of the Nile, the landscape of Labrador mountains,
and so on, and also we want something like a realization
of the sort of human life that is led in these regions. We
have enormous resources now in cheap photography, in
films, and so forth, that even our fathers never dreamt of —
to make all this vivid and real. New methods are needed
to handle these new instruments but they need not be
overwhelmingly costly. And also our new citizen should
know enough of topography to realize why London and
Rio and New York and Rome and Suez happen to be
where they are and what sort of places they are.
Geography and history run into each other in this re-
spect and, on the other hand, geography reaches over to
biology. Here again our schools lag some fifty years be-
hind contemporary knowledge. The past half-century has
written a fascinating history of the succession of living
things in time and made plain all sorts of processes in
the prosperity, decline, extinction, and replacement of spe-
cies. We can sketch the wonderful and inspiring story of
life now from its beginning. Moreover, we have a continu-
ally more definite account of the sequence of sub-man
in the world and the gradual emergence of our kind. This
is elementary, essential, interesting and stimulating stuff
for the young, and it is impossible to consider anyone a
satisfactory citizen who is still ignorant of that great story.
AND FINALLY, WE HAVE THE SCIENCE OF INANIMATE MATTER
in a world of machinery, optical instruments, electricity,
radio and so forth, we want to lay a sound foundation of
pure physics and chemistry upon the most modern lines
— for everyone. Some of this work will no doubt over-
lap the mathematical teaching and the manual training
and steal a little badly needed time from them. And
finally to meet awakening curiosity and take the morbidity
out of it, we have to tell our young people and especially
our young townspeople, about the working of their bodies,
about reproduction and about the chief diseases, enfeeble-
ments and accidents that lie in wait for them in the world.
That I think completes my summary of all the infor-
mation we can hope to give in the lower school stage. And
as I make it I am acutely aware of your unspoken com-
ment. With such teachers as we have! Teachers trained
only to reaction, overworked, underpaid, hampered by
uninspiring examinations, without initiative, without prop-
er leisure. Young and inexperienced, or old and discour-
aged. You may do this sort of thing, here and there, under
favorable conditions, with the splendid elite of the profes-
sion, the 10 percent who are interested, but not as a gen-
eral state of affairs.
Well, I think that it is a better rule of life, first to make
sure of what you want and then set about getting it,
rather than to consider what you can easily, safely and
meanly get and then set about reconciling yourself to it.
I admit we cannot have a modern education without a
modernized type of teacher. A teacher enlarged and re-
leased. Many of our teachers — and I am not speaking only
of elementary schools — are shockingly illiterate and ignor-
ant. Often they know nothing but school subjects; some-
times they scarcely know them. Even the medical profes-
sion does not present such extremes— between the dis-
couraged routine worker and the enthusiast. Everything
I am saying now implies a demand for more and better
teachers — better paid, with better equipment. And these
teachers will have to be kept fresh. It is stipulated in most
leases that we should paint our houses outside every three
years and inside every seven years, but nobody ever thinks
of doing up a school teacher. There are teachers at work
in this country who haven't been painted inside for fifty
years. They must be damp and rotten and very unhealthy
for all who come in contact with them. Two thirds of the
teaching profession now is in (Continued on page 608)
NOVEMBER 1937
559
STEEL AND COAL
Drawings by Harry Sternberg
Courtesy Frederick Keppel and Company, New York
THE SLOPE MINE
STEEL MILL, BETHLEHEM
STEEL TOWN
Harry Sternberg has spent half of his 1937 Guggenheim award
year in the mines and mills of Pennsylvania. He has made many
powerful, sometimes even melodramatic, studies of towering
furnaces, hills of gray coal wash, black tunnels, mean streets and
hovels, and the people who live and work in these surroundings,
abandonee the abstract style for which he was best known.
CRITIQUES FROM BOTH SIDES
Six Months After the Strikes
I. OBSERVER FOR INDUSTRY: PHIL S. HANNA, Editor, Chicago Journal of Commerce
In two articles, from different points of view, Survey Graphic serves as an
open forum where two men who saw the strikes have their say. Mr. Hanna
criticizes the tactics of labor, and asserts that "the CIO is helpless without
the sit-down and conspiracy with public officials."
THE MORE ONE TRAVELS ABOUT THE SCENE OF JOHN L.
Lewis' efforts to "organize" the unorganized and exam-
ines the net gains or losses of the workingmen who
have joined the cause, the more respect one has for Doc-
tor Townsend and his $200 a month scheme to bring
economic Utopia to the aged. The Lewis scheme and
the Townsend scheme differ but little in principle; both
are based on the delusion that wealth is a thing which
can be distributed and will stay distributed; both deny
the immutability of the arithmetic tables and the inevi-
tability of economic boomerangs. Both are a hoax on the
unsuspecting and in both the chief winners are the pro-
moters. But Lewis was smarter than Townsend; he took
politics into partnership with him while Townsend made
the error of making his vehicle a competitor against poli-
tics and political parties.
That the foregoing is true needs no other verification
than the fact that Townsend was prosecuted for violat-
ing an election law, was called upon to make an account-
ing of funds received, and finally adjudged in contempt
of a congressional committee. On the contrary, Lewis
not only makes political contributions with impunity
(even to such sums as $600,000), continues to collect
money from his followers without accounting to any
public authority or to them, and operates under a form
of organization that Michigan legal authorities describe
as being "non-existent"; he not only thumbs his nose at
public regulation but is such a power at the moment
that he can almost dictate regulation for everybody
else.
It may well be that wages and working conditions in
the motor and steel industries have not been what they
ought to be, judged by Utopian standards. But judged
by the "real" wages enjoyed in other industries, or in any
other place on the globe — in short judged by things as
they are and not as an idealist would like to have them —
judged in that way there was no omission or shortcom-
ing on the part of employers in steel and motors that
even faintly warranted the sit-down strike or the acts of
property damage which were committed.
In Michigan, where the greatest claims of membership
are being made, the sit-down was a springboard for the
CIO which gave it a tremendous start. The AF of L
could have done as well had it been willing to use un-
lawful tactics and had it had the assistance of public
officials in denying employers the protection of the law.
It was the same at Akron, where the sit-down pre-
vailed without molestation from authorities for many
562
months. It also gave the Lewis crowd several nuclei from
which to bridge to others.
But in Illinois and nearby Indiana points, where the
sit-down was forced out as a tactic very early in the
drive, very little progress has been made. Strike after
strike has been settled without either an agreement for
exclusive bargaining or even for bargaining privileges
for members. Regardless of claims to the contrary the
Inland Steel strike was called off when the company
offered its standard proclamation as to wages and con-
ditions which had been in effect for years, plus a sup-
plementary agreement that the Indiana State Labor
Board would be final arbiter in shop grievances. Republic
Steel at South Chicago, Youngstown Steel at Indiana
Harbor and a host of smaller concerns that have had
strike troubles, are bargaining freely with a representa-
tive or with the representatives of the employes — but they
have all done this for years, and to all practical effects
they are still open shop.
Without the sit-down the United Automobile Work-
ers must rely on persuasion to take the Ford Motor
Company into camp, but the Ford worker is a singular
animal. Whether anticipated or not, Ford has a larger
percentage of middle-aged and older workers than any
of the other large plants. The older men know more
labor union history than the younger. These are not so
easily persuaded that they will be anything ahead by
selecting the Lewis crowd as their manager. It is unsafe
to reason from isolated cases of course but when you see
Ford workers' wives thumbing their noses at UAW or-
ganizers there is at least a suggestion that the Ford
women may be a factor.
Many have heard how the CIO organized the colored
waiters at the Detroit Athletic Club and then after
taking their money made a proposition to the manage-
ment to displace the colored boys with white waiters.
Another springboard for Lewis was political help. The
great organizational drive in Michigan must be consid-
ered in connection with the political events and alliances
which preceded it. One dislikes to inject politics into this
discussion but an understanding of what really took
place cannot be had without it. From frequent and first-
hand observation of the Michigan scenes during the
past eight months, and based on a residence there for
more than ten years, I have no hesitation in saying
that the offensive in Michigan would never have gotten
to first base except for a conspiracy between politicians
and labor leaders. Shortly before the election in 1936 the
SURVEY GRAPHIC
IT
President made a speech in Detroit and said in so many
words, "We are going to raise your wages." This assur-
ance from the highest office in the land, coupled with
the propaganda work which had been carried on for
many months preceding, thoroughly crystallized labor
sentiment. Men had been told so often that they were
being abused by employers that when this aforesaid
promise was made it was taken literally. The motor
companies, having had a very successful year and sensing
the situation, tried the expedient of paying out large bo-
nuses, but this was immediately misconstrued by the
rank and file as an attempt to buy strike immunity. It was
not long thereafter that the sit-down strikes began in
General Motors.
Being unaccustomed to sit-down tactics, and unaccus-
tomed generally to the ways of labor coercion, General
Motors was defiant; in fact, at the time of the first big
strike in Flint, General Motors had reason to be defiant.
Sentiment among its workers was so predominantly anti-
union that had public authorities forced evacuation of
the plants, the General Motors strike could have been
nipped in the bud. But it was just at this point when a
most shameful exhibition of disloyalty to public trust
took place. After the local police had been overwhelmed
by the Lewis "flying squadron," made up of professional
strong-arm men imported from outside, the governor
called out the troops. But instead of using the troops
even to maintain the status quo — leave alone protecting
Internationa
In Flint outsiders kept in touch with Fisher Body strikers
NOVEMBER 1937
property — they were quartered at a distance from the
Fisher Body plant. This gave the organizers precisely
what they wanted — an opportunity to send into the
plant its force of professional sit-downers. The governor
professed then and still professes to believe that preven-
tion of bloodshed was more important than anything
else.
I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that,
had the governor used the troops to keep the flying
squadron out of the Fisher Body plant, and had the
precedent been then established that bona-fide employes
only could sit down and professional sitters must stay
out, the wave of sit-down strikes over the country would
never have occurred. I submit also, notwithstanding the
governor's many claims, that had he not encouraged the
professional sitters who came to Michigan to believe
they could invade property with impunity, there never
would have been bloodshed at South Chicago.
THE PROFESSIONAL "SIT-DOWNERS," OR, AS MORE POPULARLY
known in Michigan, the "Lewis flying squadron," are
a group of men of which the public learned but little
during the strikes. They are not easily identified because
they usually work under cover. They seldom appeared
on the scenes at any one time long enough to make
themselves conspicuous or easily identifiable. But that
they operated under the direction of an organizer strate-
gist there is no question. Two illustrations will suffice to
explain their place in the picture.
At the sit-down strike at the Kelvinator plant in Feb-
ruary, which began at 12:30 noon, all but 150 actual
employes had left the plant at shift-change time, 3:30
p.m. Suddenly there arrived a truck load of young men
at the main gate of the plant. Where they came from or
who they were the management did not know. Refused
admittance by the plant police because they had no em-
ploye badges they promptly jumped the fences. I counted
12 of them entering the plant in that manner. Within
ten minutes after they had gained access to the plant
someone locked the door leading from the machine
shop to the main offices. A day or two later someone
welded the front door of the main office so that even
the management could not get into the offices.
At Anderson, Indiana, when aroused citizens obtained
an order for martial law after hearing that the flying
squadron was on its way to "discipline" the people of
Anderson who opposed the CIO invasion, the police
stopped 32 automobiles carrying 112 persons, and con-
fiscated revolvers, shotguns and blackjacks. Who were
these journeymen? Police testimony is that they came
from Flint, from New York, from New Jersey. Some
admitted having sat down in the Flint strike. Some
even had not shorn their sit-down whiskers.
One very important fact was developed in both in-
stances, that is, they were not employes of the plant or
plants being attacked and some of them were not em-
ployes of any Michigan or Indiana plant.
It is highly important to understand the relation be-
tween employe sit-downers and professional sit-downers
who came from the outside. Employe sit-downers alone
would have been impotent without the help of the oth-
ers mentioned, for the principal reason that in nearly
every case where sit-down strikes started in Michigan
the number of employe sit-downers was a small minority
of the whole. But in nearly every case, as soon as a sit-
563
down started the professionals jumped over the fences
and the so-called "quartermaster's" department of the
flying squadron immediately began to supply the sit-
downers with blankets, pillows, food, games, and other
means of carrying on a sit-down.
The next step where the professional played a part
was the "education" of the employe sit-downers. They
were taught how to damage machinery, to commit acts
of human filth in desk drawers and filing cabinets, and
how to make blackjacks and other weapons for use
"in case." Simultaneously the outside professional force
visited the homes of the sit-downers, as well as the
non-combatants, spreading fear and terrorism with
threats of violence. It was not long under these condi-
tions in Flint that literally hundreds, who were defiant
in the beginning, succumbed to the doctrine "it's better
to join, even if we do not wish to, than to be in trouble."
One can readily imagine, with this state of affairs con-
tinuing over a matter of weeks, why public resistance
to the sit-down was quieted, and why it was possible
for the organizers to make an appearance of strike
strength which, in terms of actual employes, they really
never had.
The completeness with which the professional group
checked up on the employe sit-downers was evidenced
in the way they accounted for them. If a sit-downer wished
to go home he was checked out on leave, much as a man
gets leave in the army. In many cases the professionals
would send an envoy along with the sit-downer to his
home, to prevent his going a.w.o.l. As these conditions
continued and the troops remained at a safe distance,
the professional element not only had control of the struck
plants but control of the city as well. As open opposition
diminished, naturally it became more difficult for the
negotiators of General Motors to be adamant. Equally, as
the police showed they were impotent, and when it be-
came clear that the governor would not use the troops to
carry out the orders of the courts, General Motors found
itself bereft of the protection of the laws and virtually
existing by the tolerance of anarchy.
If one has any doubt about this, let him consider the
statements of attaches of the Flint courts who testified that
so great and so general had become the disrespect for the
authority of the law that when process servers sought to
serve citizens in minor cases, the officers of the court were
laughed at. All of this came about as a result of the idealis-
tic endeavor of Governor Murphy to avoid bloodshed.
ONE CANNOT SAY AT THIS LATE DATE THAT THERE WOULD NOT
have been some bloodshed had the governor resolutely
sent the troops to the first major scene of disorder and pre-
vented the outsiders from either going into the plants
or sending in supplies. But there is this to be said, which
I believe to be the exact truth, that if the outsiders had
not been made aware in some fashion that the governor
did not intend to prevent trespass, it is extremely likely
they would not have amassed formidable forces in Flint
to offset capture of the plants and create the reign of ter-
ror that followed. Of course there were among the em-
ploye sit-downers some very radical characters, but with-
out connivance with the professionals who came from
the outside, and without knowledge that enforcement of
the law would be withheld, it is extremely difficult to
believe that they would have planned the attack in the
masterful and strategic way in which it was carried out.
The foregoing recital is a typical illustration of the
technique of the sit-down strike in operation. That it can-
not possibly succeed where law officers do their duty was
evidenced at the Fansteel strike in North Chicago. When
a handful of men took possession of that plant the court
ordered eviction and the local law officers carried out the
order. Governor Homer, though a New Dealer and
friendly to union labor, made the statement that any com-
pany that paid taxes in Illinois was entitled to protection
of its property. Many a sit-down strike followed in Illi-
nois, but few lasted very long. When the sitters were con-
fronted with the knowledge that the state meant business,
and the police advised the sitters to quit their employer's
property or be evicted by force, every one of the sit-
downs after the Fansteel eviction was ended without
bloodshed and the great majority without violence.
IT IS TRUE THAT THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR IS A
strong political force in Illinois, and more than likely this
had something to do with Governor Homer's display of
courage. But as to the police of Chicago, upon whom criti-
cism has been heaped because of the Memorial Day riots
at South Chicago, it is well to understand that ever since
the days of the Haymarket riot in 1886 there has been a
strong tradition on the Chicago police force that mobs
will never again be permitted to get the upper hand.
For the purpose of this article there is no need of going
into the unfortunate South Chicago affair any more than
to say that there was a mob bent on forcing the loyal Re-
public Steel workers to leave their jobs. This mob had
been worked up to a high emotional pitch by inflamma-
tory speeches at a mass meeting the night before. It re-
fused to disperse when commanded to by the police and
the inevitable followed. Illinois has not forgotten the
Herrin massacre when a mob under very similar circum-
stances set out to chastise workers who persisted in defy-
ing the orders of Lewis' union. While the fatalities at
South Chicago are an unhappy incident in this organi-
zational drive, yet no one knows how many innocent,
loyal workmen might have been killed had the mob been
permitted by the police to go into the plant on its an-
nounced mission.
One could go on citing case after case in Michigan
where the organizational drive was accompanied by ter-
roristic tactics which could not possibly have succeeded
except that the lieutenants doing the actual work had
confidence that the law officers in Michigan would not
interfere. In fairness to Governor Murphy it is probably
the truth to say that he was like a child playing with
dynamite and did not know it. And although it is difficult
to see how one can excuse him for what happened in the
early stages of the reign of terror in Michigan, certainly
when the Lansing holiday was called and he stood on the
capitol steps and saw that the CIO forces had barricaded
two streets in front of the capitol, it was then and there
his duty to call a halt.
Sordid as this tale has been and strongly as one must
condemn the apparent conspiracy between labor leaders
and politicians, the objectives of which are money income
to the former and votes to the latter, yet it is the American
way of burning down the barn to get rid of a few rats.
And good may yet come out of it all, as emotions die
down. Many an employer has learned about conditions
among his workers that had never before come to his
attention. Undoubtedly the speed of machines in some
564
SURVEY GRAPHIC
cases was too fast. There were cases where management
had gone to the nth degree to provide safety measures
but was backward in providing comfort conditions for
their workingmen. There were also cases where low
wages were needlessly paid, and without gain either to
employe or employer.
How generally it is known I cannot say, but as a mat-
ter of interest it might be recorded that the Ford Motor
Company is doing a wage-raising job outside of its own
plants that is far more effective than any organization
drive could ever be. Many a supplier of parts to the Ford
Company has been asked to submit his wage scale, and
where wages have been out of line the Ford Company has
suggested an increase in wages before orders are placed
with the supplying company. And yet this is the institu-
tion which Mr. Martin says must be brought to its knees!
One can only guess as to how many actual union mem-
bers there are and as to how many are paying dues, but
there is abundant evidence, whatever the facts may be,
that the zeal of last spring for strikes and terrorism has
measurably subsided. The reasons for this subsidence arc
not hard to find. Men who have lost a fourth of a year's
wages need, even with a 10 percent increase, two-and-a-
half years' steady employment just to break even. When
the increased cost of living and the dues are considered,
apparent gains are still further whittled down.
Interesting also is the fact that the beginnings of a re-
volt against the shorter week have begun to appear. In
the Carnegie Illinois mills at Chicago with a 10 cent raise
in wages per hour, and the week cut from forty-eight to
forty hours, the men receive 20 cents less per week. In a
Lansing case truck drivers have petitioned the manage-
ment for a return to longer hours. Ten cents an hour more
for eight less hours has yielded them 80 cents less per
week. Thus these wage earners are finding actual experi-
ence with share-the-work less pleasant than the theory.
The arrows truly point to a better deal for labor some
day in the future. Though their numbers are i,mall at the
moment, a new generation of labor leaders is in the mak-
ing. Reputable lawyers are taking advantage of the Wag-
ner act and going into the business of forming really
independent unions. They are counselling employe mem-
bers not to expect Utopia, but to make demands upon em-
ployers that will not wreck their own pay envelope sooner
or later. In other words, these more enlightened labor lead-
ers are seeking a place around the directors' table and
are demanding the consideration that labor is entitled to
as a part of enterprise, which many a chastened employer
is anxious and willing to give. The potentialities for good
in this small but growing movement supply the one out-
standing bright spot in the present picture.
The sit-down and deals with politicians furnished the
springboard, true enough, but they have now been denied
to Lewis, even in Michigan. The going will be harder
henceforth. But as to the essential character of the Lewis
organizational drive I say again it perpetrates upon the
unsuspecting worker the same kind of an economic hoax
that Dr. Townsend perpetrated on the aged. It is less
defensible than the Townsend scheme because it took
advantage of lawlessness and defiance of law to get its
start. Without the sit-down and the help of weak public
officials it would have been helpless.
II. OBSERVER FOR LABOR: EDWARD LEVINSON, Industrial Reporter, New York Post
The tactics of resistance to unionization are criticized by Mr. Levinson. Most
of the Little Steel plants, he says, could not have held out without expensive
propaganda, vigilantes, and the cooperation of prejudiced public officials.
THIS MOST TURBULENT YEAR IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN
industry has produced two general reactions among em-
ployers of labor. The largest category includes those who,
some with reluctance, have made their peace with organ-
ized labor, signed agreements and enjoyed a harmonious
relationship which has made continuous production possi-
ble. This group includes General Motors, Chrysler and
other employers of some 350,000 automobile workers;
six large subsidiaries of United States Steel, employing
approximately 190,000 workers, Jones and Laughlin, a
great independent, and other smaller steel companies. It
includes large electrical firms which give work to more
than 100,000 members of the United Electrical and Radio
Workers Union; and the major part of the tire and rub-
ber industries which employ 75,000 members of the United
Rubber Workers of America. The Committee for Indus-
trial Organization has organized and obtained working
agreements for approximately 1,500,000 men and women
workers. The American Federation of Labor claims
to have enrolled a million new workers in the last twelve
months, and to have won working agreements for most
of them. The sudden drop in the number of strikes after
the upheaval of the first six months of the year indicates
the acceptance by a large section of the employing
interests of the principle of collective bargaining.
The second group of employers, notably, Little Steel,
led by Republic and Bethlehem, have chosen warfare in
place of peace. There are indications that Ford Motor
and Weirton Steel will also offer their unionized employes
the same type of resistance which appears, for the mo-
ment, to have defeated unionism in Little Steel. The
technique of this opposition has been fully demonstrated
in Chicago, Johnstown, Pa., Youngstown, Warren, Canton,
Massillon, and Cleveland, Ohio. It is now possible to de-
scribe and characterize it, so that both American busi-
ness and the public may judge which of the two methods
is to be preferred— the collective bargaining of U.S. Steel,
General Motors, and Chrysler, or the union-smashing
efforts of such companies as Republic and Bethlehem
Steel.
A majority of the employes of these companies, called
out on strike by the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing
Committee, quit work voluntarily. It has not yet been
successfully demonstrated that any large body of Ameri-
can workers can be stampeded by a minority, either by
threats or violence, into quitting work. The support of a
NOVEMBER 1937
565
majority of the employes o£ these companies was indi-
cated by their response to the strike calls. Why, then, did
the employes of Republic and of Bethlehem's huge Cam-
bria plant at Johnstown return to work before the strike
was won? There are several reasons:
Civil government in Johnstown, Youngstown, War-
ren, Niles, Canton, Cleveland, and Chicago was sympa-
thetic, if not outrightly subservient, to the steel corpora-
tion. In Johnstown, Youngstown, and Chicago, key strike
centers, the cooperation was open. Public authorities can-
not evade their share of responsibility for the deaths
of eighteen steel strikers in what independent, government,
and labor observers agree were unprovoked attacks. Al-
most 200 active strikers and local leaders were arrested
in Youngstown alone, most of them to be released even-
tually without formal charges against them. Official vio-
lence was supplemented by vigilante violence in Monroe,
Mich., and Massillon, Ohio. Despite this pressure, the
ranks of the Ohio strikers continued to hold fast. The
National Guard was then brought into play in Ohio
despite state laws specifically enacted to prevent strike-
breaking by the military. Following a secret conference
between the Ohio National Guard commanders and the
heads of Republic Steel, the troops moved systematically
from Youngstown, to Warren, to Niles, to Canton, and
then to Massillon to harass and disband picket lines and
arrest local strike leaders.
MEANWHILE, THE PROPAGANDA OF THE STEEL COMPANIES
went forward. Johnstown, Youngstown, Warren, Canton,
where I had an opportunity to observe the strike first-
hand, are one-newspaper towns, and in each case the local
paper was opposed to the strikers. Trivial incidents on
picket lines were enlarged to give the impression of a
strike-inspired reign of terror. Hysterical outbursts of
local public officials were given undue prominence. Back-
to-work movements were heralded as successes before they
started. Eight-column headlines and four-column picture
spreads told of "normal" and "near normal" operation of
mills while they were still deserted. Endorsement of these
back-to-work movements was given by so-called "inde-
pendent" unions whose aim uniformly coincided with the
current objectives of the corporations. The movements
were supported by vigilante and would-be vigilante move-
ments in Johnstown, Youngstown, Canton, Massillon and
Monroe. These were labelled "citizens" committees and
constantly bespoke their impartiality in the dispute, but
all managed nevertheless to serve the interests of the cor-
porations. Finally, on the list of the corporation strike-
breaking devices there must be added the "outside agita-
tors," the high-priced publicity and advertising men, and
those advocates of peace and order — like Representative
Clare Hoffman of Michigan — who in Johnstown sug-
gested that private citizens might have to take "law en-
forcement" into their own hands.
This is a serious indictment, yet it is understated. Let
us fill in the record, starting with the steel corporation's
use of local public authorities. As "Exhibit A," there is
Mayor Daniel J. Shields of Johnstown, one time inmate
of a federal prison following conviction for attempting
to bribe a federal officer. The Bethlehem strike brought
Mayor Shields busy days. Observe him early in the morn-
ing issuing tin hats and permission to carry clubs to
supervisory employes of the corporation. He learns that
there is some name-calling on the picket line and he
rushes out of City Hall to order pickets to "move on"
and direct the arrest of those who, he feels, move too
slowly. An hour later, he mounts the bench in police
court and sits as a magistrate on strike cases. "Are you a
member of the CIO?" is the first question. If the answer
is in the affirmative, the next question is, "What were you
doing up so early this morning?" (On his arrival at the
courtroom, he had found time to greet newspapermen
and to urge them to observe how "I give them [the
strikers] hell.") A union lawyer protests against the
seemingly needless violence of Patrolman Doc Krise, the
"quick-draw" man of the Johnstown police force.
"Doc Krise did his duty wonderfully," Mayor Shields
exclaims from the bench. The mayor's enthusiasm was
boundless. "We need policemen like him. A world with-
out policemen would be like a world without music . . .
a very dreary world indeed."
Striker Andy Ogando, his head wrapped in bandages,
mute proof of Doc Krise's performance of "duty," is given
ninety days or $100. The next case is that of a striker who
had been found with a dirty rag in his hands. A state
trooper testified that the striker might have thrown the
rag. "Ninety days or $100." Next came culprit striker
Charles Draganovich. He had been sitting on a fence fifty
feet from a mill gate, thus "setting a bad example" for
other strikers. "Ninety days or $100."
"This can keep on all day," says the mayor, adjourn-
ing other strike cases for a later date. A few minutes
later he is at City Hall speechifying for news cameramen
on the "sacredness" of the right to work. A few hours
later he is on the radio — the same station which has denied
time to the SWOC — announcing that "the back-to-work
movement starts from now on." When the movement
does not start, the mayor orders the strike leaders to leave
the city. They refuse, and he has them dragged before him
by police officers. No charge is made against them. They
are told they remain in Johnstown at their own peril.
As a revealing postscript to Mayor Shields's behavior, we
may now add the testimony before the National Labor
Board of Francis C. Martin, secretary of the Citizens Na-
tional Committee. Martin told the board that he carried
three envelopes, containing approximately $30,000, to
Shields during the strike. The envelopes were given him,
said Martin, by Sidney D. Evans, management's represen-
tative at Bethlehem's Johnstown plant.
BEFORE WE LEAVE JOHNSTOWN, WE SHOULD GLANCE AT ITS
newspaper, the famous Johnstown Democrat, and its
morning edition, the Tribune. Its editorials refer to "dirty
Mexicans" and "knife-throwing Mexicans" stirring up vio-
lence on the picket lines. Now to begin with, there are
fewer than 300 Mexican steel workers among the some
12,000 who work for Bethlehem at the Cambria plant.
These were imported by the corporation as cheap and
docile labor. The editors of the Democrat and the Tribune
know this well, but their object is not to attack the Mexi-
cans, by bold appeals to race prejudice, but to create the
feeling that most of the strikers are "dirty" foreigners,
knife-throwing aliens. The general tenor of the editorials
follows that dealing with the "dirty Mexicans," who are
also referred to as "greasers." The newspapers play hand
in glove with the so-called "Citizens Committee of Johns-
town," composed exclusively of business men, and officered
by the heads of the local Chamber of Commerce and the
banks. Johnstown had been peaceful for days, when these
566
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Wide World
In Cleveland non-union workers went back to their jobs at a Republic Steel plant under the protection of the National Guard
sentences appeared in an advertisement signed by the
"Citizens Committee":
These dastardly attempts to scare the families of working
men. . . . This throwing of stones and missiles at men who
want to work. . . . This wrecking of workers' automobiles.
. . . This cowardly ganging of one lone, willing worker. . . .
These vile names hissed from the lips of human beings aimed
at men who want to work. . . . This throwing of dynamite.
. . . This breaking of windows in workers' homes — all these
things, all these atrocities must stop. ... Be assured that the
Citizens Committee means business. . . .!
The city, as we have said, had been quiet for days when
this advertisement appeared. Its object was not, how-
ever, to save the city from the fictitious events which were
described, but rather to arouse the city against the strikers
and the CIO, an objective which was soon achieved. One
more glimpse at Johnstown, and we shall pass on to ob-
serve Little Steel's technique in other cities. Mayor
Shields has summoned the citizens of the city to a mass
meeting. The city is in danger! All honest men and
women must respond! Fewer than 1000 of the adult popu-
lation of perhaps 15,000 show up. The mayor is tired and
he speaks only briefly, giving over the burden of the mes-
sage to Representative Hoffman of Michigan. For an hour
then we hear covert personal reflections on Governor
Murphy of Michigan and the tale of how that once great
state has become a shambles through the unchecked ruth-
lessness of John L. Lewis and the CIO. Hoffman tells in
detail of men and women ailing in Michigan hospitals,
when along comes Lewis and orders a utilities strike,
pulling the electric switches and condemning the sick to
NOVEMBER 1937
die in darkness. This was a complete distortion of events.
"The time may come when, if citizens be not protected
by legally constituted authorities, they will take the law
into their own hands," Hoffman suggests.
Youngstown's counterpart of Mayor Shields was the
sheriff of Mahoning County, Ralph Elser, a one-time
school superintendent. We may pass over his pride in
his improvised armored wagons, pierced with holes for
rifles, which he proudly displayed to newspapermen and
flaunted daily along peaceful picket lines. His wholesale
swearing in of deputies is comparable to Shields' enlisting
of his own army of armed men. But the mayor of Johns-
town never achieved the record of some 200 arrests which
Elser accumulated within a period of forty-eight hours.
The Youngstown Vindicator, only newspaper in the city,
served the same purpose as the Johnstown Democrat, but
it did the job more cleverly. Its news columns were care-
fully and diligently partisan, particularly when the crucial
"back-to-work" movement was launched. Editorially, the
paper was more restrained than the Johnstown publica-
tion. Throughout, the Vindicator's strike policy was dic-
tated, edited, and largely executed by a newspaperman
whom the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee later
was informed was on the payroll of a strikebreaking pri-
vate detective agency.
The most profitable research into Little Steel's technique
in Youngstown would be into the activities of the National
Guard. The troops came into Youngstown and other Ohio
cities to prevent Tom Girdler and the Youngstown Sheet
and Tube from attempting forceful, violent dispersal of
567
picket lines around the mills. Soon after, Governor Davey
announced that the troops would be used to open the mills.
R. J. Wysor, second in command to Girdler in Republic
Steel, conferred unannounced with the National Guard
authorities in the Youngstown armory. No strike leaders
were present, and it soon became evident that the troops'
intentions were solely partisan. The intelligence division
took over direction of the back-to-work movement. Daily
press releases announced the time of mill openings, and
gave the companies' estimates of the number of strikers
who had returned to work. These releases told of National
Guard officers' daily conferences with corporation execu-
tives. When Captain C. M. Conaway, in charge of press
relations at Youngstown, was asked why the union esti-
mates were not also made public, he declared the union
figures to be falsehoods. Here are a few excerpts from
National Guard press releases : "We met first with Youngs-
town Sheet and Tube Company representatives, and later
in the day representatives of the Republic Steel Company
were here. At 6 p. m. the following estimate of the total
number of employes now working in the Youngstown
area was made, based on all figures available from the
steel company offices: 18,328." The next day: "Statement
by Major Gilson D. Light, Commanding: 'The Struthers
plant of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company will
start operations tomorrow.' " And again : "Women and
children appeared on the picket lines in Warren early
today when a crowd of some two hundred people as-
sembled some distance from Republic's main gate of Niles
plant. The crowd was dispersed without incident by a
small group of National Guardsmen." The press releases
of the National Guard became the principal propaganda
of the back-to-work movement and were dutifully fea-
tured in the local papers at Youngstown, Warren, and
Niles.
STEEL COMPANY PROPAGANDA WAS ONLY THE LEAST OF THE
services rendered by the National Guard. Martial law was
never declared in any of the three counties affected by the
strike. There never were enough disorderly or threatening
incidents to justify martial law. This difficulty was cir-
cumvented by the simple device of having the sheriffs
of the respective counties issue "proclamations." Picket
lines were disbanded or so drastically limited as to make
them worthless. Public assemblies were forbidden without
permits from the sheriff. Picket line leaders were arrested
and detained long enough to demoralize the rank and
file pickets. In all these operations, the National Guard
acted nominally as aids to the sheriffs under the pro-
visions of the clearly arbitrary proclamations. Actually, the
sheriffs gave the military a free hand. The encampment of
troops in Canton, where the strike had been peaceful for
weeks, was not accompanied without popular resentment.
Children were driven from their school playgrounds by
nervous troopers with drawn bayonets. Three of the
youngsters, all under sixteen years of age, were cut by
bayonets and bled so profusely they had to be treated in
the medical corps room of the Canton armory. The fol-
lowing day a captain in the military press headquarters
asked this reporter, among others, to "cooperate" by sup-
pressing the facts. In Canton also the military made whole-
sale arrests of pickets, detaining scores for hours in a
basement of the Republic plant. The National Guard
propaganda of the return to work of strikers, followed by
arrests and dispersal of picket lines was repeated methodic-
568
ally and apparently from a prearranged strategy in five of
the six Ohio cities where steel workers were on strike.
The mere details of the killing of strikers in Chicago,
Youngstown, Massillon, and Cleveland suffice to indicate
the wanton disregard of life and law perpetrated by some
of these steel companies and their willing accomplices, the
local "law enforcement" agencies. The Senate subcommit-
tee on civil liberties has found that the Memorial Day
attack on the Chicago strikers near the Republic plant,
which resulted in the death of ten workers and the maim-
ing for life of several others, was without provocation;
that the strikers were proceeding entirely within their legal
rights in an effort to set up picket lines at the plant; that
following the brutal police attack, no attempt was made
to aid the wounded; that the group could have been dis-
banded without loss of life; and that the subsequent in-
vestigation by the Chicago city authorities was farcical
and prejudiced. To this we need add only the findings of
the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild that
the Republic officials and the Chicago police were "actively
cooperating to break the strike." The two who died in
Youngstown gave their lives, official explanation has it,
because wives of strikers started a row by calling insult-
ing names at sheriff's deputies. The mayor and Chief of
Police Stanley Switter of Massillon have told the National
Labor Relations Board how local Republic executives and
members of the "Law and Order League" pounded away
and "put the heat on" them until guns were placed in the
hands of "special police." Finally, Switter related, he was
led to leave town and in his absence a self-appointed
leader of the "special police" precipitated a riot in which
two strikers were killed and several wounded, and as a
result of which 160 strikers were arrested, some of them
dragged from their homes in the process. Switter testified
that a Republic official had demanded, "Why don't you
take action like they did in Chicago?" He told also of
the efforts of Gen. William E. Marlin of the National
Guard to have him enroll the "special police." The eight-
eenth worker to give his life was killed in Cleveland when
a strikebreaker stepped on the gas feed of his car and
crushed a picket against an iron fence. Immediately after
the Cleveland strike headquarters was wrecked by a mob.
This record of company-inspired propaganda with
which the press cooperated, of the corruption of local
authorities, of National Guard strikebreaking, of violence
and needless killings could be documented by a volume
of evidence, much of it recorded under oath in hearings
before the Senate committee, before the National Labor
Relations Board, and in several Ohio courts.
LITTLE STEEL HAS TEMPORARILY DEFEATED THE WILL OF ITS
employes to organize into bona fide, independent unions.
It has lost millions of dollars in the process, and its only
certain result is that it may look forward to more strikes
and more labor trouble within a year. The current mood
of American labor is not one which will accept violence
and repression as the final arbiter of its modest demands
for recognition and written agreements through collective
bargaining. Employers who are tempted to follow the
Little Steel technique will do well to give the matter cau-
tious second thought. Certainly an enlightened public
opinion will have nothing but condemnation for the re.ign
of terror through which Little Steel stampeded its em-
ployes back to work and denied them the plain rights
accorded them in the National Labor Relations Act.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Society and Sex Offenders
by IRA S. WILE, M.D.
A well-known psychiatrist discusses the subject that recent spectacular
crimes has brought forward: How should society handle the sex
offender? What can be done to prevent sex crimes?
EX-CONVICT ADMITS SLAYING GIRL OF EIGHT
GIRL FOUR MURDERED IN NEW SEX CRIME
Two THOUSAND AT FUNERAL OF MURDERED GIRL
POLICE MAKING LIST OF SEX CRIMINALS
COURT GRANTS TEST OF SANITY
WAR ON SEX OFFENDERS
NEWSPAPER HEADLINES SUCH AS THESE OF RECENT WEEKS
tell a story of communities agitated by a series of fresh
crimes and demanding greater protection from "sex crimes
by degenerates." It is alleged that there is a new outburst
of these crimes. That this is true is by no means certain.
According to the United States Bureau of Census the
actual number of prisoners received from the courts by
the state and federal prisons and reformatories in 1935
was 1584 for rape, 2064 for other sexual offenses. In 1933
it was 3602 for rape, 2042 for other sexual offenses; in
1923 the number was 1060 and 5938 respectively. Like
many other forms of crime, sexual offenses show advance
and recession over the years, and social alarm parallels the
rise. Sex offenses against children long have been a cause
of concern in this country. In 1925 the Children's Bureau
published a small brochure entitled Laws Relating to Sex
Offenses Against Children. Difficulties then noted aris-
ing from diverse definitions of age of consent, variable
meaning of statutory rape, and differences in punishment
for males and females in terms of death or imprisonment
or permanent confinement in a correctional institution,
still complicate the present efforts of outraged communi-
ties crying for action.
Sex crimes, as a class, constitute part of the general prob-
lem of crime. However general social attitudes toward
sex and the status of the family have led to the considera-
tion of sexual crime as significant deviations from ordi-
nary criminal acts. The definition and treatment of sex
crimes have varied through the ages. Even today some
forms of sexual offenses are practically ignored, and many
sexual deviates condoned. There is social winking at pros-
titution, homosexuality and adultery but uniform con-
demnation of the specific sexual crime against immature
children. Our society abhors paedophilia.
It is significant that rape is more commonly the act of
young adults while sexual abnormalities with children
are apt to be practiced by older men. According to the
U.S. Census figures for 1934, 16 percent of the committed
rapists were males 21-24 years old, with the median at
25-29 years, and only 9 percent were over 50 years of age.
The median age of other sexual offenders was 30-34 years
and 14 percent of the perpetrators were over 50 years old.
Only 15.4 percent of the rapists as compared with 21.3
percent of those committed for other sexual offenses, had
advanced beyond age 45. Of 19 men who recently as-
saulted young girls, and then murdered them, the median
age was 43 years.
It is needless to analyze the various types of sex offenses,
which may involve impotence, homosexuality, or rape;
they may result from jealous infatuation, intoxication, or
narcotic addiction. For sound social thinking it is how-
ever necessary to distinguish between the unpremeditated
and the purposeful sex crime, between the offense against
an adult and one against a child. It is essential to differen-
tiate the homicidal element of the crime from the sexual
assault. Frequently when a sexual assault is not accom-
panied by more serious consequences, the court accepts a
pleading to a lesser charge, such as "impairing the morals
of a minor."
A degenerate by definition is "a defective having innate
proclivities for crime, especially such as take the form of
perversions of instincts." Hence the degenerate who is
violating the normal (accepted) standard for social in-
stinctive behavior is regarded as an especial problem in
the realm of sex offenses. There is no clearly defined crim-
inal type. There is little evidence of specific racial or cul-
tural background. Economic status per se is not a factor,
nor is any specific social pattern. Inferior intelligence plays
its part, as does emotional instability, and a psychopathic
personality inadequate in self-direction. The sex offender
does not differ greatly from other criminals, although he
may manifest some sexual anomalies and lack in potency
and virility, factors which may cause him to compensate
in abnormal sexual behavior.
ONE MAY QUESTION WHETHER IT IS POSSIBLE TO ANALYZE
the causes of sex offenses with any degree of certainty.
There may be personal, organic deficiencies, some perhaps
of hereditary origin. There may be psychogenetic causes
that call for psychological investigation. There may be a
definite psychopathic personality, with emotional instabili-
ties, more or less intangible but recognizable in a mode
of life rather than as a specific mental activity. The psycho-
paths may manifest instabilities, such as moodiness, irri-
tability and even episodic mental crises. Despite possible
normal intelligence they lack prudence, consistent pur-
pose and are unable to make social adjustments satisfac-
tory to society. To define this group, however, in exact
legal phraseology is beyond our present competence. The
psychiatrist can only present the facts concerning such per-
sons and make recommendations to those who must deter-
mine the proper legal treatment for the offender.
Mild antisocial or asocial activities are too common in
society to constitute reasonable bases for certification as
mental disorder or even as psychopathic disposition. In the
realm of sex crimes there is even greater diagnostic hazard
NOVEMBER 1937
569
because of the wide practice of what abstractedly is re-
garded as abnormal sexual behavior.
To ascertain the potential sexual delinquent is difficult.
It is hard to separate with certainty from the gray bor-
derland those who are normal and those who are abnor-
mal. It is not always easy to be sure who is, and who is
not, insane. It is almost impossible to diagnosticate indi-
viduals who are prone to think along abnormal lines,
individuals who, upon occasion, might act upon such
thought. Sexual crimes are caught up with the general
problems relating to mental deficiency, epilepsy, compul-
sions, alcoholism, psychoses and senile deteriorations, emo-
tional instability, rage, jealousy. In addition they relate
to queer deviations of the sexual impulse which find satis-
faction only in stimuli arising from sources regarded as
antisocial. It is not easy to define abnormal mentality
where specific symptoms are absent. Yet it must be ac-
knowledged that a definition based only upon persistent
offenses gives inadequate social protection.
Recividism is well illustrated in the recent case of a
forty-nine year old man who brutally murdered and as-
saulted a child. His mother, maternal grandmother and
a maternal uncle were insane; one brother was a mental
defective. His record showed two previous convictions for
crimes against little girls. Besides an early history of
grand larceny, he had served twelve years of a twenty-
year sentence for his first sex crime. After a later sentence
for the impairment of the morals of the young he was
granted a parole, which he violated; he was then returned
to Sing Sing and only two months after liberation from
that institution he renewed his sexual career and mur-
dered his victim. This man represents a type of persistent
offender for whom some form of social restraint is man-
datory.
A thirty-two-year old man, killer of a boy in a sex
crime, was a defective delinquent, with a previous record
of sexual assault. At the time of his crime a western paper
suggested editorially that potential criminals of this sad-
istic type "must possess a mental pattern of certain dis-
tinguishing characteristics, which psychiatrists in prisons
or insane asylums should be able to recognize." Unfor-
tunately, the line between the normal and the abnormal is
not defined clearly enough to assure such accurate diag-
nosis and prognosis.
CRIMINALS INVOLVED IN SADISTIC SEXUAL OFFENSES WITH
young children constitute a medico-social problem as well
as a medico-legal problem. In a recent report the British
Joint Committee on Sexual Offenses came to the conclu-
sion that "owing to the difficulties of legal and medical
definition, it is not practicable to press effectively at this
stage for special provisions for the detention and treat-
ment, as such, of convicted persons suspected of abnormal
mentality who are not certifiable either as insane or as
mentally defective."
Criminals suffering from general paralysis of the in-
sane or mental deficiency are readily diagnosticated. How-
ever psychopathic personalities are not so readily certified
as insane, even though their mental instabilities may lead
them to commit sexual offenses. There are occasional
sexual offenders who suffer from an "obsessive-compul-
sive" type of psychoneurosis for whom no certifiable men-
tal disorder can be determined.
Some members of our judiciary agree with Judge Peter
J. Brancato of the Brooklyn County Court, who has been
570
quoted in the New York press recently as saying: "The
talk of treating sex perverts as insane individuals I do not
believe has much justification within the purview of our
penal law." There is a question as to whether sex perverts
are insane in the ordinary medical sense, although they
may have recurrent episodes of mental disease. Rarely is
a primary sex pervert held legally incompetent solely be-
cause of his perversion.
THE QUESTION OF SANITY OR INSANITY INVOLVES A CONFLICT
between legal and medical definitions. To base judgment
of sanity or insanity merely upon long psychoanalytic
procedures is of doubtful value, because even the revela-
tion of a fundamental complex determining compulsive
activities does not establish insanity as such. Even the
broader psychiatric methodology for the determination of
sanity or insanity offers a challenge because of the lack of
adequately trained personnel and because there are still
insufficient bases for generally accepted classifications of
personality disorders. Society desires to protect individuals
against injustice while it safeguards itself. Hence an em-
phasis upon the medical point of view is more valuable
than dwelling upon legalistic difficulties.
It might be assumed that the commission of a sexually
perverted offense, in itself, would be an evidence of in-
sanity, but obviously the presence of a deviation in sexual
behavior does not establish the fact of mental disease. The
character of the sexual offense either in terms of the
nature and quality of the sex act or the nature of the sex
objects would have to be considered. Thus there is a dis-
tinction between exhibitionism and homosexuality, be-
tween rape as a result of ignorance of the statutory age of
consent and an attack upon a young child. The degree of
responsibility of the offender for his own acts is of essen-
tial social importance. Unfortunately, the idea of criminal
responsibility is a legal concept, whereas the question of
motivation of an act is a medical concept. The law dwells
upon responsibility and knowledge of the rightfulness or
wrongfulness of an act at the time it is committed; medi-
cine emphasizes the general trends of disease processes.
Admittedly a number of the sex offenders are definitely
insane; a few are mental defectives; more possess border-
line or dull normal intelligence. Yet mental deficiency as
related to criminality is overstressed. Greater danger lies
in the uncontrolled activity of the person with sufficient
intelligence to make the ordinary adjustments to life
but without the emotional stability and self-control essen-
tial for completely normal social living. This applies par-
ticularly to those who possess innate tendencies to deviate
from normal sex expression. This group falls into no dis-
tinct medico-legal category that may be authoritatively
diagnosticated or that can be satisfactorily reached under
existent laws. Only one thing is certain: incarceration is
ineffective and definitely unjust to the offender and to
society, unless an indeterminate period is granted for
medical and psychiatric treatment.
Dependable criteria for an absolute diagnosis of psycho-
pathy are lacking. What Dr. Bernard Glueck stated in
1917 still holds true: "No well defined method is at hand,
such as would serve to convince the layman that one is
dealing with a distinctly abnormal individual." The diag-
nosis rests mainly upon a life history of reaction to en-
vironmental stresses. The mere recording of emotional
instabilities does not constitute a sufficient warrant for a
diagnosis that might cause permanent institutionalization.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
International
Excited townspeople at Inglewood, Calif., last June muttered threats of lynching as they awaited news of the search for the man who
had assaulted and killed three young girls. But vengeance is no answer to sex crimes; it does nothing to prevent similar offenses
The approach to the problem of handling sex offenders
varies from permanent punitive control to curative psy-
chiatric procedures. Application of the modern idea of
social rehabilitation for criminals to sex offenders offers
definite hazards. There must be assurance that the trend
towards sexual offenses has been nullified or reduced to
safe levels. Thus the psychiatric approach involves grave
social responsibility. Psychoanalytic endeavors cannot as-
sure normal sexual function any more than the employ-
ment of endocrines or the establishment of occupational
interests. Both law and psychiatry are challenged by the
indefiniteness of the dangerous psychopathic personality.
Among the many legal steps that have been suggested
to reduce sexual offenses there is this proposal:
1. The abolition of the determinate sentence for a sex
offender and his release only after a state board of alienists
has decided that he is fit to return to society,
2. The transfer of judgment concerning the sanity of any
criminal to a state board of psychiatrists rather than to a
jury-
In 1925, New Zealand proposed indeterminate sentences
for all persons convicted of sex offenses and advocated
that psychiatrists be appointed to advise concerning the
classification and treatment of such offenders. The advis-
ory service was to be available to the courts prior to the
sentence of the offender. The board was to have power of
recommendation concerning the release or probation of
such criminals as were guilty of offense upon children.
Some such measure as this, whether dealing with parole,
probation or indeterminate sentence, of course has mean-
ing only after a conviction and would serve in no way as
a preventive of crime. It would however tend to reduce
the hazard of sexual recidivism. How great is the hazard
is evident. In 1934, our federal and state prisons and re-
formatories discharged 1376 individuals serving time for
rape and 1382 serving sentences for other sexual offenses.
The complete time actually served by them averaged 40.2
months for rape, 31.4 months for other sexual offenses, as
compared with 42.1 months by those discharged after
sentence for robbery.
The short term treatment of sexual offenders is essen-
tially punitive rather than corrective and has doubtful
social value. The reason for not granting early parole
is obvious.
Prolonged imprisonment has been advocated on gen-
eral principles and the castration of sexual offenders urged.
Neither is rational. Castration, or other forms of steriliza-
tion, removes procreative power but does not wholly
destroy the sexual urge. In fact lowered potency tends to
stimulate many forms of sexual offense, as, for example,
exhibitionism and attempted irregular sexual activities
with young children.
Prisons for sexual offenders constitute another prob-
lem. Unfortunately sexual perverts manifest a basic in-
stinctive sexual drive which cannot be corrected by incar-
ceration. In fact, as every prison official knows, deviation
from the normal sexual behavior of a mature adult is more
or less stimulated by imprisonment. Placing all types of
sexual offenders in one institution would lessen the prob-
ability of rehabilitation.
However segregation under hospital care would be
sound policy. It would recognize individuality. In the
long run the community would benefit by the psychiatric
examination given the offender to determine the course
of treatment needed.
IN NEW YORK MAYOR LA GUARDIA PUT FORTH A PROPOSAL
to eliminate sex crimes through the incarceration of con-
victed offenders whose sanity is in doubt. It applies to
prisoners already convicted of "impairing the morals of
children or of sex crimes involving perversion." His plan
would call for continued medical observation with an ar-
raignment upon release, under a section of the mental
hygiene law, that would provide for further study to de-
termine whether the release should be permanent or
whether hospitalization for mental disease should follow.
In a sense this does give social protection against recidi-
vistic sex crimes.
What we lack most noticeably in America is a unified
approach to sexual offenders. States disagree concerning
NOVEMBER 1937
571
the nature and meaning of various crimes and do not
have uniform laws, penalties, bases of extradition and
methods ot crime prevention or treatment. But there is
growing appreciation of the need for a revaluation ot laws
concerning indeterminate sentence, parole, probation, the
mental examination of an offender after conviction, pen-
alties and treatment. It is conceded that at least the men-
tal defectives and the insane should receive non-punitive
therapeutic care. National conference and inter-state agree-
ments could formulate essential definitions and modes of
procedure that would promote legal uniformity.
Yet whatever measures are taken society must put its
emphasis on prevention as well as treatment. Sex crimes,
however, like all others are due to multiple factors, and
no single mode of approach supplies the sole measure
of prevention.
The number of sexual offenses known to the police has
always been far out of proportion to those that lead to
arrest. Police blotters contain only a part of the exhibition-
isms, the indecent assaults, the attempts at carnal knowl-
edge and the vicious obscenities directed towards children.
Parents hesitate to report unpleasant experiences; they
often refuse to file charges against an alleged offender.
Much would be gained if adults dared to follow up every
instance of child molestation; if judges were less willing
to accept a pleading to a lower degree of crime in cases
involving offenses against children. A charge of "impair-
ing the morals of a minor" should create doubt as to men-
tal stability. As Austin MacCormick, commissioner of cor-
rection of New York City, has said, it would be "wise to
scrutinize every single case involving molestation of chil-
dren, because we know that, quite often, minor offenses
may be merely a warning or danger signal that possibly
major crime may follow." A second arrest for a minor
offense would amply justify prolonged detention to in-
vestigate the motivation underlying the act prior to an
indeterminate sentence in prison or hospital. Police cap-
tains know that sexual indecency, exposure and assault
occur in parks and at beaches and in other public places.
More thorough policing of these, of vacant lots and empty
houses is essential.
WHAT ARE THE POSSIBILITIES OF INFLUENCING THE YOUNG
through home and school that they may mature with a
greater stability, responsibility and moral equilibrium?
Obviously, better homes, better schools, more organized
recreation are important. Theoretically intelligent sex edu-
cation should be a useful preventive measure, but parental
cooperation must be elicited and educational systems must
concede its place in the curriculum. The welfare of youth
is the concern of our various juvenile organizations such
as the scouts, the religious organizations, the playground
associations. Junior republics, crime prevention bureaus,
juvenile courts and family rehabilitation organizations are
familiar with antisocial sexual behavior. The multiple
organizations with overlapping programs suggest a rea-
son for the coordination of activities in a concerted attack,
whether in neighborhood councils, as proposed by the
New York Crime Commission in 1930, or patterned after
the Berkeley Coordinating Council for dealing with the
problems of children.
The entire problem calls for an intelligent objective
study. The part that magazines, movies, radio and the
public press play in heightening the suggestibility of un-
stable personalities has not been wholly determined. Legis-
572
lative committees should investigate the legitimate place
of parole, probation, mental hygiene and correction in
dealing with sexual offenders, 'ihere should be legisla-
tion to protect the public against these people, legislation
based on careful investigation of probable causality and
not a premature response to the cry for more laws. The
records of child guidance clinics or the case material gath-
ered in mental hygiene clinics or psychiatric departments
of our public medical institutions can be useful. If it is
possible to ascertain abnormal trends during the period
antedating adolescence, preventive psychiatric and social
measures might be advised and mandated in the interest
of social protection.
OUR CURRENT LAWS FAIL TO PROVIDE FOR THE PSYCHIATRIC
study of criminals in general and sex offenders in par-
ticular. There is urgent need for a collective study of
sexual offenders, particularly with relation to the nature
of sexual psychopathy and methods of locating dangerous
sexual deviation prior to maturity, or as early there-
after as may be possible. More facts are needed concern-
ing specific differences between the criminal and the non-
criminal members of the community. The potential worth
of psychiatry in dealing with delinquents and criminals
must be established. The legal and medical concepts of
normality and abnormality, responsibility and irresponsi-
bility, emotional stability and instability, sane and insane,
should be harmonized. Our crime detection bureaus have
improved and there is increasing appreciation of the
application of scientific principles in crime prevention.
Prevention of crime depends upon a knowledge of crimi-
nal personalities. Sexual offenders lack the ability or will
to accept social mandates concerning the sex drives as
verbalized in canons of law and morals. Unless some ade-
quate way be found to investigate and determine this
particular weakness the total prevention of sexual crimes
is impossible.
Rationality and objectivity are requisite in the correla-
tion of available data and the deduction of constructive
modes of procedure. A collective study should be more
than a legislative hearing of emotional testimony unsup-
ported by validating data. It should represent the coopera-
tive efforts of medicine, psychiatry, sociology, education,
law and politics. The problem of sexual offenses involves
not only individuals as offenders but the contributory
shortcomings of society.
Courts could determine the degree of responsibility or
guilt on the basis of diagnostic reports from an unbiased
state commission consisting, say, of two psychiatrists, a
sociologist and a legal representative of the state. The
commission, acting either before or after conviction,
within the discretion of the court, would enable a judge
to deal justly with the alleged offender. He might com-
mit for further examination and report, place on proba-
tion, give an indeterminate sentence to an institution to
meet specific needs, or make provision for prolonged care
in a hospital or other social institution.
Social justice requires an elastic plan of treatment that
will promote the rehabilitation of the offender and safe-
guard the community against further sex crime. Our
courts should recognize the relative participation of hu-
man frailty and social inadequacy in every deviation from
socially acceptable behavior. In the last analysis, the crux
of the problem lies in prevention before there is reason to
appear in a court.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Liberty in an Insecure World
II. IF FREEDOM MATTERS
by HAROLD J. LASKI
"Our business is to be prepared for the eventualities, to organize our-
selves that those to whom freedom matters are powerful enough to
abridge as may be the period of difficulty."
FASCISM IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA MAY COME IN
diverse ways. It may arrive as the slow outcome of an
almost imperceptible system of limitations upon public
liberty, an accumulation of suppressions no one of which,
at the time, is adequately seen in its full perspective. Or
it may come as an attempt by a reactionary government
to forestall what appears to be the inescapable victory of
their opponents at the polls. It may come because of the
necessities of national organization in a great war; or out
of its aftermath in the attempt to deal with problems of
discontent otherwise deemed insoluble. It might even come
as a deliberate challenge to a government of the Left that
had acceded to power; we know that when men's ultimate
convictions, as they deem them, are at stake, the tempta-
tion to fight rather than to give way is well-nigh irresisti-
ble. After all, a thorough-going socialist victory in either
country would mark an epoch in the history of the world.
It would change so decisively the balance of social forces,
if it were adequately implemented in action, as to rank
with the two or three major events in the records of
civilization. It would deprive of economic privilege a class
that has never known what it is to live in an equal world
— a class, too, that has been taught by all its experience
that its private good is identical with the public welfare,
and has remained steadfastly unconvinced by the scepti-
cism displayed by those excluded from the privileges it
has enjoyed. It is a class which dominates the courts, the
civil service, and the defense forces of the modern state.
Overwhelmingly, also, it controls all the techniques for
influencing opinion. It is compact, well-organized, and
conscious of its power; it is aware, also, of the deep dif-
ferences which divide the forces of its opponents. Sincere
in the conviction that the maintenance of its authority is
necessary in what it believes to be the public interest, is it
surprising that it should view with horror the advent of
a socialist democracy? And, on all past experience, would
it not rather be surprising that its members should refuse
to abdicate when they believe that they have the prospect
of victory? No such class in the past, at least, has volun-
tarily parted with the right to dominate the state power.
We need not be moved by the argument that there is
no evidence of a will to fight. On the eve of the civil war
in Great Britain three hundred years ago careful ob-
servers were insistent that the very idea of sedition was
dead. We need not, either, be moved by the insistence
that, in either country, compromise is in the genius of
the people. National behavior is adapted to the stress of
circumstance. The "mystic, dreamy Slav" whom we were
taught to admire from 1914 to 1917 has become a grim
realist, hard, practical, increasingly efficient, utterly un-
like the stereotype to which past experience had accus-
tomed us. No virtues seemed more deeply rooted in the
NOVEMBER 1937
German people than respect for science and learning; they
have not only vanished overnight; they have been replaced
by a public veneration for the mystic ravings of a group
of fanatics comparable only with the adulation heaped by
the Roman mob upon the compositions of Nero. We need
not deny the force of any national tradition ; we need only
remember that national traditions are shaped by the ex-
perience men encounter. Where they are formed by fear
and hate, the power of reason to determine their substance
is necessarily limited in its application.
LET US ADMIT THAT THE TRADITION OF DEMOCRATIC SELF-
government in Great Britain and America is more firmly
rooted than elsewhere. On historic experience that does
not mean that the tradition cannot be transformed; it
means only (let us hope) that its defenders will give a
good account of themselves if they are challenged. But
that implies, once more, either the possibility of conflict,
or that the possessors of economic power will shrink from
its implications. Involved in the first alternative is the
certainty that liberty, in any meaning sense, can hardly
hope to survive. Germany and Italy, Austria and Spain,
remain to prove that grim hypothesis. And the one thing
that may persuade the capitalist class to self-sacrifice is
the persuasion that a challenge to democracy is a gamble
too great for it to embark upon. The condition of that
persuasion is, so far, absent. It means such a unity of the
Left forces in the state as will leave the chances of a
capitalist victory at the best wholly uncertain and, at the
worst, minimal. I do not argue for a moment that such
unity is unattainable. In the face of grave danger to
democracy that unity was achieved in France, and, so far
at least, it has proved adequate to the preservation of the
traditional forms. We must not, indeed, build too much
upon the French example. What it has secured is a
breathing space for the Left, rather than a transformation
of class relations. It has preserved the contours of French
capitalist democracy; but that has been upon the condi-
tion that there was no major adventure in socialism at-
tempted under the partnership. No doubt the gain therein
is real. But it means that the forces of French capitalism
have not yet been put to the supreme test; and it is notable
that M. Blum accepted defeat at the hands of the Senate —
a rare thing under the constitutional conventions of the
Third Republic — rather than risk the consequences of free-
ing the popular will in France from sabotage by the effete
Upper Chamber. The French Popular Front has secured
a breathing space for capitalist democracy and the im-
portance of that achievement is beyond question. It has
still, however, to be proved that it has built a road through
which the French people may pass to the socialization of
economic power.
573
I think it probable that the achievement of such unity
in Great Britain might, if it were done quickly enough,
and a major war did not supervene, have the same bene-
ficial results for democracy that it has had in France. It
would capture political power; and it would put the forces
of economic reaction upon the defensive. That would, in
itself, be an immense gain for freedom. For not only
would it exhilarate the forces of progress all over the
world. It would put an end to the war of attrition that
fascism has been waging against international democracy.
It would renovate the league, and revivify the principle
of collective security. Instead of a policy of piecemeal
surrender to the fascist powers, as in Manchuria and
Abyssinia and Spain, it would present them with a chal-
lenge to aggressive action fairly certain to change for the
good the balance of our civilization. The mere fact of its
achievement, moreover, would give new hope to the men
and women in the fascist countries who are now crushed
down by the weight of its coercive terror. We are entitled
to believe that the renovation of the democratic spirit in
Great Britain would be followed by its revival all over
Western Europe.
IF IT is DONE IN TIME; THAT is THE INCALCULABLE ELEMENT
in all these equations. We do not deal with a static world;
we cannot measure our forces in terms of the inevitable
gradualness of geological epochs. A major war, a new
industrial depression like that of 1929, some further fascist
victory on the European continent, might easily destroy
the prospect of unity before men see the urgency of its
consummation. What is disturbing in the British situation
is the complacency among parties of the Left about a
situation that is critical. Most of their members seem to
assume that here, at least, things will amble on in the
old wonted way. They refuse to see the depth of the crisis
in which we have become involved. They mutter that it
cannot happen here with the same easy confidence that
persuaded German socialists before 1933 that Hitler was
merely a passing phenomenon. There is, perhaps, a half-
conscious defeatism, also, in their attitude. For they have
been warned so often by the forces of the Right that mili-
tancy on their part is a strategy of disaster, that they tend
to accept a plan of battle dictated to them by their op-
ponents. The result is to make them at all costs anxious
to avoid a policy those opponents may interpret as a chal-
lenge. They watch, that is to say, the slow deterioration
of their position (in which the status of liberty is neces-
sarily involved) without being able to arrest it. Their
assumption seems to be that respectable behavior on their
part will eventually bring them to power. They do not
seem to understand that such "respectability" merely con-
firms their opponents in their belief of socialist weakness,
that in politics, as in war, the road to victory lies in taking
the offensive. For the policy of "respectability" does not
convince the opponents of socialism that its danger is any
less as a doctrine than they suppose; and it has the un-
happy effect of reducing its supporters either to apathy or
despair. The real comment on the policy of "respect-
ability" is the declining interest in national politics as evi-
denced by the polls in the British by-elections since 1935.
That declining interest is a measure of waning faith in
party politics; and that waning faith is exactly the atmo-
sphere in which the temper of fascism most easily grows.
Party government, as Bagehot said, is the vital principle
of representative government. As soon as an electorate
loses faith in that principle the way lies open to the sup-
pression of democratic government. For such a lack of
faith indicates a belief in the people that a change of gov-
ernment cannot effectively alter their situation. Such a
mood of apathy is a constant temptation to listen to the
"strong man" who promises, granted the abolition of par-
ties, the immense improvements that Hitler and Mussolini
promised before their advent to power. He explains that
the old system is outworn. He insists that it is the prin-
ciple of opposition which stands in the way of thorough
going and wholesome changes. He makes promises to
everybody of everything if only he is allowed to cleanse
the Augean stables. He exploits every felt grievance to
make his appeal attractive. It is the insecurity of employ-
ment, the bondage of interest, the foreigner, the big stores,
the Bolshevist agitator, or what you will. Since most men
are private men, who feel only in a dull way that, some-
how, something is wrong, they begin to give heed to the
promised dispensation. A time comes when they are per-
suaded that things can hardly be worse, and may well be
better under the new regime. They run, as Rousseau said,
to meet their chains. It is not until it is too late that they
recognize that the promised freedom is, in fact, but a more
evil variant of the old bondage.
Anyone who examines the history of the rise of Musso-
lini or Hitler to power can confirm this diagnosis for him-
self. He will find a constant pattern underlying the whole
process. The dictator works on the sense of unease, of
anger, of apathy and despair. He promises a new heaven
and a new earth. He attributes their absence to a few
easily identified enemies, whether men or principles. He
so defines his remedies that the average man recognizes in
them at least the language of ideas he has been taught to
admire. He hears of the demagogue's charity; he wit-
nesses his dramatic parades; he reads of his flaming de-
nunciation of evils he himself abhors. The farmer fastens
upon the promise that he will be relieved from tithe. The
small shopkeeper is entranced by the vision of a world in
which there are no chain stores and no cooperative socie-
ties. The workingman learns that he may be released
from the haunting fear of unemployment by the prohibi-
tion of foreign imports. All this, to the accompaniment of
wholesale invective, passionate drama, well-organized
martyrdoms, high pressure emotionalism, gives the idea
of a great activist movement, persecuted by the "old gang,"
representative of youthful vigor which seeks, despite the
power of vested interest, to break through the ancient
ways. Successfully rehearsed, it begins not unplausibly to
sound to many like a catharsis for the discontents they
vaguely feel without being able to articulate them into
terms of rational argument. An affirmation made with
sufficient constancy begins to seem true. Invective suffi-
ciently repeated tends to persuade men that perhaps there
is something dubious about the "old gang." Youth is at-
tracted to the movement because it appears to offer a
theater of action, and because its very novelty seems like
emancipation from that older generation whose authority
it resents. For men who are bewildered and unhappy
fascism offers the anodyne that religious revivalism has so
often brought. It is the supreme release from the gnawing
canker of thought.
THEY DO NOT SEE — THEY ARE CAREFULLY PREVENTED FROM
seeing — behind the faqade of the demagogue's appeal to
the little man, carefully organized threads which bind him
574
SURVEY GRAPHIC
to the interests of reaction. The shows have to be paid for;
but the balance sheets are not published, and the contracts
are sealed in private. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini allowed
the world to penetrate that twilight in which their real
purposes were determined in concert with the vested inter-
ests of reaction. These pay the piper; and they refrain from
calling the tune only until his misguided adherents have
placed the demagogue in power. Only then is the mask of
fascism lifted. The
free trade unions
disappear; the so-
cialist parties are
suppressed; the co-
operative movement
is "taken over."
There is no longer a
free press. Strikes be-
come illegal. Critics
have a way of disap-
pearing into jail or
concentration
camps. The "revo-
lution," it is an-
nounced, is accom-
plished. But the
same interests re-
main in authority
after the "revolu-
tion" as before it.
All that has effect-
ively changed is the
ability of the ordinary citizen to oppose his will to the
orders of the government. He has ceased to be a free
citizen. Whatever his thoughts, his only right, as the new
dispensation becomes effective, is the right to applaud the
men who have forged his chains.
THIS IS THE DANGER THAT CONFRONTS US IN OUR TIME; AND
there is no answer to that danger save the courage to
organize against it while there is time. I say the courage
to organize against it; for in our day, not less than in that
of Pericles, the secret of true liberty remains courage. We
acquiesce in the loss of freedom every time we are silent
in the face of injustice. The more we insist that it is not
our concern, the easier we make the demagogue's task.
For it is of the essence of liberty that it should depend for
its maintenance upon the respect it can arouse in humble
men. Their power to maintain it lies in their willingness
to organize themselves for its maintenance. It has no foe
more subtle than their sense of apathy or helplessness. And
men who have known what liberty means will not sur-
render it if they are awakened to its danger. Their weak-
ness lies in their inability to penetrate beneath the mask
its enemies assume. They have been habituated to obedi-
ence. They have not been schooled to read the lesson of
the historic movement. The economic interdependence of
the world, the necessary relation of boom and slump in
capitalism, that system's requirement of an army of un-
employed, the degree to which methods of production
must shape the forms of the political system to the re-
quirements of their own imminent logic, these things are
not the staple intellectual diet upon which they are fed.
Most of them are born to live and die without a glimpse
of any of the forces by which the world is moved. They
have to judge its governance only as they faintly descry
From L'Htunoniti, Paris
The Fascist Axes
the larger context in which its own vast secular changes
impinge on their petty lives. Before them is the daily
need to live, the exacting toil of work, the need for play
and sleep and a brief hour of love. They are schooled to
obedience by the rigorous discipline of their lives. It is no
easy task to give them the sense of grave dangers to be
arrested, of big ideas which need an army to fight for
them. Only great leadership can strike their imagination
into that a c ti o n
which responds to
the call.
The first necessi-
ty of that leadership
is recognition of the
situation we occupy.
It is not enough to
know that we live
in dangerous days;
it is above all ur-
gent to recognize
the nature of the
danger. It is not
enough, either, to
insist upon the in-
security of the time;
it is fundamental to
recognize the nature
of the insecurity.
Our danger and our
insecurity are no
different in their ul-
timate causation than the danger and the insecurity which
brought about the collapse of Greek and Roman civiliza-
tions. We have come to the end of an economic system
exactly as they came to an end. Our relations of produc-
tion contradict the forces of production exactly then as
now. What distinguishes our position from that of our
predecessors is the greater knowledge we have of the dy-
namics of social change. We are able, as the Greeks and
Romans were not able, to become the masters of our social
destiny if we so will. The means of a new and fuller
security lies at our disposal, and, with its advent, the
means, also of a new and fuller liberty. For what has char-
acterized our liberty in the past, in almost every significant
field, has been its limitation by the implications of the eco-
nomic system under which we have lived. Liberty for us
has been always hindered and hampered by its necessary
subordination to the claims of property. It has been en-
joyed only as its exercise has not threatened the owners of
economic power. Now that the consequences of their own-
ership risk once more the foundations of civilization, they
seek to abandon liberty that they may preserve their privi-
leges. If we permit its abandonment, at some stage conflict
is certain. For the mind of man cannot, in the long run,
be habituated to tyranny; at some stage the slave revolts
against his master.
They seek to abandon liberty; and they will succeed un-
less we organize ourselves to prevent their success. I do
not for one moment underestimate the risks or the diffi-
culties of the task. To transform the ultimate economic
foundations of society is the most hazardous enterprise to
which men can lay their hands. It touches habits more pro-
found, prejudices and convictions more sincerely held,
than any other form of social change. It can never be ef-
fected without the pain and disappointment that invari-
NOVEMBER 1937
575
ably accompany the failure of established expectations. Per-
haps, even, it cannot be accomplished save at the price of
violent conflict between man and man.
The alternatives before us are stark. Either we must
acquiesce in the maintenance of an economic system
which, day by day, brings war and fascism nearer as its
inevitable price, or we must seek to change the system.
There is no remedy now for our ills save, with all its
intricate complexities, the planned production of our eco-
nomic resources for community consumption. This means
— let us face the fact — that the private ownership of the
means of production must go. With them must go, too,
that class structure of society with all the privileges it has
annexed to the system of ownership it has maintained. It
is possible, though I do not think it likely, that if we or-
ganize for this end in time, we may persuade men, be-
cause the initiative which comes with the possession of
state power is in our hands, peacefully to acquiesce in this
transformation. Certainly if we are successful in that per-
suasion we shall have accomplished the most beneficent
revolution in the history of the human race. It is, on the
other hand, possible that the privileged will fight rather
than give way. In that event, because we are organized,
there is at least the chance of victory. Acquiescence, in
any case, is only a postponement of conflict. To organize
the unity of those who seek the new social order is, at the
worst, to give them a fighting chance.
And it cannot be too strongly emphasized that those
who seek the new social order are in this hour soldiers in
the army of freedom. They alone can end the exploitation
of man by man. They only have it in their power to es-
tablish a society in which there is recognized to be either
an equal claim upon the common good or differences in
return to claims rationally justified by their ability to aug-
ment the sum of the common good. Our present economic
system cannot display these characteristics. "The reward,"
said John Stuart Mill of its working, "instead of being
proportioned to the labor and abstinence of the individual
is almost in an inverse ratio to it; those who receive the
least labor and abstain the most." A society like ours can
be secure only as its foundations permit of its continuous
expansion; it is now decisively clear that the age of its
expansion is ended. With its contraction, it is unable to
satisfy progressively the wants of men, and it is therefore
deemed, by all excluded from its privileges, an irrational
and unjust society. As such, it is incapable of the security
which is the basic condition of freedom.
NOT ONLY so. THE GREATER THE EFFORT TO RESTORE ITS SECU-
rity upon its present foundations, the greater the attack
upon freedom that is involved. For the way to that resto-
ration lies through the suppression of all the instrumentali-
ties of freedom. Its method is depicted for us by the expe-
rience of die fascist countries; they achieve security by
transforming their societies into prisons. Science and art
are no longer free creations there of the human mind;
they are the instruments of the authority that coerces men
into obedience. To seek security, they are compelled to
deny their own cultural heritage; and a new and more
terrible inquisition presides over die thoughts of men.
Yet, even so, they do not achieve security even at the terri-
ble price they seek to pay for it. For not only, in the very
shadow of the prison-house itself, do brave men and
women arise to challenge its authority — Matteotti and
Roselli in Italy, Dimitrov and Thalmann in Germany; it
cannot meet the challenge all social systems have to meet
— the need so to develop its resources that it can progres-
sively advance the standard of its people's life. In the long
run, though indeed the run may be very long, war and
circuses are no substitute for bread and the free life of the
human spirit. Men, in the end, come to recognize this;
and, when the recognition dawns, they renew their cour-
age to shake off their chains.
Fascism cannot permit the free expression of grievance;
for increasingly this would be to admit the hollowness of
its claims. It dare not permit freedom of association; were
it to do so, its enemies would organize at once for battle
against it. There is no way open to a fascist dictatorship
to transform the processes of coercion into processes of
consent. That ability was at the disposal of capitalism in
its epoch of expansion. With the close of that epoch, it has
either to fight democracy, or to submit to transformation
by it. Fascism has chosen the first alternative; and over a
wide area it has registered victories. But there is nothing
of finality in their nature. There have been dark ages be-
fore in history; they mark the end of an economic system
and the birth of a new. The fascist enjoys today his uneasy
hour of triumph. It is yet possible to discern in his vain-
glory the conscious fear of an impending doom.
I DO NOT MEAN BY THE PREDICTION THAT FASCISM CONTAINS
the seeds of its own decay any assurance that its downfall
will come quickly or that the victory will be an easy one.
No one who looks at our world need doubt the power of
reaction to fight vigorously for its privileges, its power,
also, as it declines, to destroy no inconsiderable part of
civilization. We shall have to pay heavily for that destruc-
tion; do not let us forget that it took Germany until the
nineteenth century to recover from the Thirty Years' War.
We may have to pay so heavily that, as in the Soviet
Union, men may have to pass through an iron age before
the reign of freedom is reestablished.
Our business is to be prepared for the eventualities, so
to organize ourselves that those to whom freedom mat-
ters are powerful enough to abridge as much as may be the
period of difficulty. Amid all their perplexities, they have
ground for hope. For they are entitled to the knowledge
that the impulses of men to affirm their own essence rise
superior to every effort at suppression; even the slave will
dream that one day he may be free. They have the right
to emphasize that, if liberty is stricken, the conquests of
science over nature are inhibited at every turn. They can
be confident, also, that man, however ignorant, will not
finally endure the paradox of poverty and unemployment
in a society that might be rich and secure. They will need,
indeed, great qualities if they are to win, courage above
all, and the power to endure with resignation the bitter-
ness of temporary defeat. They will require the self-control
that gives rein to the heart only as it is guided by the mind.
They will need philosophy as well as faith, daring not
less than patience.
It is the glory of freedom that it brings these qualities
to those who serve it with fidelity. Before now, it has
transformed a prison into an altar. Before now, it has
brought the light of unconquerable hope into places
that seemed utterly dark. We who fight the battle of free-
dom can maintain at least one certainty. We know that
alone among the ends men seek it has the genius, where
the need of its service is imperative, to give the quality of
heroes to the common men who answer its call.
576
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Wanted: Leaders for Labor
by FREDERICK BRYCE
From the directors' table, a message to labor — and the expressed hope that
adequate leaders, from labor's own ranks, will lead it "toward fairer working
conditions, a reasonable share in the profits of industry and a new measure of
security for wage earners and their dependents."
WHERE ARE THE MEN WHO, IN THIS CRITICAL TIME, CAN LEAD
labor, especially the unskilled group; who can obtain for
them, throughout the land, fairer working conditions and
a reasonable share in the profits of industry, and aid them
in obtaining a measure of security in their jobs? Where
and how can they be found?
Before commencing this discussion an identifying note
may be appropriate. For more than thirty years I have
practiced law. I happened by merest accident to get my
start with a firm whose principal clients were large corpo-
rations. The firm's business consisted in part of defending
against claims made by employes injured in the line of
duty. I welcomed the advent of workmen's compensation
laws. For the past eight years I have served as director on
the board of an industrial corporation having a labor pay-
roll of over sixteen million dollars a year. Never before
have I written for publication. This present article was
inspired by a real interest in the labor problem and in the
welfare of wage earners.
A while ago, I happened to be present at a gathering of
some seventy-five business men. During the course of the
after-dinner speaking, the labor situation was discussed
and one guest, a man with a distinguished record, both
civil and military, announced with emphasis that the best
way to deal with labor was to use the iron hand. His
attitude seemed to me unreasonable and stupid.
Shortly thereafter, having an extra hour of enforced
leisure due to a misunderstanding on the part of a train
conductor, I thought over the labor situation in this coun-
try as I have seen it during a span of thirty years and
I decided to put my views on paper.
Those like myself, whose lot has been from the outset
cast on the capitalist side of the line, cannot furnish labor
leadership. Men of my profession, for the most part, earn
their bread and butter in the service of capital. Lawyers
who have achieved any measure of success, and especially
if that success has come in the corporate field, are suspect
if they tender advice to labor. Indeed, there are those who
regard prominence (save when it comes by political prefer-
ment), or the possession of property, as prima jade evi-
dence that the subject holds undesirable economic views
and is probably selfishly motivated in anything he seeks
to accomplish. If we who have labored in varying capaci-
ties on the capitalist side of the line are looked at askance
even by those holding high public office, how can it be
expected that any aggregation of wage earners would re-
gard us without suspicion?
Where will labor seek its leaders? Labor is not apt to
seek a leader among the highbrows. It is generally rec-
ognized by wise politicians that, while the people of a
NOVEMBER 1937
great metropolitan district may occasionally elect a mayor
from the "upper" classes, while they may choose once a
man of culture and education, they do not re-elect him.
By and large the masses in the industrial and political
centers prefer a man whom they can look at eye to eye.
They will not often choose one to whom they must look
up.
LABOR WILL NOT TAKE ITS LEADERS FROM THE CAPITALIST
ranks. The wage earners will not single out as their guide
a man learned beyond their imagination ; they want one of
their own. This is natural and to be expected, and is most
desirable. Lincoln was a profound success as a leader of
men. The reason for his success lay not in the fact that
he was of humble origin and forced to struggle for an
education and a livelihood, but it was grounded in the
recognition by the great body of his fellow citizens that
he was one of them. He could walk with them and talk
their language; no one had to look up to meet the eyes
of Lincoln.
Labor must bring forth from its own group the men
who are going to urge its rights and counsel it during the
coming years. Much depends upon the wisdom of its
choice.
Labor should be wary in acknowledging any standard
bearers. It should not accept without close scrutiny the
first thundering elocutionist who proclaims his intentions
to go forth to battle in its behalf. Labor had better ex-
amine the credentials of any seeker after the job. It had
better chose some man of integrity, intelligence and cour-
age, who knows labor's problems and who has had some
years of experience. He need not be, indeed it were per-
haps better that he were not, one with strong intellectual
leanings. There are plenty of closet philosophers about
who know nothing of pick, sickle, hammer or machine,
save what they read in books. These will not serve the
purpose. Nor should leadership be unhesitatingly accepted
from the scions of the silver spoon, from gentlemen in
high office who never by toil earned a dollar; nor from
a man who never sailed an industrial ship through the
rapids of competition or, "broadside on" in the troughs of
depression, headed her up and brought her safely to port.
Leadership must come from before the mast.
Those who deplore the present leadership of the CIO,
who look upon its present chieftain as a self-seeking, irre-
sponsible individual with a flair for elocution, forget that
the plight of unskilled labor in America was a golden
opportunity for any man with a gift for leadership.
Gompers frequently asserted that he spoke for the skilled
artisans, the aristocrats of labor. Whether he did or not,
577
^
^
•* >
McCutcbeon for the Chicago Tribune. 1937
An X-ray of the labor situation
the fact remains that unskilled labor in America has been
largely unrepresented throughout the years. Today with
progressive mechanization it has greatly increased in num-
bers. It constitutes a terrific force, a power for good or
evil which is not susceptible of exact measurement, and
its leadership is one of the great challenges offered to
America today. Lewis' friends insist that he is sincere and
single-minded in his efforts to improve working condi-
tions in this country and that his methods are those which
he deems essential to the attainment of that objective.
To which it may be replied that sit-down strikes and
broken agreements made under his banner are a poor
foundation for industrial peace. And one would like to
feel sure that the welfare of labor is his motivating cause.
If the present chieftain is successful he can number his
constituents by millions, and may himself become a potent
force in selecting one of the next candidates for the presi-
dential office. It would be a pity if labor, unskilled labor,
should become merely a human bridge across which one
ambitious person should walk to political power.
There may be those who feel that labor just now is
"riding high, wide and handsome" and needs no protag-
onist. Consideration of the facts will convince them that
never was labor in greater need of wise leadership.
Labor needs leadership because one cannot treat with
a multitude. It is difficult to challenge the ethical sound-
ness of collective bargaining. "Liberty of contract" has
been used as a shibboleth to befuddle courts into holdings
that destroyed beneficent legislation. Courts have been
persuaded to strike down statute after statute on the pitiful
excuse that each individual wage earner must retain the
priceless right to bargain with his back to the wall, to
barter his health and strength and the welfare of his
family, for whatever number or silver pieces the employer
is prepared to give. No one questions the right and neces-
sity of organization on the part of capital, and yet, until
quite lately, men in the capitalist group have shuddered at
the phrase, collective bargaining, as though it were the
cousin of communism and therefore anathema. Ten
thousand men can scarcely be expected to assemble and,
in chorus, urge grievance and demand redress; they must
speak through representatives. It is vital that they be
allowed to speak and that their speech be heard.
WHERE ARE THE LEADERS? GOMPERS, DESPITE HIS FAULTS, DID
a fairly successful job, but for reasons which doubtless
seemed good to him he undertook little, if any, work
among the unskilled. His organization, despite many
shortcomings, may be said fairly to represent skilled labor,
but if that organization is to speak for labor hereafter, it
must broaden its base. It cannot afford to limit itself to
the so-called aristocrats, but must issue its charter to bodies
of wage earners wherever they may be found. Its failure
so to do will be an open invitation to the seekers after
power, and the great body of unskilled labor in America
may be unworthily represented.
From the standpoint of the wage earner it is the feeling
of security which is most needed and most sought after.
It would be helpful if the average industrialist, before at-
tempting to appraise social security legislation, would stop
to consider what it means to him when, confronted by the
serious illness of a wife or child, he knows that he has
but to step to the telephone to summon to his aid all that
science can offer; and that he can back his prayers by the
hands of the most skilled surgeon and by all the remedies
that research has revealed. Let him then contrast his case
with that of the average wage earner who, in the same
human situation, too often finds himself practically help-
less. He can perhaps call on a kindly neighbor, or a
second-rate doctor, but rarely can he secure for his loved
ones adequate protection and rarely is there available for
him the skill and the remedies at the service of his more
fortunate brother. This is not always true; there are loca-
tions where clinics and public health agencies will serve
the humblest but, generally speaking, serious illness is a
black beast when it visits the worker's home, and a lay-off
at such at time is nothing short of a tragedy.
No one has ever put the case for social security more
poignantly, nor more simply, than the old Clyde docker
who said: "Heaven? 'Tis a place where ye can wake in
the mornin' and know the job is safe for the day."
IF THE HAVES KNEW WHAT INSECURITY MEANS TO THE HAVE
Nots, the former would be the first to urge upon em-
ployers everywhere the necessity of assuring steady em-
ployment throughout the year. Continuous employment
is not yet possible in all industries, but employers with
vision have contrived to extend into a full calendar year
enterprises which in their inception were highly seasonal.
A good example is that of the manufacturers of a well
known paper tag. They began with but a few months'
work in each year. Gradually they spread into side lines
with the result that their employes can now work continu-
ously throughout the twelve months. A Wisconsin shoe
company faced with seasonal rushes, extra employes, slack
periods and heavy lay-offs, by careful planning stabilized
production and today guarantees to its employes each year
fifty-two weeks of work.
578
SURVEY GRAPHIC
It would be comforting to feel that the great majority
of employers are wise men with an understanding of their
responsibilities toward labor. We have traveled a long way
from the time when the high point of desirability in
locating a new enterprise was indicated by the sure-fire
advertisement, "Water plentiful and labor docile." The
fact is, however, that hundreds of thousands of men and
women today in America are working under deplorable
conditions which bring unnecessary fatigue, with little, if
any, alleviation by way of vacations or rest periods, with
no participation in profits beyond the wages in their pay
envelopes, and with wages ofttimes insufficient for the
decent support and upbuilding of a family.
One of the most humane employers I ever knew took
pride in the fact that he could call most of the employes
in his large plant by their first names, and in looking
after them in times of sickness and stress. He abominated
labor unions and was stubbornly convinced that if all
employers treated their men as he did there would be no
labor problem. It could not be made clear to him that men
will not willingly barter independence for benevolence.
THE HISTORY OF THE PAST THREE HUNDRED YEARS REVEALS TOO
often a forgetfulness on the part of capital of that splendid
motto of the privileged, noblesse oblige, and a ruthless
exploitation of labor not only in merry old England but
in Puritan New England as well. The pendulum swung
far to the side of capital. One illustration taken from the
period of the Gay Nineties may serve to reveal the atti-
tude, even at that recent date, of one of the Tory indus-
trialists of that day.
In a western town was located a plant for manufac-
turing powder. Fire broke out near a tank into which
inflammable oils were flowing. Flames were licking at
tiny oil streamlets on the ground. A workman, of his own
volition, and at peril of his life, crawled on hands and
knees under the tank and shut off the flow. He suffered
crippling burns and made claim on his company for com-
pensation. This they refused and fought the case through
the supreme court of his state, contending that he had
been under no obligation to save company property and
had voluntarily assumed a needless hazard.
Is it strange that, as labor gains ascendancy, the pendu-
lum should pass the center of fair dealing and swing
against capital? The sins of industrial fathers are visited
upon the children.
Industrial conditions throughout this country have im-
proved however, thanks in part to the efforts of labor
unions and in part to a better realization by the employers
of their duty to the employed. Notwithstanding occa-
sional disheartening instances of labor racketeering on the
one side and of tyranny on the other there is today no
general feeling of hostility on the part of management
toward labor or on the part of labor toward management.
No solution of the labor problem will ever be reached
through force, and if anyone is unwise enough to advo-
cate force as a proper weapon in the present crisis he is
an enemy to his class and an unsafe counsellor. But the
problem can and must be worked out. Peace and not war
will yield to both the better harvest. This the wise leaders
will know and, under their guidance, the waste and irre-
parable damage of strikes will be avoided. The truth is
that only by cooperation can the desired end be reached.
A pair of shears is a most useful instrument but no one
has yet made a helpful device out of one half of a pair —
the product of such an attempt would be a set of daggers.
Labor needs the executive ability of management; man-
agement is paralyzed without the willing hands of labor.
Trite, most trite; but true: United they stand; divided
they fall.
LABOR, THEN, MUST FIND ITS OWN LEADERSHIP AND WITHIN
its own ranks. If present leadership is unsatisfactory there
must be some democratic method by which better leader-
ship can be substituted. It should not be difficult, as
workers organize in plant after plant, to select spokesmen
from their own group. Such accredited representatives
meeting with others and all chosen through democratic
methods, should have no difficulty in weighing the merits
of the men now holding office in the high councils of
labor and of continuing them in office or substituting bet-
ter leadership if that be necessary.
Once the industrialists know that the men who assume
to speak for labor have come from labor's ranks, have
been chosen by the wage earners themselves, and have not
been mere self-seekers, they or at least the intelligent
majority of them, will give fair hearing.
It is not essential that there be one recognized labor
leader in America. There is no single leader of the indus-
trialists. Labor may be as well served if, in the various
sections of the country or in various plant groups, or in
each industry, they speak through the men they them-
selves have freely chosen. And labor here might take a
leaf from the book of capital: A promoter may interest
investors, but rarely indeed will they put him in charge
of the enterprise. Similarly there is no reason why a clever
"organizer," smooth of speech though he may be, should
be awarded the office of leader or be retained in that posi-
tion; and no reason why a leader once chosen should
retain his place when by unwise action or inaction he has
demonstrated his incompetence.
GENUINE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING — LIKE HONESTY OR TEMPER-
ance — cannot be brought into being by legislative decree.
If employers and workers are to substitute civilized meth-
ods for friction and violence, they must sit down at the
conference table for frank discussion in a spirit of toler-
ance and fair dealing. Increasingly, thoughtful business
men are coming to see the importance of going relations
between the employer and his employes. With manage-
ment in this country well organized, they begin to view
labor organization as a reasonable parallel. But with or
without the approval of employers, a new labor leadership
today is undertaking to spread unionization. In the long
view, this effort can only succeed if at the same time
labor develops and recognizes adequate leadership in its
own ranks — men equipped, as I said at the beginning, to
lead it toward fairer working conditions, a reasonable
share in the profits of industry and a new measure of
security for wage earners and their dependents.
In our next issue: How unions and management have kept the peace on the Union
Pacific Railroad and the profits, social and tangible, they have to show for it
NOVEMBER 1937
579
Doris Uimann Photograph
Pottery from the Georgia Highlands
SOUTHERN HANDICRAF'
A book to delight those fast-growing numbers o
pride in our living folk art is Handicrafts of the S
lands by Allen H. Eaton of the Russell Sage Foi
York, just published by the Foundation at $3. Ri,
graphs, such as these here reproduced, of people t
ful things they have made for generations and ar
folksy with references to these unknown craftstni
which might so easily have been prosaic, has been
so much imagination by author and publisher tha
much to spread interest in these handicrafts and
problems of the Highland people. Such work is ti
of earning money for thousands of native America
old. It is their natural means of creative expressior
shows, the crafts are enjoying a genuine revival in
and have a place in the field of adult education a
Basket of native Georgia sedge grass an
Corn husk figures made in Tennessee
Bear of native holly wood from Virginia
o take
High-
i, New
photo-
beauti-
iaking,
study,
d with
uld do
es and
means
ig and
e book
ctions,
nation.
Creche carved at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina
How basket with spiral handles from Kentucky
Doris Ulmann Phototrrapb
Woven coverlet from North Carolina
Repair vs. Relief in West Virginia
by J. D. RATCLIFF
OF THE SEVERAL MILLION PEOPLE ON
relief, many have never worked and
never will; but how many are on relief
merely because they are sick? In 1935
two West Virginians asked themselves
that question, set out to find the answer,
and as a result set in motion one of the
nation's most glowing rehabilitation
projects.
On the relief rolls they found in-
digent sufferers from a long list of
ailments which can make a man unem-
ployable— but which can be cured. Enig-
matically enough, government and char-
itable funds were available for people
who were hopelessly sick, but none for
these people who were curable. The state
preserved the latter in economic alcohol
by paying them relief, but did nothing to
make them fit again for productive labor.
The two men who made this discovery
were Joe W. Savage, secretary of the
West Virginia State Medical Associa-
tion, and Charles W. Ritter of the State
Workmen's Compensation Department.
They decided the community ought to
do something for these scores of "un-
employables" who had correctible ail-
ments, but were without funds to pay
for medical attention. Shrewdly, they
decided to omit completely the humani-
tarian angle, and see what kind of a
dollars-and-cents case they could make
for the venture.
Relief, including food and commodity
disbursements, cost $230 per family per
year. Rehabilitating operations would
cost nowhere like that much if doctors
would agree to pare fees. Savage and
Ritter sounded them out, and almost
to a man the surgeons agreed to work
for half their usual fees.
Estimates indicated that hospitalization
and medical fees for typical cases would
average $120. On paper the idea looked
exciting. If for $120 you could in many
cases rehabilitate a man who was costing
$230 a year to maintain, and if you
could then put him back into gainful
employment, you had a profit. Relief of-
ficials were skeptical, but agreed to ap-
propriate $1000 to give the plan a trial.
Ten unemployed men, ranging in age
from twenty-three to sixty, were picked
for the experiment. All but one were
married. They had anywhere from one
to seven dependents. One had a tumor
on his elbow, another suffered from in-
fected teeth and tonsils. There were
several hernias, one bad case of bone
infection.
Handpicked doctors were assigned to
put these invalids back in working order.
582
Once they were out of the hospital and
had passed through a safe period of re-
cuperation, nine promptly found jobs!
The cost of their operations was regained
by the state in the relief money these
men would have drawn in five months.
The experiment looked convincing, so
$10,000 more was appropriated. County
teams of doctors were assembled, and
18,000 unemployed reported for medical
examinations in church basements, lodge
halls, and schoolrooms. Out of this group
it was found that 7800 needed some type
of medical aid. Of these, 5000 — A ma-
jority of whom had hernias — were in
pressing need of attention.
The State Medical Association now set
up a three-man advisory committee to
oversee the work and act as liaison of-
ficers between the relief organization and
the medical profession.
Sick men hobbled, or were carried into
hospitals — and walked out cured. There
was J. W. J. for instance, a pipefitter who
was regularly employed until afflicted
with a double hernia. He could no longer
work; he could not afford a $300 opera-
tion; he was forced on relief, an invalid
with a repairable malady. Then came the
plan of Savage and Ritter. He spent fif-
teen days in the hospital, a few more re-
cuperating. Then he found a job; today
he is making $1.12 an hour.
OR TAKE THE CASE OF C. E. L., A MAN
who supported his two motherless chil-
dren by working; in a hosiery mill. A
urinary tract infection made an invalid
of him until he was presented with an
operation which normally would have
cost a prohibitive $250. Now he has a
steady job again.
Or B. C. J., who had a bone infection
which prevented him from supporting
his wife and seven children. Only the
lack of $118 — a pathetically small sum —
kept him an invalid. Now that this has
been supplied, he is steadily employed
as an automobile mechanic.
Six months after the experiment was
completed, 99 of the 120 beneficiaries in
a second test group — 82 percent — were
earning their own way again. The aver-
age cost? Only $127. After six months
the state began collecting roughly 200
percent dividends per annum on its in-
vestment in these people by getting them
off relief rolls.
Convinced this time, relief authorities
set up the Physical Rehabilitation De-
partment, and appropriated $15,000 per
month for medical attention. This be-
came available last January. By April,
results were so apparent that the appro-
priation was raised to $50,000 a month.
The department is being run so effi-
ciently that a bare 4.6 percent of avail-
able funds goes into administrative costs.
Whenever a family doctor is qualified,
he is assigned to the job. The doctors
are selected by the most rigid standards,
and these relief cases get the very cream
of the medical profession.
A deep-seated physical ailment isn't
like hunger, which may be banished
with food, or like despair which may be
routed by diversion. It is always present,
day and night, month in and month out.
Hence, when restored to health, recipi-
ents of this bounty are almost pathetically
grateful. "I didn't know people could be
so good," says one. Another proclaims:
"I wouldn't like my relatives back in
New Jersey to know I've been on relief.
But if I can do anything to help this
work I don't care if they put my name
in electric lights."
IN FIVE MONTHS 314 PEOPLE WITH PER-
manently correctible physical ailments
got medical aid. Of these, 41.5 percent
are back in gainful employment. This
isn't up to the record of the test cases,
but keep in mind that it includes people
who got surgical attention up to the
day the report was made — people who
obviously hadn't yet had time to re-
cuperate and find work. It also includes
several women who returned home to
give their children and their household
duties more and better attention. This
does not show on statistics of "gainful
employment," but it is in accord with
the broad principle of restoring human
beings to usefulness.
Assume that 60 percent of all people
who benefit from this new work will go
from relief rolls into private industry.
Assuming that the state spends $600,000
a year, it can rehabilitate about 5000
men; if 60 percent, or 3000, go back to
work, the state saves relief costs of $690,-
000 a year. So, using conservative figures,
the experiment more than pays for itself
in one year. The inventors of the plan
hope that the new Physical Rehabilita-
tion Department is permanently estab-
lished and that no whim of false econ-
omy will decide a future legislature to
cut away appropriations.
Inquiries have come in from other
states — New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, In-
diana— so possibly the plan will spread.
As a business proposition it's hard to
beat; as a humanitarian venture it has
yet to be equaled.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
These members of the Honolulu police force are college graduates. The policewoman has had social service experience as well
An Angry City That Did More Than Talk
by LOUISE STEVENS
Five years after the sensational Massie affair in Hawaii, Honolulu
has a new story to lay before the world: how a determined community
can put its house in order without outside help.
IN THE SPRING OF 1932, THE PEOPLE OF HONOLULU WERE
angry. With daily increasing vehemence, their wrath
vented itself upon the federal administration, the Navy,
and the mainland newspapers. The reason for this was
that these three institutions were loudly telling the world
that the people of the Hawaiian Islands were incapable
of self-government.
Seth W. Richardson, fourth attorney general of the
United States, had come to Honolulu under orders from
the federal government to make an investigation of law
enforcement in the territory. The result of his visit was a
published report wherein he stated that the Honolulu
police department was "impotent, undisciplined, neglect-
ful, and unintelligent, with its chief concern political ac-
tivity." He concluded with the recommendation that law
enforcement in the Hawaiian Islands be removed from
local control and handled directly from Washington.
Specifically Mr. Richardson suggested that the President
of the United States, with the consent of the Senate, ap-
point a territorial police head and an attorney general,
the latter also to serve as public prosecutor.
This federal investigation and report were made fol-
lowing the assault on Mrs. Thomas H. Massie, wife of a
young naval officer. It will be recalled how the crime
stirred the entire country. [See Hawaii "Needs a Friend,"
by J. Prentice Murphy, Survey Graphic April 1932.] Five
NOVEMBER 1937
men were arrested and tried. The jury, after seventy-two
hours of deliberation, announced that they were hope-
lessly deadlocked. The men were released on bond. A few
days later, the police stopped a speeding car in the out-
skirts of the city. At the wheel was Mrs. Granville For-
tescue, mother of Mrs. Massie. In the back seat were two
men and a dead body. The men were Lieutenant Massie
and E. J. Lord, an enlisted Navy man. The body was that
of Joseph Kahahawai, one of the five whom the jury had
failed to convict.
The murder trial that followed made a record for sen-
sationalism. The defendants were found guilty of "man-
slaughter" and sentenced by the judge to serve ten years
in Oahu prison. This sentence was commuted by the gov-
ernor to one hour, which was served, not in the prison
but in the capitol building in the technical custody of the
sheriff.
The mainland newspapers handled the case as if rape
were unknown on the mainland but an everyday occur-
rence in Hawaii. They did their best to create the impres-
sion that the Islands were in a state of barbarism and
unsafe for all white women.
Since the unfortunate victim of this unfortunate affair
happened to be the wife of a naval officer, the Navy
became vocal on the subject of law and order. Rear Ad-
miral Yates Stirling, Jr., expressed the opinion that the
583
military could do a better job of governing the Hawaiian
Islands than the civil authorities and, since the Islands are
most important for defense of the mainland in time of
war, he suggested that the United States government for-
get about democracy in Hawaii and let the Navy give
the world an example of good government. He further
stated: "The Islands should be governed by men of the
Caucasian race who are not too deeply imbued with the
peculiar spirit of the Islands."
The admiral failed to explain what he meant by "the
peculiar spirit of the Islands," but more than likely he
referred to Hawaii's "peculiar spirit" of racial equality
which makes it possible for Americans, Hawaiians, Chi-
nese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans and Portuguese to work
together in harmony and mutual respect even in such
places as the city hall, the territorial office building, and
the police department.
A flood of bills poured into Congress proposing some
form of dictatorship for the Islands. Representative Fred
Britton of Illinois stated, "No other nation would allow
so important a possession to be so completely dominated
by the native population."
During the naval maneuvers which occurred in the
midst of the uproar, sailors were refused shore leave. This
hurt pocketbooks as well as pride, for when the fleet sails
into the harbor, sailors normally come joyfully ashore
to spend money in restaurants, beer parlors, picture shows,
and curio shops.
Word came from the Navy Department that unless law
and order could be maintained, wives and daughters of
Navy officers would be advised to stay away from Hawaii.
There are more than twelve hundred eager junior police in Honolulu's public schools
1'he excitement did not wear itself out in talk, al-
though there was talk aplenty in Honolulu — at mass
meetings, in church pulpits, over bridge tables. Instead
the citizens came to the sensible conclusion that after all
there might be some truth in Mr. Richardson's report.
Perhaps their police department was not all that it should
be. But they also decided that they were capable of
handling the situation without outside help or inter-
ference.
As PROOF OF THEIR WILLINGNESS AND ABILITY, THE PEOPLE
of Honolulu acted while Congress was still making
speeches. The governor called a special session of the ter-
ritorial legislature and several bills were passed which
effected important changes in the law enforcement ma-
chinery of the territory and of the city and county of
Honolulu. Rape was made a capital crime carrying the
death penalty at the discretion of the court. A jury was
permitted to convict in a rape case on the testimony of
the complaining witness alone.
Two other laws which have had far-reaching results
were passed — the public prosecutor act and the police act.
The former transferred the prosecution of criminal cases
from the office of the city-county attorney to the newly
created office of public prosecutor. This official was to be
appointed by the mayor with the consent of the board of
supervisors (the legislative body for the politically co-
extensive city and county of Honolulu). He could be
removed for cause at any time by the governor and the
attorney general of the territory. This change from an
elected city attorney to a public prosecutor appointed by
an elected mayor follows the recent
governmental trend toward fewer
elected officials. The provision for
removal by a governor appointed by
the President of the United States
was a compromise with Washington.
Mayor George Fred Wright ap-
pointed the present incumbent to the
office of public prosecutor in 1932
from a list of attorneys recom-
mended by the local bar association
and the special committee on law
enforcement of the Honolulu Cham-
ber of Commerce.
The police act of 1932 provided
for a reorganized police department,
which, after five years of operation,
is still developing as conditions
change. Its set-up and methods are
worth looking at.
Three facts were realized by the
men who framed the act of reorgan-
ization: to be efficient, a police de-
partment must be divorced from
politics; to be efficient, policemen
must be trained for their jobs; and
if a city wants a good police depart-
ment, the taxpayers must be willing
to pay for it.
Policy making, as applied to po-
lice service, need not necessarily be
a full time job, nor one that requires
technical training. On the contrary,
any public spirited, representative
584
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The business-like record room in the
Central Police Station, right; and be-
low, Police Chief W. A. Gabrielson,
who thinks that if the police service
is treated as a profession it will soon
attract men of the caliber of those
who now go into law and social work
group of citizens who are willing to devote a few eve-
nings a month can formulate excellent plans for the kind
of police service that their particular city may need.
In Honolulu, that was accomplished by a board of five
unpaid police commissioners appointed in the first instance
by the governor and afterwards by the mayor to serve for
five years. New blood is injected annually in the person
of one appointee to take the place of a member whose
term has expired. There is a permanent, full time paid
secretary.
Probably the key to the entire police situation in
Honolulu was the provision in the police act which com-
pels the board of supervisors to appropriate each year not
less than $500,000 for police service. It is this mandatory
provision which most effectively removes the police de-
partment from politics. There is no annual lobbying for
an adequate appropriation and no possibility of police
funds being shifted to other departments.
The principal job of the police commission is to see
that the taxpayers get full value for this money. They
have found that the way to accomplish this is to hire the
best chief of police that they can find and hold him
responsible. The present chief, W. A. Gabrielson, was
brought from Berkeley, Calif., in the face of considerable
opposition and the demand to select a local man for the
job.
Mr. Gabrielson thinks that police service is a profes-
sion requiring years of conscientious study. If treated as
a profession by the public, it should attract men of the
caliber of those who now go into the closely allied fields
of law and social work. The University of Hawaii has a
well equipped and well staffed department of police
administration. While a college degree is not at present a
prerequisite for getting on the Honolulu police force, it
is worth noting that the five new men taken on this
summer are college graduates with full credits in the
department of police administration.
In order to be eligible to take the competitive examina-
tions from which vacancies are filled, a man must have a
highschool education, must satisfy physical standards
identical with the U. S. Army requirements, and must be
without debts.
All newly hired policemen, college trained or other-
wise, are required to attend two classes a week for their
first two years in the department. Instruction is given by
four men qualified by years of theoretical training and
practical experience in police work. Two of them are
doing part time teaching at the university.
IF THE READER FINDS IT DIFFICULT TO VISUALIZE THE AVERAGE
college graduate applying for a place on the police force
of his home town, it may help his imagination if he
bears in mind that the salary at which a new patrolman
starts work in Honolulu is at present $1900 a year. This
figure has recently been raised to $2400; the new schedule
will go into effect in the near future. If one is inclined
to think a city foolish to pay that much money to a man
who merely stands on a corner directing traffic, let him
remember that the young college graduate who comes on
the force in Honolulu does not expect always to be a
traffic cop or to walk an uninteresting beat. He hopes in
time to get into the Bureau of Crime Prevention where
he will have an opportunity to try out some of the
theories he has developed in college, or perhaps into the
record department where he may delve into statistics.
If the reader wonders what there is for policemen to
study, he may find out by glancing over the following
outline of the course given in the university's department
of police administration.
NOVEMBER 1937
585
ORGANIZATION: Historical development of police systems;
present day police problems; organization and functioning
of the Honolulu police.
LAWS OF ARREST AND COURT PROCEDURE: Methods of making
arrests with or without a warrant. A study of criminal
procedure from indictment to acquittal or conviction in the
territorial or federal courts.
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: A study of the investigative plan,
identifiable traces; finger prints, proper means of procur-
ing, preserving and reporting facts.
ELEMENTARY LAW: Elementary jurisprudence; the substantive
law and the adjective law.
CRIMINAL LAW: Definition, nature, classification and other
elements of criminal law.
EVIDENCE: A study of the kinds of evidence; primary and
secondary, documentary, opinions and conclusions, confes-
sions and admissions, declarations, res gestae, character or
reputation, dying declarations and evidence of former trial
and convictions.
CRIMINOLOGY: The problem of crime and criminals; extent
and cost of crime; the making of the criminal; the ma-
chinery of justice; the history of punishment; modern penal
institutions, with field trips.
CRIME PREVENTION: Principal types of attack on the problem,
such as community organization approach; the educational
attack; the clinical methods; the police crime prevention
activities; and the work of recreational agencies.
If the reader is still further interested in what police-
men study, he will want to compare the above with the
following day to day problems discussed in the classes
held at Central Police Station: report writing; preserva-
tion of evidence; drill and command; riot instructions;
beat problems; life saving; self-defense; criminal law;
criminal investigation; first aid; criminology; public
speaking.
Mr. Gabrielson proudly states that Honolulu is the
only city in the United States that requires its policemen
to study public speaking. He explains: "It is to enable
the men to express themselves clearly and succinctly on
die witness stand. It is to make it possible for me to send
men out to talk to luncheon clubs, parent-teacher organ-
izations, labor unions, even to literary and recreational
clubs. I want my men to help me sell the idea of intelli-
gent and efficient law enforcement to this community. We
are trying to convince folks that the police can't do the
job alone."
Once a year the people of Honolulu are invited to
attend a reception at the Central Police Station. Officers
are on hand to show visitors through the building and
to explain the work of all departments.
THE BUREAU OF CRIME PREVENTION, STAFFED BY FOUR MEN
and one woman, is a connecting link between the City
Recreation Commission, the social agencies and the police
department. The bureau organized the "Police G-Men,"
a bare-foot football team. It is composed of youngsters
of the gang age, the type of boys that, in many cities, are
expending their energies in petty thieving and property
destruction. All races and nationalities found in the city
are represented in its membership. The team is a member
of the Barefoot League of Honolulu. These teams actu-
ally play football with bare feet. They wear track suits
and the conventional football helmet.
The G-men are coached by policemen who have been
star football players in their college days. In the four years
of the team's existence, not one of the boys has been in
any trouble with the police. They respect and admire
their police officer coaches and tell their friends that the
"cops" are not such bad fellows after all.
Another example of the work of the bureau is its
handling of a situation that arose on the waterfront
among a group of unemployed boys who were attempting
to eke out an existence by parking cars for those who
came to the pier to say "Aloha" to friends. There is little
public parking space on the streets in the immediate
vicinity of the docks and no commercial parking lots.
For a dime, a boy will take a car several blocks away if
necessary, park it, and later return it to the owner. There
was keen competition in this business, competition that at
times took the form of fist fights. With the help of the
police department, the boys were enabled to regulate
their business. They organized the Honolulu Parking
Boys' Association. The organization has made its own
rules governing "fair competition." To be eligible for
membership, a boy must be an expert driver, must be
financially responsible for damage to cars, and must wear
a shirt with a plainly visible number.
They have extended their business beyond the water-
front. If a Honolulu hostess wishes to be especially con-
siderate of her guests, she hires two or three of the park-
ing boys to be on hand to meet the cars as they drive up
to her gate. When the plan was started, the question arose
as to how a hostess could communicate with the boys.
The police department stepped in to fill the need. A tele-
phone message to the Bureau of Crime Prevention is
relayed by the officer on the waterfront beat.
There are 1225 junior traffic officers in the public
schools. Besides directing traffic in the vicinity of the
school buildings before and after school hours, they assist
the regular traffic squad in the downtown section during
the Christmas shopping rush. During the holidays, when
the schools are on vacation, the junior traffic officers who
have been most efficient during the preceding months
are chosen to stand on the sidewalks at street intersec-
tions at the hours when traffic is heaviest and help keep
pedestrians back.
For their services, they are given a dinner in a restaurant
each day and taken to a picture show every other day.
Once a year they have an all day picnic. Chief Gabrielson
and two or three other officers attend. Last year the picnic
was held at Schofield Barracks, where the U. S. Cavalry
unit put on a horse show for their entertainment.
Honolulu's one policewoman, Mrs. Lei Hapai, is an
important member of the Bureau of Crime Prevention.
She is a university graduate with several years' successful
experience in professional social work. The daughter of
a Chinese father and a Hawaiian mother, she has had
first hand experience with the problems of culture con-
flicts as they exist at this crossroads, where Orient and
Occident meet and mingle. Much of her time is spent
in acting as an informal court of domestic relations.
Husbands and wives and parents and children bring
their family squabbles to her desk.
Sometimes it is a Japanese family group consisting of
father, mother and their Hawaiian born, college bred
daughter. More than likely the mother will be dressed in
a gorgeously flowered kimona, the daughter in the new-
est thing in American street clothes. Close behind them
will come a young man whom the Japanese call a "go-
between." All will be talking excitedly in Japanese. The
daughter will turn from her turbulent family to explain
586
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Police G-Men, a barefoot football team, was organized four years ago among boys of gang age. Police football stars are coaches
to Mrs. Hapai that her parents have hired the "go-
between" and that he has arranged a marriage for her
to a young man whom she never saw until he was brought
to the home to make plans for the wedding. The parents
are asking the police department to force the headstrong
girl into filial obedience. The daughter knows that Ameri-
can girls choose their own husbands.
In commenting on this situation, Mrs. Hapai said: "It
is strange how the Orientals seem to think that the police
can do everything. Of course we want to keep them think-
ing that. We don't want to discourage them from coming
to us with their problems, even in cases like this.
"I keep cases out of the juvenile court or out of any
court whenever possible. In sex cases it is my job, if the
girl is pregnant, to arrange for her confinement at one
of the hospitals, and frequently to cooperate with the
Children's Aid Association in finding a foster home for
the baby. In other cases I get in touch with employment
bureaus in an effort to find work for the girl. Although
I am now a part of the police department, my work is
very little different from what it was when I was em-
ployed as a professional social worker."
Since the Island of Oahu, on which Honolulu is situ-
ated, is governed as a political unit with the city, there is
no overlapping or confusion in duties between city and
rural police. If a motorist on a rural Oahu road is
stranded without gas, he usually will not have to wait
long before a policeman appears in a department auto-
mobile. The officer takes a short piece of hose and a two
gallon can of gasoline from his car. For it is part of the
highway patrolman's job to supply enough gasoline to
get stranded cars to the next filling station.
A VISITOR TO THE CENTRAL POLICE STATION IN HONOLULU
finds a clean building made beautiful with red tile floors
and growing palms in tubs set against soft gray walls.
Many of the rooms have paintings loaned by local artists.
The atmosphere is that of a well kept commercial office
building. Clerks work steadily but without mainland rush.
Since practically no records were kept prior to the
reorganization in 1932, it is impossible to make a statis-
tical comparison of the number of crimes committed then
and now, the number of criminals apprehended, and all
the other information generally contained in a study of
police methods.
However, it is possible to compare the progress of
recent years. Mr. Gabrielson's report to the police com-
mission on the operation of the department during 1936
contains some significant material. In 1935 there was one
arrest for every 1.98 reported offenses. In 1936, there was
one arrest for every 1.84 offenses. In 1935, 69.2 per cent
of those arrested and charged were convicted. In 1936,
89.1 per cent were convicted. This shows the steadily
increasing efficiency of the public prosecutor's office. It is
also partly the result of the training the policemen have
received in getting and preserving evidence and in pre-
senting evidence on the witness stand. The number of
those who plead guilty is constantly increasing. Guilty
persons in Honolulu are likely to realize that it is useless
to fight the case.
In the principal cities on -the mainland there was an
increase in Class I crimes during 1936. In Honolulu, dur-
ing the same period, these crimes decreased by 11.16 per-
cent. Class I crimes, according to the United States De-
partment of Justice, include murder, manslaughter, rape,
robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto
theft.
By the use of the Hollerith tabulating machine it is
possible to compute within two or three minutes the
number of crimes committed on any one beat in the city,
the number of accidents at any corner, the number of
crimes committed at any hour of the day or night. Mr.
Gabrielson has this to say of the department of records:
"No matter how trivial the offenses or other occurrences
reported, officers are assigned and complete reports of
their investigations are typewritten by the officers them-
selves, after which the reports are delivered to the record
bureau, where they are numbered, indexed, coded, con-
solidated and filed, so as to facilitate not only the clearing
of the individual crimes under investigation, but so that
there may be an accurate accounting of police work, for
which the public is paying."
Since vacancies in the police department are filled by
applicants making the highest (Continued on page 610)
NOVEMBER 19*7
387
THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS
Fair Play, in Football and So On
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
ABOUT THIS TIME, TWO OR THREE COLLEGES IN WHICH FOR
one reason and another I have special personal interest
are going up against one another, and as well against
other institutions of the so-called "higher" education, in
respect of that quasi-gladiatorial conflict of brawn and
sinew, tonnage, brains and coordination, known as foot-
ball. Naturally in such matters one has bias of interest and
hope alias expectation that the "home team" will acquit
itself gloriously, even if, despite its damnedest and the
will-to-believe persisting till the last whistle blows, it can-
not win. A year or two ago, in a spirit of home-team fer-
vor, I expressed to one of the leading football enthusiasts
of one of "my" colleges whose eleven thus far that fall
had sustained an unbroken record of victories my wishful
confidence in its crowning that record fitly in the forth-
coming final game of the season.
"Alas, I fear not," he replied, "though I should not ad-
mit it publicly."
"But why the sudden pessimism ? We have licked every-
body thus far hands down. It's only another game."
"Not so this time. We shall be, as usual at that college,
too heavily outnumbered."
"What do you mean — outnumbered? Eleven on a
side ..."
"Yes, eleven at a time; but they'll drown us under their
reinforcements — substitutions, you know." And he con-
tinued:
"It is almost an axiom in football that with anything
like equality in die physical and mental qualifications of
two teams, the advantage lies heavily with that group in
which seniors predominate most largely. In a game so in-
tricate and complex as football has come to be, in which
the time for development is comparatively so limited,
every additional week of practice gives added assurance of
victory. I should expect our first team to be nearly if not
quite the equal of this final competitor's first team; but
that game is going to be fought out on the basis of re-
sources of fresh substitutes, and here that other college can
throw in a whole second team practically all of whom will
have had three years of coaching under the same system;
while we, when we begin to substitute, will have to rely
upon sophomores."
"But I thought this was supposed to be a sport," I pro-
tested. "As you describe it, it sounds like war. And you
take it so calmly — as if Haile Selassie were complacently
justifying one of Mussolini's 'glorious victories' over the
virtually unarmed Ethiopians. Without batting an eyelash
you tell me that you expect defeat, not because your com-
petitor has better players, or stouter fellers; but forsooth
because he has more of 'em — fresh and experienced troops
in reserve, to be thrown in after your slender first line has
licked his, is tired out, and you have only a few relatively
raw recruits to substitute. What startles me is not your
lugubrious recital of this lamentable inequality but that
you seem to see nothing out of the way about it — only
wishing that the discrepancy were the other way about;
588
that you had unlimited resources to use, without shame."
So he preached me an eloquent sermon, both eloquent
and convincing, upon the splendid effects of college foot-
ball training upon character. "It is," said he, "about the
only place left in the American college where there is any
practical training to make a man willingly subordinate
his own individual self to the welfare and purposes of the
group; to make him willing to spend all he has in the way
of physical, mental and moral strength for the consum-
mation of a common end, in which any personal glory
for himself is improbable." He went on to argue that any
college did well to train the largest possible number of its
students in this discipline; specifically that Harvard,
Princeton and Dartmouth, for examples, were "doing a
better job for their men in developing the maximum num-
ber to major consequence than Yale, which presumably
in order to get the greatest possible precision and accuracy
of play has confined itself to smaller squads, taking great
pride in playing 'eleven men of iron.' "
To NOT A SYLLABLE OF WHICH DID I OBJECT, NOR AM I OB-
jecting now, for I think that what my friend said probably
is true. But it quite missed my point, which has to do with
sportsmanship — a mightily important element in educa-
tion all along the line, from the cradle to the grave. The
difference between sport and war lies exactly there. Aside
from its characteristic concrete horrors and indecencies, the
principal demoralization of war and its techniques takes
place in the characters of the participants and of the peo-
ples behind them. The shrewd difference between an offi-
cer and a gentleman is in the fact that a typical military
man (of any allegiance, "civilized" or savage) will glory in
and hail as a "victory" the annihilation of an inferior by
a superior force; an instance in which fresh reserves are
thrown in to overwhelm an exhausted enemy. It does
not occur to him to be ashamed of it — he isn't built or
trained that way. The motto of the war-maker is "victory
at any price." A gentleman, unless hypnotized by mili-
tary hocus-pocus, scorns to accept victory on any such
terms. Nor would it be tolerated in any sport — except foot-
ball under the auspices of the "higher" education! Try to
imagine Yale or Harvard (not to mention Oxford or Cam-
bridge), halfway down the course on the Thames, find-
ing its crew or some member of it exhausted and its boat
a length behind; taking "time out" to put in fresh rowers
— perhaps even a whole fresh crew — the result of the race
depending upon which had the largest supply of substi-
tutes to draw upon!
Bret Harte's immortal "Heathen Chinee," whose smile
it was (naturally) childlike and bland, had reserves . . .
"In his sleeves, which were large,
He had twenty-four packs!"
This isn't sport; it's playing with loaded dice; the only
possibly redeeming circumstance being that the inevitable
loser knows that they are loaded. In real sport, engaged in
"for the game's sake" by gentlemen and scholars — yes,
even in prize fights — effort is made to equalize the physi-
cal factors and let skill and prowess win. Substitutions
should be allowed only in case of actual disablement; at
any rate reserves should be as a matter of course, as to
numbers at least, on equal terms. I shall continue to hope
SURVEY GRAPHIC
for the day when present practices in this regard will be
as unlawful as mayhem in a wrestling match.
A small boy in school once complained to me that two
of his classmates habitually cheated in examinations:
"I caught them at it," he said.
"What doing?"
"Praying to God for help! And afterward they signed
the Code of Honor, in which you give your word as a gen-
tleman that you 'have not sought or offered, given or re-
ceived, any assistance in this examination.' Do you call
that honest, or gentlemanly?"
Before I could adjust my startled wits, he continued:
"I s'pose God knows all the answers; but that only
makes it worse — the examination isn't to find out how
much God knows. You might just as well ask the princi-
pal to help you. Besides, if God is the square shooter they
say He is, He wouldn't help them anyway. I should think
He'd only be disgusted with them."
That episode of long ago is revived in mind by the re-
ported act of a Canadian lad, a Rhodes scholar from the
University of Manitoba, who the other day returned to his
former principal in the academy at Sydney, Nova Scotia,
the governor-general's medal for scholarship awarded in
1930 to him as the student in Grade 12 having the high-
est aggregate of marks in the final examinations. Inci-
dentally he returned also three other medals won previ-
ously, as he confessed, "partly by ingenious cribbing."
Evidently these awards always had been a thorn in his
peace of mind; but lately, it appears, he "got religion"
through the so-called "Oxford Movement," whose principles
require a complete catharsis of conscience and such restitu-
tion as is possible. But the affair of the governor-general's
medal is sui generis, and goes to the heart of sportsman-
ship. For, according to the young man's statement, he be-
gan in April secretly to prepare an extra subject, entitling
him to additional points, but failed to inform his competi-
tor of that fact until June, just before the examination;
too late for the other to prepare adequately to meet this
reinforced attack. He therefore surrendered the token to
"the rightful winner." Here is a subject commended for
debate in any gathering, especially of persons who "profess
religion." It challenges compunctious thought on the part
of anybody who in school, in sport, in business or any
other form of competition ever has won kudos of any kind
by questionable strategy . . . "ways that are dark and
tricks that are vain." How many kinds of peacock feath-
ers, or emoluments more valuable, will stand such a test?
IN THE LAST ANALYSIS, FAIR PLAY IS THE IDENTIFYING CHARAC-
teristic of civilization — if that much abused expression
means anything at all; anything to distinguish it from raw
savagery however veneered with clothing and equipped
with scientific techniques. We have reached,' at least the-
oretically, the stage in progress where handicaps are given
to equalize contests. Except in war. And in football. The
six-footer is not supposed any more to utilize his mere
"beef" upon him of four-foot-six. Even the latter, "equal-
ized" by possession of a gun, is not thereby authorized to
use it as an instrument of gainful occupation. We have
substituted courts and other measures to reduce adjudica-
tion to less primitive terms. To be sure, one still may see
benches of solemn robed judges sit unprotesting while
before them a six-foot-brain overwhelms a little one, more
or less regardless of justice. But let us not elaborate counsel
of perfection — enough to stay with the presently obvious.
NOVEMBER 1937
He were a notable seer who could foretell, a brave
forecaster who would attempt to prophesy, the ultimate
consequences in this country and the world at large of
President Roosevelt's momentous speech of October 5 at
Chicago and the immediately ensuing, amplifying and in-
terlocking statement of the State Department. In both
diplomatic hypocrisy was thrown to the winds and what
all the world knows was said right out loud, as it were
in words of one syllable. By name Japan was denounced
(with plain allusion to other nations not specified) as wil-
ful violator of international pledges. In particular the
Nine-Power Treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity
of China and cooperation with her peaceful and "unem-
barrassed" development, and the Pact of Paris (the so-
called Briand-Kellogg Pact) in which 50-odd nations in-
cluding Japan solemnly foreswore resort upon any pretext
to violence as an instrument of international policy. In so
many words these utterances voice the obvious fact that
today's lawless performances, such as Italy's in Ethiopia
and Japan's in China, are outrageous in themselves, in-
volve international perjury, threaten the peace of the
whole world, and are therefore the concern of the whole
world. They demand the restoration and maintenance
of international peace and order, by the only kind of action
— together — by which the peaceable peoples (90 percent of
the world, Mr. Roosevelt estimates) can secure them.
Unless empty oratory, mere bluff the calling of which
will leave him and this nation ridiculous, these declara-
tions open a wide door to consequences incalculable. In-
cidentally, they spell anything but the intent of the so-
called "neutrality" legislation recently enacted, upon which
the isolationists and ultra-pacifists set their hearts.
"Here we are again," cry these, "back at the same old
road-fork; mouthing the old platitudes; on the way to
another 'war-to-end-war' ..." etc., etc.
Oh, yes, one wearies of it; nevertheless remarking that
but for exactly those isolationists of whatever motives,
that might indeed have been "the war to end war"; might
have been had we followed through the logic of our par-
ticipation in it, and played our part in the only kind of
international cooperation that could or ever can bring it to
pass. We helped to destroy the old order whose last resort
was war, but refused to accept any responsibility or part in
the organization of a new. There was the opportunity to
initiate a new world, in which Fair Play among nations
should at least begin, implementing the common good will
and guaranteed by the common power in which our own
contribution, actual and potential, had been shown to be
decisive. Does Mr. Roosevelt mean to lead us, if he can,
back to that opportunity and responsibility from which
we ran like scared rabbits ? Back we must go, soon or late.
Only so, with our tremendous power as a cornerstone, can
a decent structure of world relationships be erected. But
it will be far more difficult now; things are very different.
Must we learn, again, through new slaughter and suffer-
ings compared with which those of the past were trifling,
that there is no other way?
This is no digression from my starting-point. Character-
istic of the outrages, the international bad faith, of which
the President complains, is the absence of Fair Play, the
reversion to the bad old primitive techniques of force and
the Right of Might. Current practices in football I have
ventured to use as an illustration. Its propriety as such is
only emphasized by the undoubted value of the game as a
discipline in education.
589
LIFE AND LETTERS:
Fall Book Section
Axis of Our Future
by LEON WHIPPLE
DICTATORS AND DEMOCRACIES, by Calvin B. Hoover. Macmillan.
110 pp. Price $1.50.
THE STORY OF DICTATORSHIP, by E. E. Kellett. Dutton. 231 pp.
Price $1.75.
GOLIATH, by G. A. Borgese. Viking Press. 483 pp. Price $'3.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
THE ANATOMY OF MODERN DICTATORSHIPS HAS BEEN CHARTED.
We know what they are and how they work. They root in
the disintegration of peoples by war; they were buttressed by
the breakdown of world economy; they are supported be-
cause they restored the self-confidence of nations with inferi-
ority complexes by creating a sense of a national mission,
imperial in Italy, racial in Germany, class in Russia. We can
write a primer of their techniques — the private army, terror-
ism, the doctrine of State over individual with the incarna-
tion of State-power in a supreme One, the perfection of a
universal propaganda, and the promise of war for national
prestige or as a distraction from internal troubles. On these
things the doctors agree; they are the axioms of these three
studies of dictatorships. It is encouraging that already the
democracies have mastered this knowledge in the harsh
school of events.
But the principal questions remain unanswered on this the
main axis of our times, democracy-dictatorship. Why do they
endure dictatorships? What will they do? Can they be dis-
solved from within or overthrown from without? Will they
spread in the free states because of our failure to solve eco-
nomic problems, or in consequence of new wars provoked by
the dictators? These challenges must be met before civiliza-
tion can march again. The bombing of Chinese cities, piracy
in the Mediterranean, are present proofs. The conclusion of
each of these books is a desperate endeavor to answer the
question: What can we do?
Calvin Hoover, who has already contributed much to our
knowledge of dictator states from his first-hand study of Ger-
many and Russia, closes a set of penetrating chapters on the
changes and present trends in the totalitarian states, with
his answer to the question: Is the tide at ebb or flood? On
the economic front, he believes, the spread of dictatorships has
been stopped by the recovery of capitalism. But the democra-
cies still have to solve the problem of developing an economic
system that combines some sort of competitive and autono-
mous operation of corporate enterprise with a minimum of
management of economy by the state. We are experimenting
with the establishment of such a hybrid type of control upon
the success of which the maintenance of the democratic par-
liamentary system depends. The evidence to him is convincing
that the complete control of the economy means abandoning
parliamentary government.
The significance of this dilemma is in his conclusion that
the totalitarian states can control a modern economic system.
The dictators march from political to economic totali-
tarianism, and are really moving toward the supplanting of
capitalism by state control, and toward the obliteration of
private property, in the sense of income. The very nature of
the totalitarian state demands that it control everything, and
appropriate any surplus value for social purposes or war
preparations. He defends his theses in two acute chapters that
disavow the alleged capitalist inspiration of fascism, and assert
that a rigid collectivism must be the goal of a state that is held
responsible for both good and bad times. Hence to meet this
challenge the democracies must strive to find a reconciliation
between collectivism and parliamentary liberty. The evidence
on either side is not all in, but it is a profound service to have
the issue thus stated. It illuminates the entire American scene.
On the war front, Mr. Hoover believes that the decision
rests on England. Can she arrange concessions and compro-
mises that will satisfy Germany and Italy? Or can she muster
an alliance that can defeat them by arms? He recognizes that
the remedy of war is as dangerous as the disease, both to
capitalism and parliamentary democracy, but declares that
whatever the risks "opposition to Hitler and Mussolini offers
well nigh the only prospect for the survival of parliamentary
government in Europe." Is this the answer?
THE STORY OF DICTATORSHIP BY THE ENGLISH SCHOLAR, E. E.
Kellett, is in a queer way hopeful. By telling the story from
the Hebrew, Abimelech, through the sway of the Greek
tyrants and the Sicilian, Dionysius of Syracuse, into the
despotisms of Renaissance Italy, and so to Napoleon, the dic-
tators of South America, and down to our modern exemplars
in Russia, Germany, and Italy he proves at least that dictators
are no new phenomena, and that nations survive their tyrants.
He shows that one salvation has been that dictators have not
been able to set up a succession that endured; the heirs grew
weak and were overthrown in the third generation. Russia
still is shaken by the struggle over the succession. But if the
modern dictators set up a dynasty of ideas through coercive
propaganda, that dynasty might survive the fall of individual
tyrants. Russia has molded the minds of the people for
twenty years now.
Kellett recognizes that while the modern dictators use all
the devices of the old ones — private armies, terror, war,
demagogic appeals to the people, and alliances with the rich,
they also employ new weapons. First, they offer an ideology.
They seize power not for themselves but for a theory. They
are not utterly selfish at the expense of the country, but for
the country. Second, they have perfected the devices of
propaganda with a universality impossible before. They deal
in ignorance and impose myths. No breach is left for the
minority to present the truth or advocate rebellion. You can-
not appeal to a people whose minds are made up for them.
Finally the force at their disposal is of a vastly powerful
mechanical kind — tanks, gas, airplanes, machine guns — against
which clubs, daggers, bare hands no matter how numerous
are unavailing. We have no experience of how a revolution
can be carried on against such arms. With control of the
armories and one hundred thousand men, the dictator can
mow down his most resolute opponents. This impotence ex-
plains why the rebels intrigue for intervention by other
nations. In Russia some would even welcome help from Ger-
many or Jap'an to break the iron ring; in Spain others have
enlisted to try to break down the master from without. Faced
with such undecipherable modern forces in dictatorships,
Kellett can find no answer within the new states. But he does
agree with Hoover that the maintenance of our liberties at
home, and the rebuilding of parliamentary government to
meet the political and economic challenges of the day, is our
single hope.
PROFESSOR BORGESE HAS UNDERTAKEN A FORMIDABLE ENTER-
prise: to interpret what in the Italian spirit from Dante to
D'Annunzio opened the road for fascism, and what Mussolini
is and how he gained the power that now confronts the
world. Professor Borgese had a unique preparation for a giant
590
SURVEY GRAPHIC
task. He was professor of esthetics in the University of Milan,
literary editor, and foreign editor of Italy's most influential
paper, and now, self-exiled, is of the faculty of the University
of Chicago. The approach to Goliath combines ihe spiritual
insight of a master of Italian literature with a direct knowl-
edge of the movements and persons of Italian politics before
and after the March on Rome. Among the many contribu-
tions to our understanding in this brilliant book are the inter-
pretations of such figures as the King, D'Annunzio, Giolliti,
and the fascist chiefs. He knows whereof he speaks.
The scale of this history is too large for adequate summary.
The author, moreover, pays us the compliment of overestimat-
ing our knowledge of Italian literature and history. We must
learn from him. We learn that Dante's immortal dream of
world unity created Italy. In her spirit ever since has been the
yearning for national unity, and the restoration of imperial
power. For one tradition that restoration meant that Rome
must again be mistress of an empire, for another that Italy
must help create the world empire of equal states. The con-
flict was never resolved, the inner unity not even attained
after the Risorgimento. The twin strands are traced in a series
of gorgeous pictures of poets and statesmen, Carducci, Leo-
pardi, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, down to the beginning of
the Black Age, when D'Annunzio planted the seed of dicta-
torship from which Mussolini reaped the harvest.
The rest of the study is on Mussolini and how he conquered
Italy as a prelude for a march on the world. To Borgese
Mussolini is an anarchist who was not converted to patriotic
nationalism, but made himself Duce because as dictator his
anarchism could find satisfaction. He would be the one abso-
lutely free man in his world. The author asserts that there
was no social need for fascism in the early nineteen-twenties,
either to liquidate the war or meet an economic crisis. The
nation was recovering, but the man of will took advantage of
the weak liberal leadership, an irresolute King, and the age-
old cleavage of tradition. Here, as elsewhere, one may ques-
tion Borgese's interpretation of history in persons, but if his
diagnosis is true, then there is no answer to the question:
What shall we do to meet fascism? What can free nations do
to meet an anarchist who has such a machine of power?
The question is unanswered in Goliath. The author has
done a profound service in presenting a superb analysis of
the sufferings and gifts of a great nation, and in an almost
miraculous transfer of his feeling for Italy into an English
prose that is rich in fire, eloquence and beauty. Here are char-
acter etchings, epigrams, challenging generalizations, charts of
diplomacy and statecraft, restored visions in a profusion that
itself is of the Renaissance. And underneath a great anger
for the betrayal of a tradition, the ruin of a dream.
When one has read all he can understand of the dictator
states, there remains the uneasy doubt that we have reached
the heart of their meaning. They endure — although their terms
still are only a gnat's breath in history. Travellers from Ger-
many report that outside the dispossessed classes, the people
seem content even with a very simple living. Is it possible that
this enforced simplicity is in itself a healthful way of life?
Can it be that all our modern civilizations crush the individ-
ual so that he craves a Leader, and accepts an ersatz divinity
from lack of a God? Perchance the overthrow of the dicta-
tors will be won not in war or economics but in discovering
what deep spiritual needs send the peoples crying after false
saviors, and seeking to meet those needs.
Minority Men in the American Procession
WILLIAM G. BROWNLOW: FIGHTING PARSON OF THE SOUTHERN HIGH-
LANDS by Ellis M. Coulter. University of North Carolina Press. 432 pp.
Price $3.50.
THE LEARNED BLACKSMITH, by Merle Curti. Wilson-Erickson. 241
pp. Price $3.
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN AND HIS LETTERS, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe.
Houghton Mifflin. 498 pp. Price $4.
SKY STORMING YANKEE: THE STORY OF GLENN CURTISS, by Clara
Studer. Stackpole. 370 pp. Price $3.
A MAVERICK AMERICAN, by Maury Maverick. Covici-Friede. 362 pp.
Price $3.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
ALL THE ABOVE BOOKS DEAL WITH EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN PER-
sonalities in rebellion against the status quo of their time and
place. The social effect of these perverse talents is impressive.
Although none of the heroes of these sympathetic volumes
was, or is, of quite top rank importance — and none of the
books is, either — they are all, though not equally, interesting.
Take, for example, Professor Coulter's well documented story
of Parson Brownlow. An egotistic, picturesque circuit rider,
crusader and eventually governor of Tennessee, Brownlow's
savage tracts, sermons and newspapers were famous in the
period from John Quincy Adams to Rutherford B. Hayes.
His rough mountain background gave him an excuse to outdo
Crockett, Houston, Lincoln in the exploitation of unqualified
log cabin virtue. Whether or not his crude battles for God
and the Union were useful, we can be grateful that he is now
remembered only as a historical curiosity, and that his fanatic
modern counterparts attract no real body of disciples.
By contrast with uncouth Brownlow, consider the strange
and appealing figure that Professor Merle Curti has resur-
rected— a self-educated New England blacksmith who strove,
sweetly and peacefully, in the same bitter era, to promote
tolerance and justice. Elihu Burritt was a working class
pacifist whom no amount of communion with social thinkers
on both sides of the Atlantic could induce to forsake his lot
as an artisan. By pamphlets, by meetings, and by example he
fought to make "the human spirit more free, and its earthly
home a less unjust and more kindly place." Cheaper foreign
and domestic postage, and peace, these he urged ably and
literately, in a career that Professor Curti has done well to
record mainly in Burritt's own gently reasonable writings.
. Almost a generation later we come to a man who was born
during, instead of before, the Civil War, but who nevertheless
was, as Owen Wister said, "a belated Abolitionist." When
John Jay Chapman died in 1933 younger literary people tend-
ed to think of him as a bearded man of letters, a Century
Club individualist of the old school, a writer of witty com-
munications to editors and contributor of mellow essays to
the elite pages of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic. Mr. Howe's
collection and interpretation of Chapman's writings about
himself, including letters as revealing as anything Henry
Adams ever wrote about his reactions to life and people,
presents the iconoclast as he saw himself. His enthusiastic pen
was never disciplined, and he knew it; his well born mind
never shed its prejudice against the Roman Catholic church,
and he acknowledges it; his cosmopolitan wanderings never
rid him of his sense of comfortable genteel sanctuary in New-
port and Charleston and in the New York bounded by down-
town and uptown Manhattan. In Germany and England, in
the summer of 1914, he saw the war start; and on his return
he did his part to Anglicize the American mind — Britishers
irritated him less than the Germans, in whom he detected
even before the war a hint of some wild tribal secret. A
charming, opinionated liberal, he never lost his eager amateur
standing in public affairs or literature. As a civic pamphleteer
he was a fusionist and one of the founders of the City Club;
he enjoyed reform movements amid good company. Some-
thing of the Emersonian Bohemianism which motivated him
can be explained by the loss of his left hand. When he was a
young student he soundly beat a friend with his cane, then in
a fit of remorse went home, thrust the offending hand that
NOVEMBER 1937
591
had done the deed into the fire, and a surgeon at a Boston
hospital smote it off.
In Sky Storming Yankee, a warm and unpretentious book,
Clara Studer tells how American aviation developed because
unpredictable, stubborn men stuck to it when it all seemed a
mad dream. This book sheds light not only on Curtiss, whose
work far outside the realm of social movements has pro-
foundly affected modern society, but on the unselfish support
which Alexander Graham Bell gave to Curtiss and to aviation.
Among all these minority men, whose singlemindedness
has brightened the American procession, is one contemporary.
Maury Maverick writes his own story, with the Constitution
of the United States, all properly indexed, as an appendix to
the volume. A fiery, impulsive lover of humanity, Maverick's
dream of a more rational America is happily tempered by
tradition — -after all, he's a Maverick, descended from great
old families — and reality — after all, too, he has to get elected
to Congress every two years. Like the cowboy from the Rio
Grande, his book is wandering. But you get the idea that
Maverick conceives of himself as a kind of vernacular ambas-
sador from the algebraic peace-and-plenty economists to the
people. His book, half an account of his life, half random
political philosophy, embellished with touches of poetry, ser-
mons and humor, should be required reading. For Maverick
is bound to become even more of an institution in our political
life than he is today. Already he is a minor prophet, a leader
of the progressive bloc that has been described as the "neo-
New Dealers." VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
The Problem of Race Relations
RACE: A STUDY IN MODERN SUPERSTITION, by Jacques Barzun. Harcourt
Brace. 353 pp. Price $2.50.
THE ETIQUETTE OF RACE RELATIONS IN THE SOUTH, by Ber-
tram Wilbur Doyle. University of Chicago Press. 249 pp. Price $2.50.
OUR RACIAL AND NATIONAL MINORITIES, edited by Francis ].
Brown and Joseph S. Roucek. Prentice Hall. 877 pp. Price $5.
Prices postpaid of Survey Graphic
THESE STUDIES MAY BE READ WITH PLEASURE EVEN BY THOSE
who are a little tired of the often needlessly bitter controversial
literature on the subject of race. The author of the first has
read widely and with discrimination, approaches the subject
as a historian, and yet is versed also in the finer points of
recent scientific inquiry. He shows that race is a concept par-
ticularly rich in potential associations, and therefore lends
itself to the elevation of otherwise narrow or selfish purposes
to the realm of popular ideals.
The second study illustrates with entertaining detail the
"cultural lag" as an important element in race relations.
Unfortunately, the thesis that the social ritual which rules
the mutual behavior of whites and Negroes in the South
"continues to have the largest share in regulating their lives"
fails to carry conviction. It is, of course, true that the authority
of mores at one time enforced by means of violence often
continues for many generations through the sanctions which
experience has given to attitudes that permit some sort of
accommodation not too painful to the subject group. But it is
pretty evident that the factor of compulsion in the South has
not disappeared but remains the chief cause of the Negroes'
self-abasement in their contacts with members of the dominant
group-
Exaggerating the part played by an established etiquette
and paying scant attention to the actual and often exceedingly
forceful controls manipulated by those who profit from the
subjection of the Negroes, this study supports a fiction popu-
lar among southern whites. Professor Robert E. Park, who
introduces the book, does not improve matters by upholding
the other popular fiction, that "the North has never under-
stood the nature of race relations in the South."
The symposium on Our Racial and National Minorities,
which significantly originated from a practical need experi-
enced in the New York University School of Education,
shows that something more is needed for understanding than
intimate contact with one group or another. The authors,
though some of them are members of the ethnic groups they
write about, here contribute to fill in the outlines of a single
plan of study, dominated by a desire to recognize similarities
and differences in situations and attitudes, and their causes.
In a sense, this work may be regarded as a dividend on
twenty years of intensive research to which most of the par-
ticipant authors have made substantial contributions. The
general sections on major aspects of race and cultural conflicts,
and on the trend toward cultural pluralism, indicates a
marked advance over the state of knowledge at the start of
the Carnegie Corporation's program of inquiries into the
social effects of immigration during the war. This increased
knowledge makes itself felt also in the shift of the school-
men's interest which this work implements: trom concern
with problems of assimilation to concern with the contribu-
tions of the different groups to American life. An excellent
bibliography facilitates the task for teacher and student to go
more deeply into the many phases of the subject to which a
single volume cannot do full justice. BRUNO LASKER
Political Power: Engine or Brakes?
CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, by Carl Fried-
rich. Harper. 591 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
"SOME TIME AGO," PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH WRITES IN HIS PREFACE,
"just about when Hitler came into power, I concluded an
article with the following sentence: 'In any case, Germany
will remain a constitutional, democratic state, with strong
socializing tendencies whose backbone will continue to be its
professional civil service.' The doings of the Nazis make me
look like a fool. But I would rather misjudge man by expect-
ing him to do better than he will. . . . What is more, in the
long run I hold firm to the sentence as written. . . . This
book wants to be a wheelbarrow of stuff toward the new
structure which is going to be reared in the not too distant
future."
Notwithstanding his own slight misadventure in prophecy,
Professor Friedrich valiantly claims "as much science for poli-
tics as for physics, if not more." The natural sciences boast
of their hypotheses; yet all the natural sciences lumped to-
gether cannot yield a single hypothesis of equal importance
to mankind with the hypothesis that "those possessing power
tend to abuse it."
Certainly, this hypothesis bulks large in Professor Fried-
rich's own mind so far as a political power is concerned. This
is shown particularly in his definition of a constitution as "a
technique of effective regularized restraint," which leads to
the conclusion, set forth in diagramatic form, that the more
completely a government is restrained, the more constitu-
tional it is. Whereas many mechanicians would evaluate an
automobile chiefly for its engine, Professor Friedrich fixes his
attention upon the braking system.
It is accordingly not surprising to find him devoting con-
siderable attention to the American institution of judicial
review. "The institution of judicial review," he writes, "sub-
stitutes judgment of judges for the judgment of the elected
representatives of the people whenever doubt exists regarding
the full meaning of a constitutional provision. It is not a
question of the manifest tenor, as Marshall maintained, but
on the contrary a question of the doubtful meaning of vari-
ous constitutional provisions, or the actual lack of any pro-
visions." This is good as far as it goes, but it should have been
added that the actual result of judicial review in this country
has been not to settle such doubts but to multiply them, with
the further result of multiplying vastly the opportunities for
judicial interference with the functions of the elected repre-
sentatives of the people.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is the one
entitled Constitutional Dictatorship. Here it is pointed out
that dictatorship was for several centuries a bulwark of the
592
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Taj Mahal is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful
buildings ever devised by the genius of man-
but when you approach Brooklyn Bridge without any prejudice
it is as beautiful and even more imposing than the Taj Mahal
"I shall write this book for two children, one of whom carried a fiddle case and one of whom carried a bunch of drawings.
I shall write it for those two forlorn kids who looked so eagerly at that train of ours — that train that was going places; so
writes Hendrik Willem Van Loon in his foreword. And he has — in the space of nearly seven hundred pages and with
the lively aid of delightful drawings; he gives the general reader a love for, and an understanding of the background of all
that is most enduring in the arts. It is a book which looks askance upon theories and issues, yet makes no concession to
over-popular presentation. Always the close relationship of art to ordinary life is stressed; and always the emphasis is
laid on the human beings who made that art, and who have heard it, seen it, and enjoyed it for centuries.
It is deeply informed with a sense of the profound universality that underlies all the arts, as it underlies all the mani-
festations of our average, everyday human existence.
THE ARTS, by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. Simon and Schuster, 677 pp. Price $3.95 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
Roman republic and yet did not lead to usurpation. This was
due principally to four things: The appointment of the dicta-
tor took place "according to precise constitutional forms";
the dictator himself could not declare a state of emergency;
the dictatorship was always created "in defense of the existing
constitutional order, never with a view to changing it"; it
was always limited to six months — none of which safeguards,
except perhaps the third, exists against emergency executive
powers in modern constitutions.
While Professor Friedrich has permitted a natural pre-
occupation with conditions in his native land to sway his
judgment too pronouncedly at points, yet American readers
will welcome in this volume a fresh approach to the subject,
much valuable illustrative matter and many stimulating
suggestions.
Princeton University EDWARD S. CORWIN
The Spy Business
SPY OVERHEAD, by Clinch Calkins. Harcourt Brace. 363 pp. Price
$2.50 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THIS DRAMATIC EXPRESSION OF EVIDENCE DEVELOPED BEFORE
the La Follette Senate Investigation Committee, has an emo-
tional effectiveness and appeal which necessarily never appear
in a prosaic committee report.
In a preliminary statement the committee referred to "a
colossal daily drive in every part of the country to frustrate
enunciated labor policy and to neutralize American labor
laws," to "vigilante and violence groups," to "private espion-
age and strikebreaking forces maintained by the industry
itself," to "individual and communal violations of free speech
and assembly by various authorities and organizations."
The report continues: "Both industrial espionage and strike-
breaking thrive on industrial strife. . . . Although as the in-
vestigations reveal, the employer directs his spy forces against
any kind of union activity, he cloaks his hostility under the
pretext that he is defending himself and the country against
communism."
However, a general statement of condemnation is not ex-
citing reading. Clinch Calkins has told us the stories of those
employed in spy activities, or the victims. She has given us
the human touch. She has shown us the nefarious effect of
the spy system upon the individual workers and upon unions.
These individual stories arouse our indignation far beyond
any general indictment.
Here is the story of Joseph Gelders. A union man named
Barton was railroaded to jail in Birmingham, Ala. Gelders
tried to enlist the interest of the public. Returning from a
meeting to his home, Gelders was seized, clubbed, thrown
into an automobile, threatened with lynching, warned to leave
the state, stripped of his clothes, flogged until he became
unconscious and was left in the fields in deserted territory.
He later identified his assailants. Two grand juries refused
to indict.
Interspersed throughout the volume are stories of like kind.
NOVEMBER 1937
593
The evidence is not abstract or remote, but is tied to
individuals.
The total cost to industry in trying to seduce workers and
break up unions is enormous. The system seems to be almost
all-pervading among our big corporations. We have several
instances like that of the American Bridge Company, which
was faced with a strike in building the Pulaski Highway,
when the workers demanded a raise of 25 cents an hour. On
a contract involving some $2 million, the increase would have
amounted to about $100,000. The company's strike cost, under
the caption "Labor Trouble" on the ledger sheets, totalled
1290,000. The workers of the Radio Corporation of America
made a demand for a wage increase, but chiefly for union
recognition. In answer, the Radio Corporation put up a bat-
tle, which cost the company around $1 million.
The La Follette Committee, in view of its meager appro-
priation, wisely centered its first attention upon various spy
agencies, Railway Audit and Inspection Company, Pinker-
ton's, National Metal Trades Association, and various others,
and from the unwilling representatives of these agencies
developed its most effective evidence.
The book is a thorough and exciting report of the strike
breaking, union smashing industrialists of America. It shows
how these agencies supply the employer with spies, with
bus-loads of strikebreakers and trouble-makers whose business
thrives on disorder and violence. The methods of the "opera-
tors" are exposed; how they report their findings; what they
are paid; their relationship to their employers; the crooked
methods by which they discover or invent the desired infor-
mation. Most of the men employed in this racket appear to be
wanderers with criminal records. We see the coercion exer-
cised on the working man, the blacklist, the huge sums of
money used for purposes of demoralization, the decay, crime
and murder involved.
Miss Calkins has lucidly described an appalling criminal
structure in an important book which should become known
to every liberty-loving American. ARTHUR GARFIELD HAYS
Neutrality and the Diplomats
NEUTRALITY FOR THE UNITED STATES, by E. M. Borchard and
W. P. Lage. Yale University Press. 380 pp. Price $3.50 postpaid of
Survey Graphic.
IN THE BATTLE OF OPINION OVER OUR NEUTRALITY POLICY PRO-
fessor Borchard's well known position has at last come into
print. This volume is at once a disappointment and a chal-
lenge. It is a brief for the status quo, not always impartial in
its presentation of materials and sometimes only too lawyer-
like in its special pleading.
About half the volume is devoted to a presentation of the
diplomatic struggle which the United States carried on with
belligerents between 1914 and 1917. It is, on the whole, the
most careful and satisfactory analysis of that period which has
yet been made. The authors have combed the materials with
microscopic care and presented a devastating picture of the
failures of American diplomacy to achieve its objective of
keeping us out of war. The picture which they draw offers
considerable confirmation to the inferences to be derived from
a reading of the reports of the Nye Committee; their analysis
indicates pretty clearly that the stakes in the game were, in
fact, non-diplomatic, and the moves on the chessboard dic-
tated by non-legal considerations.
But these are not the conclusions which the authors draw
from the record of that period. The rest of the volume is
devoted to a decidedly one-sided analysis of our post-war
efforts to keep out of another war. Professor Borchard's posi-
tion is well known; he stands for either an attempt to main-
tain by the necessary force so-called "neutral rights," or to
apply absolutely impartial treatment to both belligerents if
those neutral rights are altered or foregone. This section of
their work is little more than a brief for things as they are.
One index of the comprehensiveness of their study of post-war
American policy may be found in the absence of any citation
to or impartial analysis of the point of view of such authori-
ties as Warren, Jessup, or Dulles and Armstrong. Each of
these authors, with the same materials before them, has drawn
very different inferences from the data. It is certainly worth-
while to have so explicitly stated a point of view which, in
fact, has dominated the drafting of American neutrality policy
during the past two years. It would leave a happier impres-
sion of the authors' impartiality were not this point of view so
favorable to those interests likely to profit from the same
course of action which made many millionaires in the last
war — and failed to keep us out of it.
Am h erst College
PHILLIPS BRADLEY
The Dilemma of the Western World
AX ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, by Harry
Elmer Barnes. Harcourt, Brace. 790 pp. Price $5.50 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
Two YEARS AGO TWO LARGE AND IMPRESSIVE VOLUMES ON THE
History of Western Civilization by Dr. Barnes issued from the
press. This monumental work by one of America's most pro-
lific and outstanding students of history and politics was fol-
lowed this summer by another history devoted primarily to
the economic and social aspects of our changing civilization.
This volume, which relies heavily on the previous work of
the author for much of its economic material, presents an
introduction to the industrial achievements of man from
primitive times to the present; from the pre-hatchet era to
that of automatic machinery; from the economy of the tribes-
man to that of the New Deal in America and of communism
in Russia.
The reader obtains fascinating glimpses of the Stone Age
and of the economic life of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.
He is given an adequate description of the varied forms of
economic activities in the Middle Ages, of the origins and
progress of the industrial revolution in the important coun-
tries of the world, and of the development in the United
States and elsewhere of the giant corporation, the trusts and
the combine.
In the final 350 pages, Dr. Barnes presents to the reader
the main problems of our machine civilization; discusses the
crisis in the capitalist system, and outlines the main philoso-
phies and movements of social change which have arisen as
an attempted answer to these problems — socialism, commun-
ism, guild socialism, cooperation, single tax, anarchism, fasc-
ism, and so forth. A long chapter is likewise devoted to
imperialism and the world war.
Dr. Barnes in every period of development shows clearly
the fundamental economic forces at work in the development
of the entire social life of that epoch. The book is encyclopedic
in its scope, is written with simplicity and clarity and indi-
cates an amazing grasp of economic relationships of the past
and the present.
Dr. Barnes sees no great revolutionary movement in the
New Deal, which, in his opinion, is "fundamentally based on
a retention of the scarcity economy, in spite of much rhetoric
about the new 'consumers' era." In the future, he visualizes
a titanic struggle between fascism and communism.
On account of his penchant for contrasts, the author unfor-
tunately underestimates the significance of some powerful
working class movements. In picturing Europe engaged in a
fascist-communist struggle, and in contending that "socialism is
on the wane," he overlooks the fact that, practically everywhere
in the non-fascist countries of Europe outside of Russia, the
socialist movement is far stronger than it was immediately
after the world war. The Socialist or Labor party has the
largest representation today in the lower houses of Denmark,
Norway, Sweden, Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland, Fin-
land and Czechoslovakia and the second largest representation
in Great Britain and Holland. Only in France, Spain and
594
Czechoslovakia, among these countries, has the Communist
party any considerable strength and, in these nations, it is far
weaker than is the Socialist party. In general, among demo-
cratic countries of Europe, the Socialists have sent ten
representatives to parliament to every one elected by the Com-
munists. Moreover, in order to obtain a new foothold in the
European countries the Communist party is greatly modify-
ing and, in many instances, completely reversing their for-
mer tactics. Of these things Dr. Barnes has nothing to say.
Since he wrote his chapter on the Russian economic system,
there have occurred the recent purges which have considerably
affected the economic standards of that country. In a revised
volume Dr. Barnes will probably treat of these changes.
On the whole, however, the volume is by all odds the most
informative and stimulating history of the economic relation-
ships of our western civilization thus far written and provides
the best possible antidote to the traditional histories of the past
which gave long descriptions of battles and the private lives of
royalty, but ignored the fundamental changes which were
constantly going on in the industrial lives of the masses.
HARRY W. LAIDLER
Can America Avoid War?
THE TRAGIC FALLACY— A STUDY OF AMERICA'S WAR POLICIES, by
Mauritz A. Hallgren. Knopf. 473 pp. Price $4 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
YOUR REVIEWER, DUE TO HIS ABSENCE FROM THE COUNTRY, HAS
only just been able to take up The Tragic Fallacy published
early in the year, but today the subject matter of the book is
even more timely than it was six months ago. Spain and China
have brought home to us more keenly than ever the reality
of the war danger, as well as the perplexities of the problem
of keeping the United States clear of it.
Mr. Hallgren's thesis, in a word, is that the United States
is in reality preparing for war — not to keep out of war; that
our program of "adequate defense" and our economic policies
are shaping our destiny and that we will join in the next
world war, even though many of those in high places may
not be conscious that this is the inevitable effect of the policies
they support.
The dedication of the book to Eugene V. Debs and Robert
M. La Follette gives the clue that the author approves the
attitude of this small group which opposed our entry into the
last war but the book leaves one with the impression that the
author expects that when the next war looms there will again
be only a "pretorian guard" to raise a voice against our join-
ing it. The Tragic Fallacy according to Mr. Hallgren lies in
the fact that here in the United States we are blind to the
flimsiness of our mental, moral and psychological resistance to
war in the present state of the capitalistic world of which
capitalistic America is so vital a part. And for this war capi-
talistic America is consciously, in the case of some of its citi-
zens, and unconsciously in the case of others, preparing itself.
This war, the author concludes, will probably result in the end
of democracy or the end of capitalism, and possibly of both.
This is, of course, an over-simplification of the thesis of the
book but it is the best one can do with so broad a theme in the
space of a few hundred words. I gain the impression that Mr.
Hallgren rather throws up his hands at the inevitability of
events. Certainly he does not suggest that, granted a capital-
istic world and the state of mind that inevitably prevails in a
capitalistic world, there is any remedy.
One is tempted to ask Mr. Hallgren what policy he would
suggest since he does not go so far as to advocate the aban-
donment of the capitalistic system by all the nations of the
world. Should the United States cease its military preparations
and should it discourage foreign trade so as to eliminate these
factors as possible causes of our entry into war? Whatever
Mr. Hallgren may believe as to the theoretical wisdom of such
drastic remedies, I conclude from his book that he is realistic
enough to appreciate that there is no likelihood of their adop-
tion; hence his conclusions are thoroughly pessimistic.
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While I disagree with a large part of the argumentation in
the book, I do not quarrel with the conclusion that there is
certainly an even chance, possibly more, of our entry into a
general war which may last an appreciable length of time. I
would not agree with Mr. Hallgren that this result was abso-
lutely inevitable.
The book is well worth reading and is useful. Nothing is
more likely to help us to keep out of war and to help us to
walk warily in our international relations than to realize the
alarming reality of the danger. I also believe that the book
is useful for another reason probably not in Mr. Hallgren's
mind when he wrote it. If we realize the danger to us if the
world goes to war, it should help to bring us to a better
realization of our direct interest in the preservation of peace,
and to an appreciation that it is well worth our while to
assume a share of the responsibility for the maintenance of
peace. ALLEN W. DULLES
Peddler's Empire
THE GUGGENHEIMS— THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN DYNASTY, by
Harvey O'Connor. Covict-Friede. 496 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey
Graphic.
IN 1850, A LITTLE JEWISH PEDDLER, TWENTY YEARS OLD, TRUDGED
along Pennsylvania's muddy roads with a pack on his back,
traditional burden of his oppressed race. He hated that pack.
Among other things, it contained shoe blacking; and from a
friendly chemist, the youth learned how to make it. Soon he
doffed the despised knapsack; before it had had time to bend
his back as he had feared, Meyer Guggenheim could stand
straight.
On that day the Guggenheim dynasty was born. In this
dispassionate study of its germination, flowering and decay,
Harvey O'Connor not only has chronicled the development
of an unusual family but even more effectively has described
the almost incredible social consequences of that family's
acquisitiveness.
Meyer Guggenheim, family executive no less than business-
man, managed his seven sons as shrewdly as he directed the
empire he left to them, built from exploitation of the nation's
mineral resources. After his death, the emphasis shifted grad-
ually from production to promotion, from exploitation of the
earth to exploitation of the investor; two of the seven sons
could not stomach the change and left the firm. Meyer lived
to avenge the oppression the Guggenheims had suffered in
Switzerland, lived to visit worse oppression upon western
mine owners whom his smelters could — and did — ruin, upon
western workers and western towns. The sons took over, and
the grasping hand of Guggenheim reached out — to Mexico,
Alaska, Chile, Africa. Behind the scenes promotional schemes
became more and more fantastic and Guggenheim engineers
ranged the world from dingy prospectors' shacks to the pal-
aces of kings and Guggenheim financial experts maneuvered
Guggenheim holdings into more and more bewildering
combinations.
From Guggenheim labor policy in the Northwest was born
the IWW; from labor policy in Latin America sprang revo-
lution. ... In Bingham, Utah, they created a town that the
conservative Engineering and Mining Journal reported was
"a sewer four miles long"; their manager there sought to cir-
cumvent labor trouble by importing Japanese and Greeks, but
the trouble came, and war raged in Bingham. The empire
grew and its financial power reached around the world.
Europe blazed; the deal in March 1915, by which Guggen-
heim copper was granted entry to Europe with British consent,
was an "ominous portent" when America was supposedly
neutral — but war profits justified top-heavy capitalization. . . .
Not without protest: the dynasty faced sordid charges of
profiteering, and it was alleged that this, in copper alone,
cost the American people $350 million.
But as the family's economic activity deteriorated from
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
596
production to promotion, so it degenerated as a cohesive social
organism. Meyer's seven sons produced but two capable
of taking part in management of the empire; actual family
control waned. Later ventures were not so successful, and
one — Chilean nitrates — threatened disaster. The story speeds
to its conclusion with a mounting sense of melodrama. . . .
A son of old Meyer establishes a foundation for "objective"
art; what would Meyer have thought of that? Or of the waste
of Guggenheim male stock which resulted when the two sons
of his granddaughter hurtled to their deaths from a penthouse?
Or of another son's "inspirational" books and lectures and
Benjamin Franklin cult? Or — oddest of all — what would he
have thought of the emergence of Grandson Harold A. Loeb,
prophet of technocracy?
Honors came to the Guggenheims, and gratitude for bene-
factions, particularly Simon's inspired establishment of the
Guggenheim fellowships. Grandson Harry became an ambas-
sador. But not benefactions nor political advancement (Gug-
genheims were ineffectual in office) could obscure the fact
that the Guggenheim sun had set. True to American tradition
of speed, the family had started, flourished and declined in
less than a hundred years; coolly, carefully Mr. O'Connor has
chronicled this phenomenon.
Great Falls, Mont. KINSEY HOWARD
The People's Debt Burden
THE N'ATIONAL DEBT AND GOVERNMENT CREDIT— FACTUAL
FINDINGS, by Paul W. Stewart, Rufus S. Tucker and Carolyn Stetson;
A Program of Action by the Committee on Government Credit. Twentieth
Century Fund. 190 pp. Price $1.73 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A PARAGRAPH FROM THE CHAPTER OF RECOMMENDATIONS PRE-
sents the primary conclusions of the Twentieth Century Fund
committee on the national debt and government credit. It is:
"We do not regard either the large increase in the public
debt or its present size as a cause for apprehension. The re-
sources of the country are undoubtedly great enough to sup-
port the present debt. But a continuance of deficit financing,
although necessary in the depths of a depression, would be
both dangerous and unnecessary if carried into a period of
recovery. It would be dangerous because continued deficits,
in the face of rising industrial activity and national income,
would weaken public confidence in the willingness of the
government to balance its budget under any conditions. It
would be unnecessary because a period of prosperity should
involve smaller expenditures and larger revenues: not only
should the budget be brought into balance but substantial
surpluses should be available to reduce the public debt. For
the nation to enter another period of deficit financing with-
out having reduced the present debt load might raise serious
questions as to the ability of the government to maintain its
credit."
Though to arrive at such a belief hardly needed the large
amount of labor that the committee's specialists, Paul W.
Stewart and Rufus S. Tucker with the assistance of Carolyn
Stetson, put into their work, their extended analysis offers a
reasoned foundation.
For all this hopefulness a federal debt of thirty-five billions
is no small matter. It took us the eleven years from 1919 to
1930 to pay off approximately nine and a quarter billions.
We did not find it easy. Yet at this rate it would take over
forty years of labor to pay off the present debt. With a will
for it we can carry the debt; but not through an economics
of non-production.
Indicating the consequences of failure to pursue the course
recommended, the report says: "Whenever a government gets
itself so heavily into debt that payment out of the usual
sources of tax revenues becomes impossible — the theoretical
end of too long continued deficits — four methods of extrica-
tion are open: repudiation, inflation, debasement of the cur-
rency, and a capital levy." As the report points out, inflation
and debasement of the currency amount to repudiation, with
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The New Deal
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(In answering advertisements
its unhappy consequences not limited to bondholders but ex-
tending to society as a whole. The phrase "capital levy" means
little, if anything, more than extending taxation. One inter-
ested in these matters, and living a life of hopes and fears in
relation to them, observes that the fiscal morals of govern-
ments make the sex morals of an alley cat seem comparatively
virtuous.
Comparisons with the situations in Great Britain and
France are an interesting part of the book. The authors, of
course, are aware of the difference in the fiscal systems of
these two countries from that of the United States. Frequently
uninformed and unintelligent comparisons of income tax rates
show a complete unawareness of this difference. It is reflected
in the fact stated in the report that: "The federal government
debt of the United States is only 65 percent of the total public
debt, while that of the United Kingdom is 82 percent and
that of France 90 percent."
Per capita, the report states, the public debt (national, state
and local) of the United States is $388, and reduced to a
dollar basis, of the United Kingdom, $869, and of France
$457. Especially considering the probable greater assistance in
production that capital gives to labor in the United States,
our load seems comparatively light. But both Great Britain
and France are unable to carry their burdens. They are in-
solvent in the sense that they are not fulfilling their promises
to pay the government of the United States. Even $388 is no
small sum; and "per capita" means every man, woman, child
and babe in a perambulator. The unproductive young and old
are a current liability whose per capita someone else must
carry.
The report presents the danger in bank holdings of over
50 percent of the federal interest bearing debt. But the re-
viewer has not noted in the report a consideration of the
possible strain on government credit of a revival of capital
requirements of industry causing higher interest rates. Our
post war experience of sharp declines in the price of govern-
ment bonds, which had been sold at a "patriotism"-stimulated
price presented that situation. Throughout, the report shows
a full awareness of the relationship ot the debt to the price
level, and in other respects is a thoroughgoing, admirable,
well written work. This review makes no attempt to indicate
its full scope. HASTINGS LYON
A Doctor's Dilemma
THE CITADEL, by A. J. Cronin. Little, Brown. 401 pp. Price $2.50 post-
paid of Suniey Graphic.
PROBABLY THE PRINTED PAGES OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS
of medicine in recent years would run into acreage. Imbedded
in them is a substantial area of invaluable but highly imper-
sonal fact. In The Citadel a novelist who is also a doctor
enters this arena, which hitherto has been approached by lay-
men chiefly in terms of complaints, by students through
statistics, and by the medical profession with denials and
forebodings. Though Dr. Cronin's book is first of all a story,
and a good one, it has an authentic ring in terms of another
kind of fact, the experience of the individual physician.
The doctor of the story, Andrew Manson, embarks at one
period or another of his career on a number of the varieties
of medical practice. At various times he is a panel doctor, a
lodge doctor, and a doctor in at first struggling, but finally
lucrative, private practice. At one time, he engages in insti-
tutional research. His final outcome, the result of experiences
which have shaken his faith in himself and his colleagues, is
group practice, an arrangement "they have amongst doctors in
America." So we do, though not to the extent that his words
may have led British readers to believe. The author keeps the
faith of the novelist by showing his story in terms of Manson,
his wife, friends and patients, without ranting or lectures.
Group practice is the experiment Manson is about to make
at the end of the story, so that it is there untested. Each of the
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
598
rest is shown in its seamy and also its better side. It will not
he hard for those who wish to do so to pick up phrases or para-
graphs which can be used out of their context to prove this
or that point about the medical systems in the British Isles.
I doubt if such an intention was in Dr. Cronin's mind. The
more fundamental question is, rather, whether the competi-
tive scramble of individual practice is feasible in modern
medicine and compatible with professional morale. The alter-
natives depicted in the book all have their drawbacks, but so
have the made-to-order medical services of the rich. The lat-
ter, in the case of Manson and other doctors of the story,
were the more disintegrating to the men who practised them.
The situations of which Dr. Cronin writes have their coun-
terparts in the United States. The Citadel does not give an
answer to questions that have vexed doctors and patients in
this country, and are likely to continue to vex them, but it
may be hoped that it will make the issues clearer to readers
who are not moved by statistics. And to these readers and also
to those who care little or not at all about more or less abstract
questions, it offers an unusually human and engrossing story.
MARY Ross
The Trend Toward Industrial Control
THE DECLINE OF COMPETITION: A STUDY OF THE EVOLUTION OF
AMERICAN INDUSTRY, by Arthur Robert Burns. McGraw-Hill. 619 pp.
Price $5 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
INDUSTRIAL EXECUTIVES, STUDENTS OF INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES,
lawyers and judges, and especially those New Deal officials
who have had or are likely to have something to do with the
regulation of industry should form study groups with Pro-
fessor Burns' book as their guide. I fear, however, that this
is the sort of a book which will not receive the attention it
deserves unless a few critics take the pains to reveal its impor-
tance. It is not an easy book to read; it proceeds inductively
from facts to theories and its theories are not startling. This
is not headline material but comes rather in the order of
required reading for those who already believe that the indus-
trial process must be understood if there is to be a rational
basis for future social progress.
I cannot speak expertly on the topic of Professor Burns'
facts but I can state that I know of no comparable study of
recent years which seems to me to be more soundly based. In
his preface, Professor Burns includes a sentence dealing with
the problem of industrial fact-finding which is pertinent and
somewhat disturbing. He writes: "I cannot, however, accept
the entire responsibility for misinterpretation. The fog of
secrecy and often of deception that hangs heavily over the
activities of large corporate units is a serious barrier to ac-
curate analysis." I think every research student who has ever
attempted to throw light upon the industrial process has come
away with the same feeling and the same sense of partial
frustration. This situation is in itself symptomatic of our
current economic crisis: we wish to solve our problem by
the use of facts but those who control our vast economic
enterprise do not welcome the disclosure of the relevant facts.
But it is my opinion, I repeat, that Professor Burns has
found the facts he needs to demonstrate his major thesis
which is that free competition in modern industry tends grad-
ually to diminish, and that this trend cannot be halted by
mere anti-trust laws. The various policies which have con-
tributed to this transition within capitalism constitute the main
chapters of this work and these are: trade associations, price
leadership, sharing the market, stabilization of individual
prices, price discriminations, non-price competition, and the
integration of industrial operations. He then discusses the
policies of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and
its effort to control industrial competition.
The studies which combine to furnish the background of
this section of the volume have occupied the author's attention
since 1926 and they have led him finally to a basic proposition
(In answering advertisements
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seventy photographs convey the beauty of the region and
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256 pages. $3.50.
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Comprehensive and definitive study of North Carolina
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Hugh Hartshorne, of Yale, will necessitate many
changes in procedure. Cloth, $2.75
THEY DARED TO LIVE
By Robert M. Bartlett. In thirty-five dramatic bio-
graphical sketches, the author deftly immortalizes our
modern heroes. These are men and women who lived
dangerously, blazed new trails, and won triumphant
faith. From Jane Addams to Stefan Zweig, Kagawa to
Debs — on and on goes the glorious list of men who
dared to live! Cloth, $1.25
THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY
By Ordway Tead. The President of the American
Society of Management sees Democracy as a dynamic
progressive way of life enibodying the finest concepts of
Christian living. Here is focused the challenge that
the citizen and business man must meet: how to recon-
cile our ideals to the demands of business life.
Cloth, $1.25
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By Max Hunterberg. A timely study of anti-Semi-
tism today, its root, cause and cure, through re-educa-
tion, with an introduction by Dr. Henry S. Leiper, an
Executive Secretary of Federal Council of Churches of
Christ in America. Cloth, $1.50
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DOCTORS, DOLLARS, AND DISEASE
Who gets adequate medical care? Would insur-
ance secure proper care for everyone?
READJUSTMENTS REQUIRED FOR RECOVERY
Is recovery here to stay? Is there danger of In-
flation?
COLONIES, TRADE, AND PROSPERITY
Are colonies really an asset? Is world peace helped
by trade agreements?
SAVING OUR SOIL
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(In answering advertisements
with which all thoughtful citizens must now be concerned. I
shall allow him to state this proposition in his own language:
"The state cannot by refraining from positive control obtain
the benefits of free competition. On the other hand, state
participation in price policies presents profound and complex
problems both economic and political. Yet some such partici-
pation is inevitable." The last two chapters of the study deal
with this complicated question of social control of industry
both in terms of objectives and of means.
Can we have satisfactory industrial control and also main-
tain freedom? This ultimate question, upon which the fate
of the democratic ideal now rests, Professor Burns does not
elaborate. What he does is to furnish the reader with a calm,
reasoned perspective within which this more philosophical
question may be discussed. In short, he has performed the true
function of the research scholar.
New Yorl^ School of Social Wor/( EDUARD C. LINDEMAN
"Strategic Planning"
PLANNED SOCIETY, edited by Findlay MacKenzie. With foreword by
Lewis Mumford. Prentice Hall, 989 pp. Price $5 postpaid of Surrey
Graphic.
FOR SCHOLARS AND PROFESSIONAL PLANNERS, THIS SYMPOSIUM
can be recommended as a shortcut to reorientation, a sort of
review of their subject with the possibility in every chapter of
some new fertilization of ideas. Thirty-five eminent writers,
ranging from Arthur Morgan to Stalin himself, here present
their conflicting or complementary views of national planning.
The book as a whole is not a mere concatenation, but has a
plot, beginning with primitive and ancient systems and com-
ing down to specific modern problems such as land use and
monetary planning, and the prevailing concepts of fascist,
communist and democratic sanctions.
Like all symposia, this volume attempts no meeting of
minds. There is room for no rebuttals. The reader is jolted
from topic to topic, each handled with ability and readability
by an expert who rejects some or all of the presuppositions of
the other experts. This is quite proper for students of plan-
ning, and particularly for scientists and social scientists; it
helps to prevent sluggishness of the intellectual liver.
The general reader who is not frightened off by the size of
the volume, will find many of the papers readable and stimu-
lating. He may also be comforted by the fact that planning is
not quite so inexorable a terror as he might have feared. To
be sure, there are chapters of stark, Howardscottian produc-
tion programming, with a light mention of truly appalling
requirements of knowledge and power. But there are also
chapters explaining various aspects of the little known doc-
trine of strategic planning, from which one clinging to the
hope of freedom may take heart. All is not yet lost.
Washington, D. C. DAVID CUSHMAN COYLE
Restive India
THE VANISHING EMPIRE — INDIA A VOLCANO IN ERUPTION, by Chanian
Lai. Brentano's. 248 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IT IS REGRETTABLE THAT MOST OF THE INFORMATION ON BRITISH
India reaching the American public is strongly colored one
way or the other. India, with its 350 million people striving
for freedom from the British rule, represents one of the most
crucial problems of this day and age, and any disinterested
study would find its public in this country. This public has
been duped, however, by propaganda, so often that publica-
tions which try to "make a point" are bound to pass un-
observed.
Chaman Lai openly declares that his book is meant to be a
challenge to Britain's "vanishing" empire. The dedication "to
the American people . . . whose own struggle for independence
against India's oppressors, the British" is frequently referred
to, will hardly serve as captatio benevolentiae. Yet the straight-
forward and sincere method of presentation will appeal to the
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC,)
600
most critical reader. The book is a compilation of clippings
and quotations from motley sources, skillfully arranged
around a number of political theses. While each of the points
stressed by the author is thus covered pretty closely, less care
is applied to the choice of authorities quoted — a fact which
accounts for a certain discrepancy between quotations from
well known authors and those from sources more or less
obscure. Most of the statements depicting the cruelty of
colonial rule, horrifying as they are, appear to be taken from
a time some seven years ago, when a wave of acute violence
swept the country. However, as things stand today, bloody
disorders may break out again at any time, and Mr. Lai's
study will do its part in furnishing the background material
necessary for the understanding of Indian history in the mak-
ing. Political considerations may induce public opinion in
democratic countries to favor the status quo with regard to
the British Empire whose collapse might spell disaster for
democracy and liberalism. But human sympathy will continue
to be with those millions of starving peasants and workers
who fight desperately for the betterment of their appallingly
low standards. To arouse and stimulate these human sympa-
thies is the merit of the present book.
It is rather curious to note that Mr. Lai had to turn to
Tokyo to find a printer for this strongly anti-British document.
Moreover, he reveals the fact that quite a number of Indian
Nationalists have found shelter in Japan. Their activities seem
to be in accord with the Pan-Asia doctrine which is propa-
gated by certain Japanese quarters with a view to ridding Asia
of western tutelage— for the lasting benefit of Imperial Japan.
ERNEST O. HAUSER
Real American Speaking
FORTY YEARS ON MAIN STREET, by William Allen White. Com-
piled by Russell H. Fitzgibbon from the columns of the Emparia Gazette;
with foreword by Frank C. Clough, managing editor. Illustrated. Farrar
and Rinehart. 409 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
MASK AND ANONYMOUS HIMSELF BEHIND EDITORIAL "WE'S"
and all the other newspaper hocus-pocus as he may, no man
can write editorials and other stuff for half a century without
thoroughly exposing his own personality. Likely as not he
does so more than if he signed it every day; for by-lines make
a writer pose self-consciously. Gather the writings together
after such a period of however unintentional and unconscious
self-disclosure and you'll stand the man forth, essentially as
naked as a worm. Especially if he's William Allen White,
who in my opinion never wrote a deliberately insincere syl-
lable in his life. Mightily mistaken sometimes, but all the
time as honest as daylight. And in the main keen-eyed and
generally hard to fool. Quick at spotting bunk. So, more or
less intentionally on the part of the compilers, his colleagues
on the staff of the Emporia Gazette, this is an autobiography,
of a man who all his life has lived and observed and chatted
entertainly, discerningly, humanly, in and about a most
American of American small cities. There is nothing more
American than the life in the Kansas that White has seen and
written about and participated in, all his years. A foreigner,
reading this more or less chronologically sequential series of
White's newspaper writing, will see hundred-percent-American
life being lived, appreciated, inwardly discerned too, by one
of its finer character-products.
Incidentally, he or anyone will see how the rest of the
country, yes, and the rest of the world too, has looked to such
a man, with such a background and such a standpoint. Poli-
tics large and local; characters important and unimportant;
art and literature, artists and literary fellers; religion and
philosophy; joy and sorrow . . . "all for the average man of
today," as Walt Whitman wrote. Some of it heart-wrenching
in its poignancy — no one who reads will ever forget, for it
will be a classic in American letters — White's piece about
Mary, his daughter, killed in a horseback accident. Some of it
is side-splitting in its humor; it's full of thumbnail portraits
(In answering advertisements please
601
A CURE
FOR THE "PROBLEM-DRINKER"
TO DRINK
OR NOT
TO DRINK
By CHARLES H.DURFEE
with a foreword by Arthur H.
Haggles, M.D., Butler Hospital,
Providence, R.I.
"Laymen, social workers and mental
therapists will find this book a most
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their alcohol problems are theoretical,
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has blazed the trail along which mental
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of achieving much. I have read the
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LONGMANS . 114 Fifth Ave., New York
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PLANNED SOCIETY
YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW
Edited by Findlay MacKenzie
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field Recommended by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
989 pages. $5.00. 2ND PRINTING.
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/. The population of the United Stales mill
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and quips to puncture stuffed shirts. All of it is vivid with
life color. It would be a fine thing (I often have thought) if
Bill White would buckle down and write his reminiscences,
an honest-to-God autobiography. Maybe he couldn't; such
men find it difficult to concentrate in the looking-glass. Here
anyway are the makings of it, jotted down spontaneously as
he has gone along. There wouldn't be much to add; it would
be a pity for him to spoil it by creating an effigy. Here's a
real man, a reg'lar feller, one of America's best, disclosing
both us and himself, hardly knowing that he is doing it.
JOHN PALMER GAVIT
But Is Nazism Really Capitalistic?
THE SPIRIT AND STRUCTURE OF GERMAN FASCISM, by Robert
A. Brady. Viking Press. 420 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
IN SPITE OF THE COMMENDING FOREWORD BY PROFESSOR L.ASKI,
this reviewer is afraid that in his diligent work the author
has fundamentally misunderstood the spirit and even the
structure of German fascism. How relieving it would be were
one able to gather the present tragedy of the German people
into a simple formula like the one Professor Brady offers.
"Monopoly capitalism" has bought itself a skilled agitator to
entice the German workers off the straight left way, and as
an obedient tool of his masters, Hitler now delivers the goods
he has been paid to procure. Unfortunately, reality hardly ever
is as simple as that, and the sweeter this construction of Nazi
history and present functioning sounds to the ears of ardent
socialists, the more it is apt to lead them into decisive errors
of policy in the face of the actual social developments in Nazi
(In answering advertisements
Germany. The author is at great pains to give a complete
picture of the mechanism by which it has become possible to
run a highly educated, socially and mentally developed nation
as on the strings of a puppet show.
He has laboriously studied all the single facts, and their
presentation may give valuable information to students of
social technique in general and of the German state economy
in particular. But as a work of objective and scientific criti-
cism, the book shows a regrettable error in method. The
assumption that the deus ex machina of this puppet show is
none other than that old malefactor of the Marxian concep-
tion of history, monopoly capitalism, stands not at the end,
but at the beginning of the author's observations of facts.
From this secure viewpoint, all the little biases of Hitlerism
for such ideas as nation, race, the warlike spirit of a people's
community unified by common blood and soil, all these dwin-
dle into mere accessories. They are purely instrumental to the
one and single problem, "to achieve that discipline of the
working classes which is required to maintain profitability
under monopoly capitalism," as Professor Laski puts it. Thus,
in describing the many agencies of the Nazi structure, the
author cannot help but do some stressing and glossing over
of facts according to theory. For instance, in defining the
functions of the "Labor Trustees," their activities in the
interest of employers are set into high relief, whereas their
political objective as spies and executives for the Nazi party
as against workers and employers alike is very much out of
the author's picture. Equally, the perfect freedom of employ-
ers to regulate labor conditions in individual contracts, free
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC^
603
FRONTIER
Reports and interprets the proposed partition of
Palestine and the much discussed future of a
Jewish State
... IN A SERIES OF SIGNIFICANT ARTICLES (TO CON-
TINUE IN FORTHCOMING ISSUES) FRONTIER HAS
ALREADY PUBLISHED:
Facts Behind Partition • Jewish State Ex-
amined • New Boundary Lines • Cross-
Currents at the Zionist Congress • Documents
Maps • Pictures
Jewish Frontier also announces for early publi-
cation . . .
JEWS IN POLAND. SOVIET RUSSIA AND
OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES— A BRIL-
LIANT AND MEMORABLE SERIES BY
JAKOB LESTSHINSKY
DILEMMA OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO
BY CLAUDE McKAY AND GEORGE S.
SCHUYLER
AND ARTICLES ON JEWISH WHITE COLLAR CLASS IN AMER-
ICA • DO REFUGEES FROM GERMANY ADAPT THEMSELVES?
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ECONOMIST VIEWS THE ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY OF A JEWISH
STATE • AN ESSAY ON TOMAS MASARYK • REGULAR
FRONTIER CHRONICLES ON PALESTINE, DIASPORA JEWRY,
WORLD LABOR.
Can you afford to mi-- articles such as the fol-
lowing published in FRONTIER from month
to month ?
Poisoning Minds of German Children Klaus Mann
Franco Learns From Hitler Press Extracts
Supreme Court and Religious Liberty Felix S. Cohen
Homage to Louis D. Brandeis A Special Number
The Sharecropper Norman Thomas
I Visit a Soviet Kolkohz David Pinsiki
Is a Labor Party Coming? /. B. S. Hardman
Fascism Disrupts British Jewry William Zukerman
Jewish and Arab Rights Abraham Revusky
Culture and the U. S. S. R Max Brod
What I Represent Thomas Mann
Essay on Anti-Semitism Arnold Zweig
Intellectual Dilemma Maurice Samuel
To Jewish Youth Martin Buber
Nehru and India Robert Weltsch
Arab Political Arena Michael Asaf
Jewish Labor Views Arab Labor A Document
We Return to Seafaring Special Supplement
New Life in Palestine Julius Braunthal
Franklin Forgery Exposed Chas. A. Beard
Soviet Constitution Hayim Greenberg
The Moscow Trials Marie Syrkin
Jews in World Congress Hayim Fineman
Jewish Workers in Trade Unions Elsie Cluck
Prejudice and Our Minority Groups Isidore Abramowitz
(Issues containing these are available at 10 cents)
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SURVEY readers.
York City_
from any trade union supervision, is duly stated. But nowhere
can be found a similarly precise statement of the legal and
administrative limitations set on the employers' profits by
price and dividend restrictions, by tampering with their
right to hire and fire, to buy cheap and to sell dear, by bind-
ing orders to produce not what is most gainful, but what
serves autarchy, even by compelling them to incur huge debts
for capital structures devoid of any but militaristic considera-
tions — all these traits that have made the German state
economy look more and more like the Russian, but for the
fact that the privileged economic positions have not changed
hands quite as drastically under Hitler as under Stalin.
The book leaves us with the conception that, after having
realized the business men's paradise in Germany, monopoly
capitalism is going to propagate it the world over unless the
workers unite internationally. It is to be expected that the
failure of the above explanation to come near the spirit of
Hitlerism will some day become apparent. There happen to
be other forces in the world besides the "profit motive," and
the sooner the whole of European fascism is discovered to be
one of these other forces, the easier will it be to find the angle
from which to overcome these political diseases.
TONI STOLPER
Background Reading
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT, by Edward R.
Lewis. Macmillan. 561 pp. Price $5 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
THE BOOK UNDER REVIEW IS, IT MUST BE STATED AT THE OUTSET,
a very worthwhile contribution to a much neglected field.
Indeed, it is perhaps the first treatment of that field even
approaching adequacy. It is written with sound scholarship,
includes an admirable bibliography, a useful list of cases, and
a very good index.
The author's philosophy is eclectic, and his general ap-
proach balanced and sober. The writing is indeed not inspir-
ing, and at times connections are not well made. The author
has, perhaps, tried to include too much material, with the
result that he has sometimes given less than adequate treat-
ment to major figures. There are, however, many useful di-
gests of the theories of statesmen, reformers and social critics,
while historical backgrounds are carefully sketched. Yet at-
mosphere, the climate of opinion, and personality, the tem-
perature of individual thinkers, somehow escape.
The work is emphatically a history of immediately pur-
posive thought, rather than of effective philosophy, and one
might suggest that the concentration on thought in action as
against systematic theorizing involves some lack of balance.
Certainly there seems to be an overemphasis on the develop-
ment of political theory through constitutional interpretation
by the courts, as well as undue attention to the ideas of re-
formers of the machinery of democracy. As a consequence,
while the work may be a permanent contribution to the
problem of the relation of theory and practice in America, it
still leaves a gap to be filled in the analysis of systematic
and academic thought. Indeed, one has at times the feeling
that the author deliberately slighted the value of the works
of system-builders. Nevertheless, the book is one that the
student of the period will find invaluable.
THOMAS I. COOK
University tif California at Los Angeles
For Government by "the Better Sort"
THE END OF DEMOCRACY, by Ralph Adams Cram. Marshall Jones.
261 pp. Price $3 postpaid of Survey Graphic.
A DISTINGUISHED ARCHITECT GREATLY INTERESTED IN MEDIAEVAL
culture here voices again his dissatisfaction with modern
democracy. He thinks that life, liberty, happiness, had a better
chance in the best days of the Middle Ages and that progress
receded with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial
and the French Revolutions. The power of mechanics and
(In amu/cring advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC,)
604
money brought to the top vulgarian capitalists and charlatan
politicians, the mouthpieces of proletafiana misled by catch-
words like "equality." Sooner or later the force of democracy
had to end. Hence the swing to dictatorship.
Mr. Cram rejects autocracy, even though a bias in the direc-
tion of Rome and Berlin may be discerned. He wants a
Functional State (not necessarily totalitarian) with citizens
grouped by vocations and electing the chief public officials
by the votes of such groups. His hope is in a "middle class,"
meaning by this small farmers, small tradesmen and all the
professional people. He proposes a Constitution which would
keep the first twelve amendments and drop all the later ones,
the former having been "made by statesmen and gentlemen,"
the latter "by politicians."
This political insight is not very impressive. Though de-
mocracy is loaded with faults, Americans who want something
better are hardly likely to be persuaded by Mr. Cram. They
may disagree with him as to who are "the better sort"; and
here they may be no more mistaken than he is himself. The
thinkers whom he names with admiration are, with a few
exceptions, notoriously reactionary. He quotes most frequently
choice outpourings of hate from Spengler's "Voting is a mere
substitute for arms" (italics ours). That mankind took so ut-
terly false a turn in rejecting the leadership of the experts in
Rome centuries ago is more open to question than he seems
to think. To play up modern civilization as radically vile and
to slight its attempts to work out sounder conceptions of
human dignity is as misleading as it would be to rehearse
only the tragic blunders of authoritarians.
HENRY NEUMANN
Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture
Our Aging Literary Realists
AFTER THE GENTEEL TRADITION— AMERICAN WRITERS SINCE 1910;
edited by Malcolm Cowley. Norton. 270 pp. Price $2.75 postpaid of
Survey Graphic.
THESE FOURTEEN APPRAISALS, BY A GROUP OF CRITICS IN THE
main much younger than the writers with whom they are
concerned, make up a stimulating and valuable book. If to a
reader in his forties there are moments when a phrase or a
sentence seems a bit too much like an inscription on a tomb-
stone, that is counterbalanced by the general soundness of
critical base, and a complete lack of affectation or pontifical
smugness. Furthermore, these younger critics gracefully pay
tribute to the group who, through revolt against bigotry and
prejudice "made it possible for Americans to write candidly
and unaffectedly about their own lives and intimate emotions"
and "broke a road for the new writers who will some day
follow them." What they sometimes miss is just how impor-
tant the actual work of these men was to their own
generation.
There is not space here to go into the virtues of individual
pieces. John Chamberlain writes of Theodore Dreiser; Robert
Cantwell of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis; Lionel Trilling
of Willa Gather and Eugene O'Neill; Bernard Smith of Van
Wyck Brooks; Newton Arvin of Carl Sandburg; Robert
Morss Lovett of Sherwood Anderson; Louis Kronenberger
of H. L. Mencken; Peter Munro Jack of The James Branch
Cabell Period; Hildegarde Planner of Two Poets: Jeffers and
Millay; Malcolm Cowley of Dos Passes; John Peale Bishop
of Hemingway; and Hamilton Basso of Thomas Wolfe.
Malcolm Cowley, the editor, is responsible for the foreword
and the postscript, each of them excellent, and also for the
informative and at times witty Literary Calendar, 1911 to 1930.
The book deserves a far wider audience than it will, in all
probability, find. But I hope that it may at least make its way
into some of the English courses in our universities, for it
would dispel much of the academic haze that has already
gathered about the period of America's literary coming of age.
MAXWELL ALEY
A Womans Press Book
THE BOOK OF FESTIVALS
Dorothy Gladys Spicer
Foreword by Dr. John H. Finley
A source book for community workers on the
festivals and folkways of thirty-five nationalities
including America.
Comprehensive and authentic data for use in the
celebration of nationality holidays and holy days
and the interpretation of cultural backgrounds.
THE WOMANS PRESS
600 Lexington Avenue
New York, N. Y.
$3
CAN SOCIETY REHABILITATE
THIS CLASS OF CRIMINALS?
Do true professional thieves ever quit, "pack in the racket"? Can
shoplifters and pickpockets, 75% of whom are drug addicts, but
the mental aristocrats of the underworld, ever be reformed? Here is
a remarkable description of their profession, their habits, their plight,
written by a professional thief — truly one of the year's notable
social documents. At all bookstores, $2.50.
THE PROFESSIONAL
BY A
PROFESSIONAL
THIEF
Annotated by
Edwin H. Sutherland
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
The Newest Information upon Vocational
Subjects is Reported Regularly in the
OCCUPATIONAL INDEX
OCCUPATIONAL
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with a consolidated index to
useful occupational informa-
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origin that are not indexed
elsewhere.
Descriptive annotations as-
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PATIONAL INDEX in determin-
ing the suitability of the
material for the needs to be
Each issue of the OCCUPATIONAL INDEX contains be-
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The OCCUPATIONAL INDEX is owned and edited by The
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605
Harlem— At Home
II. NOTES FROM AN AMERICAN WANDER-YEAR
His NAME WAS MALONEY AND HE WAS THE HOUSING EXPERT
employed by a large New York charity organization to in-
vestigate the tenements in which its clients lived. As a favor
he let me accompany him on a day's routine tour of a dozen
addresses.
The first was on East 1 16 Street. On the way he explained
to me, above the roar of the Lexington Avenue subway,
what one might expect in Harlem.
He said, "God knows the home relief and private charity
budgets for rentals are inadequate enough, but they're ridic-
ulous for Harlem. The Negro, because he's a Negro, can't
live anywhere else, so the demand for apartments here ex-
ceeds the supply. The landlord has the Negro where it hurts
and he jacks the rents up sky-high."
We walked from the subway station to our address. The
outside of the building we were to investigate was indistin-
guishable from the thousands of other tenements in the city
— five stories, brick, dirty, jutting its stone steps into a street
crowded with playing children and hurrying adults, almost
all of whom were colored.
"Vertical fire escapes," said Maloney as we walked in.
"Illegal to put on a building since the Tenement House Law
of 1901, and illegal to keep on a building since a couple of
years ago. In a fire the face of the bricks gets red-hot and
reflects on the iron rungs of the ladder so that a person com-
ing down can't hold on. More people have been killed falling
off those damn things than have been burned up inside."
When I stepped into the dark interior of the building I
could see almost nothing. Through the murk I could make
out a stairway rising on one side of the long narrow hall, and
could feel rotten boards under my feet. What the hall lacked
in light, however, it made up in smell.
Even before my eyes were accustomed to the darkness
Maloney was busy jotting something in his notebook.
"Plenty of violations," he said as he wrote. "No lights in
the halls, staircase and walls not fire retarded, wooden bal-
usters, unsafe stairs. And a dime gets you a dollar that the
cellar ceiling isn't fire retarded. We'll take a look at it later.
That's where the fires start. Our place is on the third floor
west. Let's go."
We climbed the dark stairs while I tried to avoid putting
my hand on the greasy rail. By the time we reached the third
floor I could see where I was going.
Maloney thumped vigorously on the west door at the back
of the third floor hall. After a time it was opened. In the
doorway stood a young Negro, barefooted, wearing a dirty
Mother Hubbard. Two youngsters were clinging to her legs.
Maloney said, "I'm from the Amalgamated Charities.
I'm the man your caseworker, Miss Isaacs, told you about.
Can we look at your apartment?"
The woman's dull eyes showed no flicker of understanding.
"No comprendo," she said.
"Hell," muttered Maloney, "Puerto Rican." Then aloud to
the woman, with many gestures, "Miss Isaacs sent me. I want
to see your place. Inspector, see, inspector, Miss Isaacs."
The woman slowly withdrew from the doorway and mo-
tioned for us to come in. We stepped over the threshold into
the combination kitchen and living room. The sour rancid
odor of animal fat and stale human sweat which I noticed in
the hall was magnified tenfold in the apartment.
We took a couple of steps into the room and looked around.
There was a sink, a two-burner gas stove, an ancient ice box,
two chairs, and a table with the remnants of food on it.
Frightened but curious, four children were taking shelter
behind their mother. Three were barefooted, all were clothed
by ALFRED FRIENDLY
in dirty rags. The youngest, a boy of three or four, was
mechanically licking a piece of sausage rind. His black face
was shiny with the grease.
The woman herself was less than thirty. She had a half-
Spanish, half-Indian cast to her basically negroid features.
She was six or seven months pregnant.
Maloney addressed himself to the oldest child, a girl of
about ten. She had her mother's heavy features but was con-
siderably lighter in color.
"Can you speak English?" Maloney asked her.
The girl nodded.
"Will you show us the toilet?"
The child led the way out of the kitchen and back into the
hall. On the east side, in the middle, were two doors, one next
to the other. She opened one and revealed the granddaddy,
the prime ancestor, of all water closets. Its square wooden
seat was broken, the floor was littered with filthy paper and
the cast-iron bowl was beyond description. Maloney hesitated,
but finally screwed up the courage to put his hand on the
chain and pull it. A thin trickle of water swished about.
"Who else uses this toilet besides your family?" he asked.
The girl pointed to the door at the front end of the hall
on the west side.
"Them," she said.
"It isn't legal, is it?" I said to Maloney.
"No. But if I had a nickel for every shared toilet in New
York I'd make Rockefeller look like a pauper."
We went back into the kitchen and then into the two
other rooms of the apartment, both of which had small win-
dows giving onto an unpainted airshaft, the bottom of
which was invisible under a litter of rubbish. To put one's
nose out of the windows was to risk asphyxiation. The view
consisted of the dirty wall of the next building, joined solidly
at the front and back of the shaft, shaped like an elongated
hexagon, to the tenement in which we stood. The shaft let
in neither light nor air. With the electric lights off the two
rooms behind the kitchen-living room were practically dark.
The apartment had no bath.
"A guy got a prize back in 1879," Maloney explained, "for
designing these cemetery stuffers. Before that they built rail-
road tenements — one flush against the next without a shaft,
so that each apartment had anywhere from two to four win-
dowless rooms. This type we're in is a 'dumbbell.' The air-
shaft acts as a swell flue and gives a good draft for fires."
Maloney said, "How much rent do you pay?"
The child asked her mother and then replied, "Seventeen-
fifty a month."
"How much more do you get from the relief?"
Another conversation between mother and daughter. Then,
"Eighteen dollars two times a month."
Maloney sighed and hunched his coat higher on his shoul-
ders as if he had before him an unpleasant task.
He said, "Where's your husband, your marido?"
The woman understood, but only shrugged her shoulders.
He told the child, "Ask your mother if she could find as
good a place as this for the same money if you had to move
out of here."
When the Negro heard the translation she shook her head
vigorously.
"She say all places too much rent, can't get better place
this cheap," the girl reported.
"I was afraid of that," Maloney remarked as we marched
downstairs. "The real estate boys may yell about vacancies,
but you try to find a place where you can live decently if
you're black and can't pay over seventeen-fifty a month."
606
Traveler's Notebook
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THE FACE OF LONDON, by Harold Philip Cluj.u. Dutton. 582 pp.
Price $3.50.
A bird's eye view of the growth, progress and development
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MY TAHITI, by Robert Dean Frisbie. Little. Brown. 291 pp. Price $2.50.
An account of the author's five years in Tahiti in the early
1920's.
AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LONDON, by William Kent (edited). Dutton.
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A conspectus of London lore and information.
HAND-ME-DOWN, by Student Tourist Class Assn. Author, c/o Holland-
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SOUTH AMERICAN' JOURNALS 1858-1859. by George Augustus Pea-
body. Peabody Mus., Salem, Mass. 226 pp. Price $5; de luxe $7.50.
Edited from the original mss. by his friend John Charles
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A WAYFARER IN ESTONIA. LATVIA AND LITHUANIA, by E. C.
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An introduction to travel in these three Baltic States.
MOSCOW, 1937, by Lion Feuchtwanger. From the German by Irene
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The author's personal impressions of Moscow during a
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GREAT MOTHER FOREST, by Attilio Gatti. Scribner. 335 pp. Price
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An account of the adventures and observations of the
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CHINA AT WORK, by Rudolf P. Hommel. John Day for the Bucks
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INN-FIRES AND LAUGHTER, by Amy Armour Smith. Putnam. 350 pp.
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THE YACHTSMAN'S ENGLAND, by Frank G. G. Carr. Lippincott.
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PARIS AND ITS ENVIRONS, by Karl Baedeker. Scribner. 20th rev. ed.
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A SUMMER IN HAWAII, by Caroline Grotc. Christopher. 214 pp.
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MASSACHUSETTS: A GUIDE TO ITS PLACES AND PEOPLE, compiled by
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VERMONT: A GUIDE TO THE GREEN MT. STATE. Project of the WPA.
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LET ME SHOW YOU VERMONT, by Charles Edward Crane with
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THE BOOK OF THE STATES VOL II— Book I 1937— A handbook
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EDGE OF TAGS DESERT, by Mabel Dodge Luhan. Harcourt, Brace.
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The author tells of her introduction to Taos and desert life.
THREE DESERTS, by C. S. Jarvis. Dutton. Price $3.
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SOUTH BY THUNDERBIRD, by Hudson Strode. Random House.
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Impressions of South America.
VOTED FIRST
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hundreds of tourists, by shipboard
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Detailed Information from all leading tourist and travel
agencies.
SOUTH AFRICA
The World's ''Most Interesting
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Ij you are going to Florida
Live in the small, charming hometown of Brooksville,
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Brooksville, one of the oldest towns of Florida, lies among
the hills, rich with beautiful live oaks, magnolia and other
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This house is located at 43 North
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back screened porch; new modeled
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This house is two miles west of
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bath; is in good condition. S3,000
For Further Particulars Address
JOHN PATTERSON, Cashier
First National Bank Brooksville, Fla.
(In answering adreriisemems flense mention SURVEY GRAPHIC^
607
INFORMATIVE CONTENT OF EDUCATION
(Continued from page 559)
urgent need of being either reconditioned or superannu-
ated. In this advancing world the reconditioning of both the
medical and the scholastic practitioner is becoming a very
urgent problem indeed, but it is not one that I can deal with
here. Presently this section will be devoting its attention to
adult education and then I hope the whole question of pro-
fessional and technical refreshment will be ventilated.
And there is another matter also closely allied to this ques-
tion of the rejuvenation of teachers, at which I can only
glance now, and that is the bringing of school books up to
date. In this informative section of school work there is hardly
a subject in which knowledge is not being vigorously revised
and added to. But our school work does not follow up the
contemporary digesting of knowledge. Still less do our school
libraries. They are ten, fifteen years out of date with much
of their information. Our prison libraries, by the by, are even
worse. I was told the other day of a virtuous prisoner who
wanted to improve his mind about radio. The prison had a
collection of technical works made for such an occasion and
the latest book on radio was dated 1920. There is, I have been
told, an energetic New School Books Association at work in
this field, doing what it can to act in concert with those all
too potent authorities who frame our examination syllabuses.
I am all for burning old school books. Some day perhaps we
shall have school books so made that at the end of ten or
twelve years, let us say, they will burst into flames and inflict
severe burns upon any hands in which they find themselves.
But at present that is a little — Utopian. It is even more
applicable to the next stage of knowledge to which we are
now coming.
THIS STAGE REPRESENTS OUR LAST 1000 HOURS AND ROUGHLY I
will call it the upper form or upper standard stage. It is really
the closing phase of the available school period. Some of the
matter I have marked for the history of this grade might per-
haps be given in grade B and vice versa. We have still a lot
to do if we are to provide even a skeleton platform for the
mind of our future citizen. He has still much history to learn
before his knowledge can make an effective contact with his
duties as a voter. You see I am still reserving four tenths of
the available time, that is to say nearly 400 hours for history.
But now we are presenting a more detailed study of such
phenomena as the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, the
rise of Russia, the history of the Baltic, the rise and fall of
the Spanish power, the Dutch, the first and second British
Empires, the belated unifications of Germany and Italy. Then
as I have written we want our 'modern citizen to have some
grasp of the increasing importance of economic changes in
history and the search for competent economic direction and
also of the leading theories of individualism, socialism, the
corporate state, communism.
For the next five-and-twenty years now the ordinary man
all over the earth will be continually confronted with these
systems of ideas. They are complicated systems with many
implications and applications. Indeed they are aspects of life
rather than systems of Ideas. But we send out our young
people absolutely unprepared for the heated and biased inter-
pretations they will encounter. We hush it up until they are
in the thick of it. And can we complain of the consequences?
The most the poor silly young things seem able to make of
it is to be violently and self-righteously Anti-something or
other. Anti-Red, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Fascist. The more ignor-
ant you are the easier it is to be an Anti. To hate something
without having anything substantial to put against it. Blame
something else. A special sub-section of history in this grade
should be a course in the history of war, which is always
written and talked about by the unwary as though it had
always been the same thing, while as a matter of fact — except
for its violence — it has changed profoundly with every change
in social, political and economic life. Clearly parallel to this
history our young people need now a more detailed and ex-
plicit acquaintance with world geography, with the different
types of population in the world and the developed and un-
developed resources of the globe. The devastation of the
world's forests, the replacement of pasture by sand deserts
through haphazard cultivation, the waste and exhaustion of
natural resources, coal, petrol, water, that is now going on,
the massacre of important animals, whales, penguins, seals,
food fish, should be matters of universal knowledge and
concern.
Then our new citizens have to understand something of
the broad elements in our modern social structure. They
should be given an account of the present phase of com-
munication and trade, of production and invention and above
all they need whatever plain knowledge is available about the
conventions of property and money. Upon these interrelated
conventions human society rests, and the efficiency of their
working is entirely dependent upon the general state of mind
throughout the world. We know now that what used to be
called the inexorable laws of political economy and the laws
of monetary science, are really no more than rash generaliza-
tions about human behavior, supported by a maximum of
pompous verbiage and a minimum of scientific observation.
Most of our young people come on to adult life, to employ-
ment, business and the rest of it, blankly ignorant even of
the way in which money has changed slavery and serfdom
into wages employment and of how its fluctuations in value
make the industrial windmills spin or flag. They are not
even warned of the significance of such words as inflation or
deflation, and so the wage earners are the helpless prey at
every turn towards prosperity of the savings-snatching finan-
cier. Any plausible monetary charlatan can secure their ignor-
ant votes. They know no better. They cannot help themselves.
Yet the subject of property and money — together they make
one subject because money is only the fluid form of property
— is scarcely touched upon in any stage in the education of
any class in our community. They know nothing about it;
they are as innocent as young lambs and born like them for
shearing.
AND NOW HERE YOU WILL SEE I HAVE A VERY SPECIAL PANEL.
This I have called Personal Sociology. Our growing citizen
has reached an age of self-consciousness and self-determina-
tion. He is on the verge of adolescence. He has to be initiated.
Moral training does not fall within the scope of the informa-
tive content of teaching. Already the primary habits of
truthfulness, frankness, general honesty, communal feeling,
helpfulness and generosity will or will not have been fostered
and established in the youngster's mind by the example of
those about him. A mean atmosphere makes mean people, a
too competitive atmosphere makes greedy, self-glorifying peo-
ple, a cruel atmosphere makes fierce people, but this issue of
moral tone does not concern us now here. But it does concern
us that by adolescence the time has arrived for general ideas
about one's personal relationship to the universe to be faced.
The primary propositions of the chief religious and philoso-
phical interpretations of the world should be put as plainly
and impartially as possible before our young people. They
will be asking those perennial questions of adolescence —
whence and why and whither. They will have to face, almost
at once, the heated and exciting propagandas of theological
and sceptical partisans — pro's and anti's. So far as possible
we ought to provide a ring of clear knowledge for these in-
evitable fights. And also, as the more practical aspect of the
question, What am I to do with my life? I think we ought
to link with our general study of social structure a study of
social types which will direct attention to the choice of a
608
SURVEY GRAPHIC
metier. In what spirit will you face the world and what sort
of job do you feel like? This subject of Personal Sociology as it
is projected here is the informative equivalent of a confirma-
tion class. It says to everyone: "There are the conditions
under which you face your world." The response to these
questions, the determination of the will, is however not within
our present scope. That is a matter for the religious teacher,
for intimate friends and for the inner impulses of the indi-
vidual. But our children must have the facts.
Finally, you will see that I have apportioned some time,
roughly two tenths of our 1000 hours, in this grade to the
acquisition of specialized knowledge. Individuality is becom-
ing conscious of itself and specialization is beginning.
THUS I BUDGET, SO TO SPEAK, FOR OUR 2400 HOURS OF INFORMA-
tive teaching. We have brought our young people to the
upper form, the upper standard. Most of them are now going
into employment or special training and so taking on a role
in the collective life. But there remain some very essential
things which cannot be brought into school teaching, not
through any want of time, but because of the immaturity
of the growing mind. If we are to build a real modern civil-
ization we must go on with definite informative instruction
into and even beyond adolescence. Children and young people
are likely to be less numerous proportionally in the years
ahead of us in all the more civilized populations and we
cannot afford to consume them in premature employment
after the fashion of the preceding centuries. The average age
of our population is rising and this involves an upward exten-
sion of education. And so you will see I suggest what I call
an undergraduate or continuation school, Grade D, the upper
adolescent stage, which I presume will extend at last to every
class in the population, in which at least half the knowledge
acquired will be specialized in relation to interest, aptitude
and the social needs of the individual. But the other half will
still have to be unspecialized, it will have to be general poli-
tical education. Here particularly comes in that education for
citizenship to which this educational section is to give atten-
tion later. It seems to me altogether preposterous that nowa-
days our educational organization should turn out new citizens
who are blankly ignorant of the history of the world during
the last twenty-five years, who know nothing of the causes
and phases of the Great War and are left to the tender mercies
of freakish newspaper proprietors and party organizers for
their ideas about the world outlook, upon which their collec-
tive wills and actions must play a decisive part.
Social organization is equally a matter for definite informa-
tion. "We are all socialists nowadays." Everybody has been
repeating that after the late Lord Rosebery for years and
years. Each for all and all for each. We are all agreed upon
the desirability of the spirit of Christianity and of the spirit
of Democracy, and that the general interest of the community
should not be sacrificed to Private Profit. Yes — beautiful, but
what is not realized is that socialism in itself is little more
than a generalization about the undesirability of irresponsible
ownership and that the major problem before the world is to
devise some form of administrative organization that will
work better than the scramble of irresponsible owners. That
form of administrative organization has not yet been devised.
You cannot expropriate the private adventurer until you have
devised a competent receiver for the expropriated industry
or service. This complex problem of the competent receiver is
the underlying problem of most of our constructive politics.
It is imperative that every voter should have some conception
of the experiments in economic control that are in progress in
Great Britain, the United States of America, Italy, Germany,
Russia, and elsewhere. Such experiments are going to affect
the whole of his or her life profoundly. So, too, are the experi-
ments in monetary and financial organization. Many of the
issues involved go further than general principles. They are
quantitative issues, questions of balance and more or less. A
certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming
as necessary for anyone living in this world of today as
reading and writing. I am asking for this much contemporary
history as the crowning phase, the graduation phase of our
knowledge -giving. After that much foundation, the informa-
tive side of education may well be left to look after itself.
SPEAKING AS A TEACHER OF SORTS MYSELF, TO A GATHERING IN
which teachers probably predominate, I need scarcely dilate
upon the fascination of diagram drawing. You will under-
stand how reluctant I was to finish off at Grade D and how
natural it was to extend my diagram to two more grades and
make it a diagram of the whole knowledge organization of
a. modern community. Here then is Grade E, the adult learn-
ing that goes on now right through life, keeping oneself up
to date, keeping in touch with the living movements about
us. I have given a special line to those reconditioning courses,
that must somehow be made a normal part in the lives of
working professional men. It is astonishing how stale most
middle-aged medical men, teachers and solicitors are today.
And beyond Grade E I have put a further ultimate grade for
the fully adult human being. He or she is learning now, no
longer only from books and newspapers and teachers, though
there has still to be a lot of that, but as a worker with
initiative, making experiments, learning from new experience,
an industrialist, an artist, an original writer, a responsible
lawyer, an administrator, a statesman, an explorer, a scientific
investigator. Grade F accumulates, rectifies, changes human
experience. And here I bring in an obsession of mine with
which I have dealt before the Royal Institution and elsewhere.
You see, indicated by these arrows, the rich results of the
work of Grade F flowing into a central world-encyclopasdic-
organization, where it will be continually summarized, clari-
fied, and whence it will be distributed through the general
information channels of the world.
So I complete my general scheme of the knowledge or-
ganization of a modern community and submit it to you.
I put it before you in good faith as a statement of my con-
victions. I do not know how it will impress you and I will
not anticipate your criticisms. It may seem impossibly bold
and "Utopian." But we are living in a world in which a
battleship costs £8 million, in which we can raise an extra
£400 million for armaments with only a slight Stock Ex-
change qualm, and which has seen the Zeppelin, the radio,
the bombing aeroplane come absolutely out of nothing since
1900. And our schools are going along very much as they
were going along thirty-seven years ago.
There is only one thing I would like to say in conclusion.
Please do me the justice to remember that this is a project for
Knowledge Organization only and solely. It is not an entire
scheme of education I am putting before you. It is only a part
and a limited part of education — the factual side of education
— I have discussed. There are 168 hours in a week and I am
dealing with the use of rather less than six during the school
year of less than forty weeks — for ten years. It is no good
saying as though it was an objection either to my paper or
to me, that I neglect or repudiate spiritual, emotional and
aesthetic values. They are not disregarded, but they have no
place at all in this particular part of the educational scheme.
I have said nothing about music, dancing, drawing, painting,
exercise and so on and so forth. Not because I would exclude
them from education but because they do not fall into the
limits of my subject. You no more want these lovely and
elementary things mixed up with a conspectus of knowledge
than you want playfulness in an ordnance map or perplexing
whimsicality on a clock face. You have the remaining 162
hours a week for all that. But the spiritual, emotional,
aesthetic lives our children are likely to lead, will hardly be
worth living, unless they are sustained by such a clear, full
and sufficient backbone of knowledge as I have ventured to
put before you here.
NOVEMBER 1937
609
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( "We are actually (
saving money
I for the first time" (
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• Studies of the modern small loan
company often underestimate its
activity as a family financial coun-
selor.
When a family applies to
Household Finance for a loan the
manager encourages a discussion
of their difficulties. In the privacy
of his office husband and wife re-
veal their problems with a frank-
ness they display nowhere else.
Out of these discussions come
new horizons. Sources of domestic
discord are removed, expensive
living habits corrected, money
leaks stopped. The experience of
many families is typified by this
statement from a Chicago woman
who wrote us: "My husband and
I started budgeting this year and
with your help have a good work-
able plan which is exciting and alto-
gether practical, as we are actually
saving money for the first time".
Household Finance believes
that it is not enough to advance
cash to meet a family's immediate
need. Household wants to know
how the need arose, how it can be
prevented from recurring. If its
service is to be of maximum bene-
fit to the community it must help
borrowers to get out of debt and
stay there.
Every Household manager is
prepared by training and experi-
ence to act as a "Doctor of Family
Finances" — to serve as a com-
petent adviser on problems related
to the family pocket book. Prob-
ably nowhere except in the inti-
macy of the personal loan com-
pany's private office do wage earn-
ers obtain so much guidance and
encouragement to practice sound
money management.
To facilitate its work as family
financial counsellor Household has
published a series of helpful
pamphlets on money management
and better buymanship. They will
give you a new understanding of
the service rendered by the modern
personal loan company . You are in-
vited to check the titles below that
interest you and mail the coupon.
HOUSEHOLD FINANCE
CORPORATION and Subsidiaries
Headquarters: 919 N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago
"Doctor of Family Finances"
...one of America's leading family finance organizations, with 228 branches in 148 cities
•iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiiiniiiiiniiiiiiiwiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiHiniiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiini nniiiiiiiiiini » •IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII«H«MMB
ORDER BLANK — EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE
Published by
BURR BLACKBURN HOUSEHOLD FINANCE BERNICE DODGE
Research Director CORPORATION Home Economist
"DOCTOR OF FAMILY FINANCES"
Research Dept., SG-11, 919 North Michigan Avenue. Chicago. Illinois
MONEY MANAGEMENT BULLETINS
Check the booklets you want. They will be sent frrom/ifiy, postpaid.
D Money Management for House- I I Marrying on a Small Income, finan-
holds, the budget book. 1 — I cial plans for the great adventure.
D "Let the Women Do the Work," I I StretchinK the rood Dollar, full
an amusing but convincing argu- I — I of ideas on how to save money on
ment for making the wife business food bills; presents a pattern for safe
manager of the home. food economy.
D Credit for Consumers —Installment credit and small loan agencies
and how to use them; published by Thi Public Affairs Commitlti.
-BETTER BUYMANSHIP-
The titles of the series to date are listed below. Send 2 Vic per booklet to cover
mailing costs.
A sample copy of the latest number in this series may be secured free by calling at
any Household Finance office.
D Poultry, Eggs and Fish D Kitchen Utensils
D Sheets, Blankets, Table D Furs
Linen and Towels D Wool Clothing
D Fruits and Vegetables, D Floor Coverings
Fresh and Canned D Dairy Products
D Shoes and Stockings D Cosmetics
D Silks and Rayons D Gasoline and Oil
D Meat D Electric VacuumCleanets
O Food Fats and Oils
Enclosed find $ in stamps; please send booklets checked to:
NAME
D Children's Playthings and
Books
D Soap and other Cleansing
Agents
D Automobile Tires
D Dinnerware
D Household Refrigerators
_j Home Heating
( iloves
ADDRESS
CITY
STATE
(In answering advertisement!
AN ANGRY CITY
(Continued from page 587)
grades in the competitive examinations, no racial preference
can be shown in selecting police personnel. Therefore it is
probably a happy accident that there are about as many
races and nationalities represented in the department as in
the population at large. In 1936, out of a total of 241 police-
men, there were: Hawaiians and part Hawaiians, 123; Cau-
casians, 37; Portuguese, 29; Chinese, 28; Japanese, 18; Koreans,
2; Filipinos, 2; Puerto Ricans, 1. (It is one of the peculiar
customs of Hawaii to class Portuguese as non-Caucasians.)
While the problems of law enforcement in Honolulu are
not essentially different from most cities on the mainland,
there are some phases that are peculiar to the geography and
the population. Since the island area is small, and no escape
can be made except over several thousand miles of ocean,
professional criminals do not choose Honolulu as a base of
operations.
The problems are created by a mingling of races and by
the presence of about twenty-five thousand soldiers and sailors
— practically all young single men. The largest military post
under the American flag is located at Schofield Barracks,
about fourteen miles outside the city. There are, in addition,
about fifty-four thousand young Filipinos, also mostly un-
married men. This abnormal sex ratio is very unfortunate
for both the young men and the young women of the
community.
The Filipinos work for the sugar and pineapple planta-
tions and as waiters and bell boys in the hotels of the city.
Most of them expect to return to their native islands after a
few years. This situation does not make for stability. It is
estimated that in 1935, one sixth of the entire population of
the Territory of Hawaii were Filipinos. In that year they
constituted one fourth of the prison population and one third
of the parolees of Oahu prison.
In 1936 there were two cases of rape in Honolulu and
eighty-six other sex offenses. This is not unreasonably high
in a community of 210,000 with these peculiar sex and racial
characteristics. When a soldier or sailor is involved in crime
or misdemeanor, the matter is handled jointly by the civilian
and military police. The city police may apprehend the man,
get the facts as correctly as possible, and then turn the case
over to the military or naval authorities for trial by court
martial. The military police or shore patrol always has a
member sitting in at every preliminary hearing conducted by
the civilian police when a soldier or sailor is involved. In
this way the young soldiers are not allowed to feel that the
civilian police are "putting something over on them."
The problem of juvenile delinquency is augmented by the
fact that the pineapple canning season is at its height in the
summer months when schools are not in session. The largest
canneries in the world are located here. They employ thou-
sands of women for long working hours. Many children are
left without supervision at this time.
The community has made splendid efforts to cope with
this situation by providing many excellently equipped and
well supervised public playgrounds. The Central YMCA, the
Army and Navy Y, and the YWCA offer an abundant and
varied play program. There are, of course, public swimming
beaches all around the island.
Honolulu is not perfect. There are some dark sides to life
in the paradise of the Pacific. There are slums — some as bad
as any found in mainland cities. The child labor law of the
territory is thoroughly inadequate; and there is an anti-
picketing law.
But the significant fact is that Honolulu has moved for-
ward since 1932 in her efforts to eliminate crime. It has been
done by an intelligent public cooperating with efficient law
enforcing agencies.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
610
Civilizing Hallowe'en
by FRANCES SOMERS
HOW A CITY CAN BY COMMUNITY EFFORT RID ITSELF OF LAW-
lessness on Hallowe'en has been strikingly shown in the past
three years in Minneapolis. In 1933 the evening of October 31
was unusually warm — and for the police and luckless citizens
in scores of cities it became increasingly warm as the evening
wore on. By ten o'clock alarmed householders were 'phoning
police headquarters. Police began to encounter gangs of sev-
eral hundred successfully defying all efforts to disperse them.
Hoodlums grew bolder. For hours they roamed the city, over-
whelming the police by sheer force of numbers. Motorists
found streets blocked with rubbish and wreckage. Sheds and
porches were torn down. Cars and trucks were left upside-
down in the wake of The Boys. It was a veritable night of
terror. What began as youthful exuberance had overstepped
the line. Minneapolis determined to do something about it.
Seven men, with long experience in character-building
agencies, met after that celebration. They agreed that the
whole trouble was caused by a misdirected carnival spirit.
The "boy trouble" police-call rate from every section of Min-
neapolis showed that Hallowe'en was a problem of all youth,
and must be met by each district in its own way. But offered
the choice between legitimate fun and rowdyism, youth, they
were sure would overwhelmingly choose rightly.
Civic clubs, social agencies, patriotic organizations, and
recreational departments cooperated with the Minneapolis
Hallowe'en Committee. Funds were pledged to allow expan-
sion of park and settlement house activities. Neighborhood
parties were planned in homes, churches, schools, clubs, parks
and settlements all over the city.
Schools stressed the idea of Hallowe'en home entertain-
ment and parents responded by inviting tens of thousands of
youngsters to private Hallowe'en parties. Libraries featured
party material, and a few days before Hallowe'en every book,
magazine, or clipping of Hallowe'en ideas was "out."
"We know why you're planning all these parties," young-
sters said wisely as they checked out their books. "It's to keep
us out of mischief."
On Hallowe'en night few children were in the streets. It
was estimated from a school survey that 90,000 young people,
a fifth of the total population of Minneapolis, attended pri-
vate parties, neighborhood celebrations, club festivals or thea-
ters on Hallowe'en, 1934. There were parades, costume
parties, stunt contests and sports in city parks. Older boys and
girls attended dances at Y's, schools and settlements. Movies,
band concerts, community singing, magic and vaudeville
acts, boxing and dancing were open to young people in every
neighborhood. But most of the entertaining took place in
private homes. Mothers living in the same block arranged
house-to-house parties for their children. Young people in-
vited their friends in to play games and dance. Parents called
in the corner gang to pop corn and harmonize around the
piano.
Police squad car calls for "boy trouble," computed on a per
ratio basis, were cut more than a third from the previous
year's total, and to almost half of the 1931-33 average. Break-
age of street light globes was reduced 34 percent from the
three-year average. False fire alarms fell 53 percent.
To pass on what the committee had learned to other cities,
the National Youth Administration published in 1936 a
Hallowe'en handbook. Not only the organization and meth-
ods of the committee, but also suggestions for parties, games,
decorations and menus were included in this 66-page book-
let, and 1000 copies were sold at cost. Many other communi-
ties have adopted the plan, wholly or in part.
In Minneapolis united effort on the part of leaders, organ-
izations, churches, schools, parks, community centers and
newspapers has succeeded in creating a new civic habit.
(In answering advertisements
Mrs. Pappados wants
two new feet
Her feet are tired! Her feet hurt!
There's washing to do. The floor needs scrub-
bing. But Mrs. Pappados is too weary to care. She
can't do more, she says — unless she gets new feet.
That's impossible. Yet a little new help might
go a long way towards getting more work done —
with less wear-and-tear on Mrs. Pappados. And,
as far as washing tasks go, Fels-Naptha Soap
can give that new help. The extra help of richer,
golden soap and lots of naptha to speed out dirt,
even in cool water!
Write Pels & Co., Phila., Pa., for a sample
bar of Fels-Naptha mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CIEAN NAPTHA ODOR
DO YOU ENJOY ARMCHAIR TRAVEL?
See listings of books of travel and adventure in
the TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK on page 607
of this issue.
HOTEL PARKSIDE
NEW YORK
In Gramercy Park
The Parkside is one of New York's nicest hotels . . .
maintaining traditionally high standards and homelike
atmosphere. Directly facing Private Park.
SINGLE ROOMS FROM $2.00 DAILY
Attractive weekly and monthly rates
Moderate priced restaurant
A few minutes' walk to majority of the Welfare Coun-
cils, social agencies. . . . Convenient to all important
sections of the city. Write for Booklet S.
20TH STREET at IRVING PLACE
UNDER KNOTT MANAGEMENT
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC,)
611
CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS
RATES: Display: 30 cents a line, 14 agate lines to the inch.
WORKERS WANTED
Two trained and experienced social workers, one
in family welfare and one in child welfare with
experience in child placing and home finding.
State qualifications in full. Catholic Charitable
Bureau, Bridgeport, Conn.
NEIGHBORHOOD VISITOR, Jewish preferred
for large settlement not in New York. Some
settlement experience required. 7470 Survey.
SOCIAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST. Man 36-45
with actual research experience in social service
and welfare activities and with thorough aca-
demic training in research methods. State
education, experience, age, church membership
or preference. 7471 Survey.
SITUATIONS WANTED
Woman, thirty, seeks Chicago job as reading
counselor. Trained librarian, thirteen years'
experience with all ages, especially adolescents.
Enjoys guiding underprivileged, maladjusted
children. 7466 Survey.
Institutional position wanted in the capacity
of Housekeeper, Matron or practical Dietitian.
7468 Survey.
PUBLIC RELATIONS OR INSTITUTIONAL
EXECUTIVE— Man, 35. married. Six years
broad executive experience practically every
phase of welfare work, institutional and non-
institutional. Legal training, knowledge wel-
fare laws and administrative set-ups. Three
years as public relations executive, well known
organization : three years public education
work, national, professional society. Success-
ful preparation news releases, magazine
articles — technical and popular, and radio. Now
employed but seek broader fields, preferably
institutional management. A record of con-
sistent achievement, with no job failures ; ex-
ceptional references. 7467 Survey.
FOR SALE
SUMMER HOME of university professor, Tyro-
lian Chalet, tip-top Mt. Airy, big oak forest,
magnificent views across Hudson to mountain
ranges. 34 miles from New York ; frequent
express service; about 1% hours motor over
Westchester Boulevard to midtown. Electricity,
telephone, fireplace, sun-terraces, garage.
Photos on application. 21 Claremont Ave.,
ROOM AND BOARD
Cultured lady, willing to stay in evenings with
children for room and board (New York City).
7469 Survey.
Your Own Agency
This is the counseling and placement ageiiej
sponsored jointly by the American Associa-
tion of Social Workers and the National
Organization for Public Health Nursing,
National, Non-Profit making.
«/ IfirOtJtinoJ' OLcvt
( Agency)
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ADDRESSING
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One East 42nd Street New York City
AJency Tel.: MU 2-7575 Gertrude D. Holmei, Dirictor
THE BOOK SHELF
RICH MAN, POOR MAN
by Ryllis A. and Omar P. Goslin
A dynamic and dramatic picture book showing
you how wealthy and how poor America is.
Outlines in primer style the present economic
dilemma and the possibilities of an American
solution. Over 100,000 copies sold.
PAPER, SO pagea, loc
ASSOCIATION PRESS, 347 Madison Ave., N. Y.
"Let the Nation Employ Itself"
Read
PROHIBITING POVERTY
By
Preitonia Mann Martin
$1.00 — Paper 50e
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Contents for September, 1937
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW FOR
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Harriette Mills
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Louise Eitterskampf
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Volume I
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Number I
THE RELATION OF FUNCTION TO PROCESS
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CONTRIBUTORS
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Else Jockel
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and the exotic, but their chief ambition was to know the Mexico which lies beyond the
hard road, beneath the smiling exterior.
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learned something of the swift movement of life among our nearer neighbors.
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emphases are important to develop through our Seminars?
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25TH ANNIVERSARY NUMBER OF SURVEY ASSOCIATES
The Gist of It
DECEMBER 1937
CONTENTS
VOL. xxvi No. 12
FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR (PAGE 619) —
who acknowledges the team play of his Tcam p, pAUL KELLOGG 619
associates in this anniversary number; and
especially the gifted prowess of Florence The American Evolution: Murals JOHN F. HOLMER 622
Loeb (Mrs. Arthur) Kellogg, associate edi- Worki whh Naturc ..STUART CHASE 624
tor, in illuminating its pages with the arts.
The Story of a River: A New Film 629
A PLANNER SPEAKS. (PAGE 624) STUART „,-..-. .,, ., „ ,,-
Chase, a Connecticut Yankee at the court of The Living Law WALTON H. HAMILTON 632
public opinion, is the author of Rich Land, What 19,000 Doctors Could Tell Us DOUGLASS W. ORR, M.D. & JEAN W. ORR 636
Poor Land (Whittlesey House, $2.50), but ... „ ,,„
no ordinary conservationist. A practical ac- Work Portraits: Photographs LEWIS W. HINE 639
countant and economist, he brings simple The Thrust of Invention WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT 643
language to the field of social problems.
As co-author of Your Moneys Worth (Mac- The World of 1937: Drawing HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 648
millan, 1927), he began the elementary edu- £arthj Aif amj Mm(] H G WELLS 649
cation of consumers, then led his eager and
expanding audience to more advanced and Westward Under Vega: A Poem THOMAS WOOD STEVENS 654
basic questions than how to drive bargains. American Ups and Downs: Isotype, OTTO NEURATH 660
A LAWYER SPEAKS. (PAGE 632) WALTON If the City Fails, America Fails C. A. DYKSTRA 663
H. Hamilton, of the faculty of the Yale Law XT ~ • c r A • iu T r»T f.£A
School, is the author of many books and New Stepping Stones for American Homes LOULA D. LASKER
articles on social and economic subjects, nota- How Far Have We Come? WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE 669
bly coal and wages. After serving on the _ _. -.- ,_,
staff of the War Labor Policies Board in The R.se of Public Welfare . FRED K. HOEHLER 673
1918, he was professor of economics at Am- Some Pages from The Survey Scrapbook 676— a
herst and at Brookings. On leave from Yale _Q
in 1934, he returned to Washington as chief The Turn of the Century CHARLES A. BEARD 679
of the Federal Consumers Division of NRA, pjenry Ford at the Wheel. . VICTOR WEYBRIGHT 686
then as Director of the Bureau of Research
and Statistics, Social Security Board. His Modern as a Streamliner BEULAH AMIDON 692
latest book, written with Douglass Adair, is .... _ TT... T, T?.~ .. \Xi,, fiQS
The Power to Govern. (Norton, $2.50) What Every Vlllage KnOWS ELTON MAY°
Youth: Sketches JAMES DAUGHERTY 699
A DOCTOR SPEAKS. (PAGE 636) DR. AND
Mrs. Douglass W. Orr entered on the study Over One Man's Desk JOHN PALMER GAVIT 702
of British Insurance upon the initiative of T „. »ftc
the social security division, Helen Hall Miracles LEON WHIPPLE 70.
chairman, of the National Federation of Set- © Survey Associates, Inc.
tlements. A graduate of Northwestern Uni- ^ ^ — •
versify Medical School, Dr. Orr is now CTTOVPV A^SOPTATFS INC
associated with the Menninger Clinic at To- SURVEY A&SOClAlbi), 1INC.
peka Kan Mrs. Orr at present a social publication office: 762 East 21 Street, Brooklyn, N. Y. Editorial Office: 112 East 19
worker with the Provident Association of communications should be sent)
Topeka, studied at the University of Chicago
School of Social Service Administration after President, Lucius R. EASTMAN ; vice-presidents, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN PALMER
receiving her degree from Wisconsin. GAVIT; secretary, ANN REED BRENNER.
A SCIENTIST SPEAKS. (PAGE 643) WALDE- Board of Directors: JULIAN W. MACK, chairman; ELEANOR R. BELMONT, FRANCIS
mar Kaempffert is science editor of The New BIDDLE, JACOB BILLIKOPF, JOSEPH P. CHAMBERLAIN, FRANCES G. CURTIS, Lucius R.
York Times and president of the National EASTMAN, FELIX FRANKFURTER, SIDNEY HILLMAN, JOHN A. KINGSBURY, AGNES BROWN
Association of Science Writers, a small but LEACH, EDITH G. LINDLEY, SOLOMON LOWENSTEIN, J. NOEL MACY, RITA WALLACH
influential group of newspapermen who spe- MORGENTHAU, BEARDSLEY RUML, EDWARD L. RYERSON, JR., RICHARD B. SCANDRETT, JR.,
cialize in reporting or commenting upon HAROLD H. SWIFT, LILLIAN D. WALD.
scientific advances. Mr. Kaempffert was
managing editor of Scientific American, and Editor: PAUL KELLOGG.
editor of Popular Science Monthly, as well Associate editor!: BEULAH AMIDON, ANN REED BRENNER, JOHN PALMER GAVIT,
as director of the Museum of Science and FLQRENCE LQEB KELLOGG> LouLA D. LASKER, MARY Ross, GERTRUDE SPRINGER, VICTOR
Industry, Ch.cago, before joining The Times. WEYBR]GHT) LEON WHIPpLE. Assistant editors: HELEN CHAMBERLAIN, RUTH LERRIGO.
A PROPHET SPEAKS. (PAGE 649) ON HIS Contributing editors: HELEN CODY BAKER JOANNA C. COLCORD, EDWARD T. DEVINE,
recent lecture tour in the United States H. HAVEN EMERSON, M.D., RUSSELL H. KURTZ, GRAHAM TAYLOR.
G. Wells spent a weekend with Hendrik Business manager, WALTER F. GRUENINGER; Circulation manager, MOLLIE CONDON;
Willem Van Loon, fellow world citizen and Adt!ertising manager, MARY R. ANDERSON.
prophet, and author of the new best seller,
The Arts (Simon and Schuster, $3.95). As Survey Graphic published on the 1st of the month. The price of this anniversary issue,
a result his drawings accompany Mr. Wells' 5Qc. a copy. By subscription — Domestic: 1 year $3 ; 2 years $5. Additional postage per year
article in a field that has engaged them both. Foreign 50c. ; Canadian 30c.
This is by no means Mr. Van Loon's first The Midmonthly Survey published on the 15th of the month. Single copies 30c. By
collaboration with Survey editors and au- subscription — Domestic: 1 year $3; 2 years $5. Additional postage per year — Foreign 50c.;
thors. Readers will remember the drawings Canadian 30c.
that embellished the series of articles by Joint annual subscription to Survey Graphic and The Midmonthly Survey $5. Coopera-
Samuel S. Fels, progressive Philadelphia tive Membership in Survey Associates, including a joint subscription, $10.
615
1S5
cause yoV311,6^ ig important in the
The telephone u ^ mj_vital in emer-
everyday affairs of ite
gencies. But that » not th
Lrvice. value ov- b ^ bu y
616
manufacturer, that later came out as This
Changing World (Houghton Mifflin, 1933).
BACK OF THE CENSUS FIGURES ARE PLACES,
people, work. Some of them are revealed
close-up in the sheaf of manuscripts begin-
ning with Mr. Stevens' epic on wheels,
Westward Under Vega. (Page 654) Now
teaching at Leland Stanford Junior Univer-
sity, he was formerly head of the School of
the Theater at Carnegie Technical Institute
in Pittsburgh. He directed the Shakespeare
Theater at the World's Fair at Chicago and
at the San Diego Exposition. The author of
many pageants and plays, mostly on assign-
ment, the narratives and lyrics of this poem
fairly wrote themselves after a motor jaunt
on which he gave a lift to just such a couple
as John and April heading west from
Washington.
C. A. DYKSTRA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVER-
sity of Wisconsin (page 663), is chairman
of the Urbanization Committee of the Na-
tional Resources Committee. "Dyke" knows
cities — as Cincinnati can tell you. He was
city manager of that well governed munici-
pality for seven years. He was personnel
director of the Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power in the great days of aque-
duct construction, under the chairmanship of
Dr. John R. Haynes (member of Survey
Associates), which assured the future indus-
trial and .recreational development of the
region.
LOULA D. LASKER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, HAS
herself laid stepping stones to better homes
(page 664) in the series of articles through
which she has followed housing develop-
ments, public and private, here and abroad,
both in The Midmonthly Survey and Survey
Graphic. Readers will recall two — Sunnyside
Up and Down, a study of hard times in a
pioneer limited dividend venture; and Three
Years of Public Housing, an appraisal of the
projects built by PWA under Secretary of
the Interior Harold L. Ickes.
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, EDITOR OF The
Emporia Gazette, looks at the last twenty-
five years (page 669), first in Emporia, then
in the larger American scene. Editor, jour-
nalist, man of letters, citizen, Mr. White is
an American interpreter par excellence. Ever
representing the refreshing realism and san-
ity of the Middlewest, he is a member of that
extraordinary company of writers who lifted
journalism to new levels of authority and
popular influence after the turn of the cen-
tury— Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, William
Hard, Will Irwin and Ray Stannard Baker
among them. Forty Years on Main Street,
his favorite pieces from The Emporia
Gazette, has just been published. (Farrar
and Rinehart, $3)
FRED K. HOEHLER (PAGE 673) WRITES OUT
of intimate professional and personal knowl-
edge. After serving as Director of the De-
partment of Public Welfare in Cincinnati, in
the formative early days of that city's charter
government, he became president of the
American Public Welfare Association. Later
he became executive director of the associa-
tion when Frank Bane went to Washington
as secretary of the Social Security Board.
CHARLES A. BEARD, HISTORIAN (PAGE 679)
S. Adele Shaw
(Mrs. Jonathan W. Freeman)
THE DOUBLE CALIBER OF THIS ANNIVER-
sary number was made possible by a gift in
memory of one who was a member of our
staff the year Survey Graphic was launched —
a gift from a Pittsburgh friend who prefers
to remain anonymous but who shares our
admiration of the lance she cast in life.
Daughter of an outstanding newspaper editor
and publisher, Miss Shaw was the youngest
member of the staff of The Pittsburgh Sur-
vey— a volunteer. After several years as an
executive of the National Federation of
Working Girls Clubs, she picked up the
strands of her father's calling, spent a year
on the New York Evening Post, and in 1920,
'21 and '22 served Survey Associates as man-
aging and industrial editors. One of her
most telling commissions was a swift can-
vass of those independent companies that
had demonstrated the practicability of elim-
inating the long day in steel. Three Shifts —
the Pioneers and the Problems (March
1921) opened the way for more considerable
studies for the Cabot Fund directed by
Morris L. Cooke and John A. Fitch; and
to a comprehensive report (under grant of
the Cabot Fund) by the National Engineer-
ing Council when Herbert Hoover was its
president. As Mrs. Freeman, in the years
before her death, she was active in the civic
life of Pittsburgh, especially in behalf of
civil liberties and the Urban League.
The Cabot Fund was a bequest of the late
Charles M. Cabot — a Boston stockholder of
the U. S. Steel Corporation, roused to action
by The Pittsburgh Survey (page 676-a)
This fund was a consecutive and cumula-
tive force behind the long drive to eliminate
the 12-hour day, which dates from John A.
Fitch's studies in 1907-8 (The Steel Work-
ers: Pittsburgh Survey) and culminated
under pressure from President Harding in
1923. Thereafter on dissolution of the fund
a share was entrusted to Survey Associates
and affords us two pieces of staff inquiry
in the industrial field in this anniversary
number by Miss Amidon and Mr. Weybright.
was professor of politics at Columbia Uni-
verstty when Survey Associates was founded,
and already known for his growing shelf of
volumes (four of them on European history
in collaboration with James Harvey Robin-
son). In the years since then his writings
and lectures have stretched the public knowl-
edge of social history and projected it into
the future.
VICTOR WEYBRIGHT, MANAGING EDITOR OF
Survey Graphic (PAGE 686) came to Survey
Associates in 1935 after editorial experience
with the Butterick Company, residence at
Hull-House, and the editorship of our special
number on New World Gypsy Trails (Octo-
ber 1927). He is the author of Spangled
Banner, a biography of Francis Scott Key
(Farrar and Rinehart, 1935).
BEULAH AMIDON, ASSOCIATE EDITOR (PAGE
692), a native of North Dakota and a gradu-
ate of Barnard College, has written and
edited many articles on education, social
security, conservation, economic planning,
but her most conspicuous specialty has been
labor and industry. Among her notable ar-
ticles in this field have been: In 1926, An
Old Fashioned Strike (textile workers). In
1930, Toledo, A City the Automobile Ran
Over (Willys-Overland); and Ivorydale: A
Payroll that Floats (Procter and Gamble).
In 1933, Employers and Workers Wanted
(public employment service). From 1934
through 1937, a series on the transition in
labor relations from 7-a of the NIRA to the
present Wagner labor relations act.
ELTON MAYO, WHO AS NO ONE ELSE HAS
brought modern insight to the psychology
of working life (page 695), is professor of
industrial research, in Harvard's Graduate
School of Business Administration. An an-
tipodean, he came to the University of
Pennsylvania in 1921, after ten years of
university teaching in Queensland and Tas-
mania. His teaching and research have
centered at Harvard since 1929.
JOHN PALMER GAVIT, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, is
both root and branch of the Survey family
tree. (Page 702) Chief of the Associated
Press Bureau in Washington before the war,
managing editor of the New York Evening
Post during and for several years after the
war; then correspondent from Geneva. Since
1927 Mr. Gavit has written a monthly de-
partment on affairs commonly called foreign
— Through Neighbors' Doorways.
LEON WHIPPLE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
since 1924 (page 705), is professor of
journalism at New York University. The
knowledge of civil liberties reflected in two
of his books — Story of Civil Liberty in the
U. S., and Our Ancient Liberties — is not
academic. He came up against the prejudice
of wartime, personally and as publicity di-
rector of the National Civil Liberties Bureau.
Born in St. Louis, he has been a typical man
from Missouri — as writer and as teacher.
READERS WILL RECALL MAURICE STERNE'S
memorial to the New England Settlers in the
June Survey Graphic. (See page 633.)
James Daugherty (page 699) has made
several striking portraits for Survey Graphic
of leaders in the Southern Tenant Farmers
Union, and of Angelo Herndon.
Woodcuts and the name of J. J. Lankes
(page 654) are practically synonymous.
iMeet Lewis W. Hine on page 639 and
Otto Neurath on page 660.
617
Sculpture groups
on facade of the
community center,
Greenbelt, a new
Resettlement town.
Lenore Thomas,
chief of the
sculpture unit
DECEMBER 1937
VOL. XXVI NO. 12
25th Anniversary Number
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Team Play
by PAUL KELLOGG
We celebrate five and twenty years of Survey Associates at our birthday
dinner in New York this month. May all good fortune — no less than the
luck of odd numbers — attend us as our Survey ship turns into a new quarter
century of exciting service to the times. This anniversary number itself is a
hail to members and contributors, to writers and artists and printers and
readers, old friends and new, to join us in fresh expeditions of discovery.
AT 75, FOR ITS DIAMOND JUBILEE, The
Atlantic poured out a cornucopia of
manuscripts leading off with My Captain
by Oliver Wendell Holmes — the poet's
story of how in the midst of the Civil
War he went to meet that wounded son
who was to become the oldest, youngest
member of the Supreme Court. At 50,
Scribner's followed suit in a golden num-
ber, glowing with the work of artists
and going back to the eighties for A
Drift from Redwood Camp by Bret
Harte, and How the Other Half Lives
by Jacob A. Riis. At 25, we are not at-
tempting a silver coinage of this sort.
For when you have a prospector's
outfit like ours, obviously the thing to
do with it is to push out. As a friendly
gesture to our celebration, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch confirmed that "news-
paper headlines today read like some of
the titles of articles The Survey printed,
five, ten, and twenty years ago." Or, as
Professor Frankfurter put it, "the stuff
of concern of The Survey has become
the stuff of concern of the whole coun-
try." The explanation has been simple;
we have spread the tidings of those who
search out and find new lodes of
quickening experience — explorers, ex-
perimenters, what the Post-Dispatch
meant by "A Band of Prophets."
Clearly we should enlist their kind in
striking off into a new stretch, but we
are not unmindful of precious metal
from the past in our own treasure chest.
TURN TO OUR SCRAPBOOK (PAGE 676-a) BUT
here let me take three of our fields and
give you clues to what our selections might
have been. Surely something from those
writings which Jane Addams contributed
over the years and which a great editor so
aptly called "fresh minted." For example,
the intuitive parallel she drew between
Pullman and King Lear remains unmatched
as a luminous portrayal of the impact on
human behavior of our mounting indus-
trialism. (For a new chapter see the Dear-
born Victor Weybright draws on page 686.)
In the days when immigration was at
flood, not only Miss Addams at Hull-House,
but Lillian D. Wald through her windows
on Henry Street, Jacob Riis, up from his
newspaper desk, Emily Greene Balch in Our
Slavic Fellow Citizens (which we published
serially) interpreted that human process to
which Pearl Buck gave fresh incarnation in
Survey Graphic last June. As a contribu-
tion to public understanding on the part of
a member of Survey Associates, sixty thou-
619
sand reprints of Miss Buck's article — On
Discovering America — have been spread
broadcast in the months since.
OR TAKE ANOTHER FIELD, WHERE WE HAVE
tugged at old leashes. Edward T. Devine,
my chief in the days of our founding (page
676-a), broke all the taboos when 30 years
ago he first took up the venereal diseases.
That next week letters grew to two big
piles on his desk: those of outraged pro-
test, canceling subscriptions; those of enthu-
siasm from physicians, social workers, men
and women, acclaiming this breach, on the
part of a non-medical journal, with a tragic
and age-old conspiracy of silence.
Even last month, even General John-
son failed to break the inhibitions of a
national broadcasting system when he
wanted to call spades spades. Surgeon Gen-
eral Parran had met with a similar experi-
ence and a national syndicate held that
newspaper readers were not ready for them
to touch his challenging article, Syphilis:
The Next Great Plague to Go. This, pub-
lished in Survey Graphic for July 1936, had
been a piece of collaboration with DeWitt
Wallace, editor of The Reader's Digest,
which featured it the same month. And
again taboos broken — fifty thousand reprints
sold of our full length version, nearly
half a million of theirs, and the pith of it
in newspapers with six million circulation.
Throughout the quarter century, Some
Inf'mation for Mother, as reprinted from
The Survey, has been one of the tools
employed in sex education among children.
Daring in its day, inimitable for always,
John Gavit wrote it (pages 676-a and 702).
OR TAKE THE FIELD OF INDUSTRIAL CONDI-
tions which the Graham Taylors, father and
son, Mrs. Florence Kelley and John A.
Fitch first foraged for us. For example,
long before he had set foot in Middletown,
Robert S. Lynd wrote of the 7-day week
and the 12-hour day among his parishion-
ers as an oil town minister. His article in
Survey Graphic, and alongside it a com-
panion article by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,
swept those hoary abuses out of a wide
swath of the producing fields within a year.
When in a period of economic tension
not unlike our own, the public mind
closed up like a trap at the bombing con-
fessions of the MacNamaras in 1911, it was
a Survey symposium that called for "throw-
ing light into a situation of such heat";
and, followed up, set going the U.S. Com-
mission on Industrial Relations.
Our Giant Power Number in 1924; our
Unemployment Number in the spring of
1929; our Economic Planning Number in
1932 forecast, one after the other, the "shape
of things to come."
WE HAVE STUCK TO OUR BENT THEN IN
fashioning this anniversary number.
Within the fields covered by Survey As-
sociates, within the restricted compass of
even a double issue, we have turned first
to our authors and now (or it fails of its
purpose) we turn to our readers — asking
you one and all to consider what has
been taking shape in the span of our
twenty-five years. And what's ahead.
Now any plan to net the living pres-
ent is up against the surprise and vitality
of life. As result, our table of contents is
at once more vivid, more various than
anything we could have contrived. My
heartiest thanks to contributors and staff
alike for their team play throughout as
I set down some of those larger team
plays that to my mind encompass it.
One People
FlRST OF ALL THAT "MOUNTING FEELING
of the whole" which has been one of the
striking trends in American life in these
last 25 years. It has living force to bring
to the shaping of the years ahead. Grow-
ing up in the Middlewest, my brother
and I were taught how Lincoln set the
Union as the key to the struggle between
the states; how the mass of men and
weight of resources turned into the scales
from what had been prairie settlements
so shortly before, tipped the beam be-
tween North and South. That theme of
the "states united" takes on altogether
fresh significance today when localism
and sectionalism yield ground as never
before. The war dramatized it; radio,
movies, motors, trailers, streamliners
visualize it; the depression itself disclosed
Washington as the economic no less than
the political capital of the United States.
Beneath the issues drawn in Congress
and the courts is the urge to leave no
vacuum in our common life where gov-
ernment does not run. Through the
social security act, as in a prism, we see
states, counties, townships shifting not
into the discard but into new functional
relationships. The rise of the cities be-
comes the tremendous current chapter in
the American quest for opportunity and
for homes; and as William Allen White
pointed out, the thing that made our
hard times worse than the Black Nine-
ties of his memory, was that there were
two generations between the city worker
and the farm. The unemployed had no
place "to go back home."
Which brings us to the lapses, disuni-
ties and gaps that leave our national
unity still by no means a seamless gar-
ment. With our huge overhang of work-
lessness and our new machine-made
unemployment, modern business enter-
prise has still to make good as a sure and
steady source of livelihood. We point to
a Promised Land with surfaced roads
leading straight to a scientific surplus,
but as consumers our tribes still trudge
in sand. There are the sharecroppers,
the dust bowl victims, the caravans of
dispossessed families seeking new foot-
holds. We are still beset by racial and
Ann Reed Brenner
religious bitterness, old clinkers of slave
days, embers tossed by fires of hatred
abroad; by class animosities at home.
Yet, as Senator Wagner said to the
social workers in national conference at
Indianapolis, out of it has come also the
recognition that evils no longer can be
dealt with piecemeal. We are coming to
feel that what's wrong anywhere is
everybody's concern; that measures of
conservation and development must, like
schooling, be universal. A creative con-
science that can be countrywide, must
be — if we are in truth to be one people.
The People in Another Guise
TURN NEXT TO THE MUSTERING OF THE
commoners of our day to have a larger
part in settling political and economic
questions. Popular feeling, welling up
out of the hard pan of the depression,
was canalized by the New Deal. To
judge by the cries raised in the land —
fascists, communists, royalists, dictators,
— we are invaded, horse and foot, with
foreign ideologies. But we can find
plenty of native impulse if we look; we
can find a counterpart a hundred years
back when the Jackson Democrats shook
up the status quo.
The thing which distinguishes the
present-day political development is that
interweaving with it, standing out in
this last year of strikes, we find new
mass movements contesting the old con-
trols in hitherto non-union industries. In
one way this takes us back to the decades
when trade unionism first made its fight
for recognition in this country — old
mind-sets, wild claims, raw excesses, on
either hand, that go with inexperience in
industrial relations. In another way it
may be looked at as a belated economic
development, coming abreast, for exam-
ple, with England where collective bar-
gaining has been part of the climate for
a couple of generations and leadership
has matured. What's new is the break
with old molds in labor organization
that antedated electricity and mass pro-
duction. New, too, is the rise of white
collar groups. What is fundamental is
the projection of labor objectives which,
as responsible leaders see it, neither a
single employer nor any industry by it-
self can assure its workers. They look
to the full employment of our productive
capacities as a people in ways that will
yield both a type of security which the
hard times betrayed, and mounting
standards of living. Hence they turn to
political no less than economic action.
Hence fears in many quarters lest prole-
tarian government rise and repudiate all
we have gained. Hence fears, contrari-
wise, lest vigilantes that crop up today
are seeds of a Nazi putsch tomorrow.
Both sets of fears read into American
developments what has been going for-
ward in post-war Europe; forget that
here in the New World, the American
colonists refused to accept the old hard
stupid choice between mob rule and
autocracy in the constitutional system
they set up just 150 years ago. We can
take to heart Professor Beard's convic-
tion, that the Founders could not have
620
SURVEY GRAPHIC
devised a better framework through
which democracy might function had
they anticipated the stresses of industrial-
ism. Granted that recent developments
have made more for clash than cohesion
they may prove pangs of a hitherto un-
achieved unity in the making — an
American team play such as we have
never known before — from top to bot-
tom no less than from coast to coast.
Such as we have never known before
— but such as we may invent; are already
inventing in natural born fashion.
"Social Invention"
IT WAS LITTLE MORE THAN 25 YEARS AGO
that Justice Brandeis coined the term
"social invention." (His own Savings
Bank Insurance has been one of them.)
There is little likelihood that scientific
discovery will slow down in the next 25
years. Mr. Kaempffert gives us encour-
agement that it dovetails with democracy.
To my mind some of the most potent
inventions in these years will come in
the form of social arrangements that
strike a new human equilibrium with
what science holds out. Elton Mayo puts
this in its simplest terms in his plea for
human association as our oldest and most
neglected need. When Walton Hamilton
traces the rise of workmen's compensa-
tion legislation, what is he talking about
but a lawyer-made safety appliance for
fending off the homebreaking conse-
quences of modern heats, voltages,
speeds, acids? What is unemployment
compensation but an invention to tide
over broken time among workers which
may be more devastating than frosts and
floods? What are the old age pensions
Fred Hoehler deals with, but a belated
contrivance to take the place of chicken
coops, garden patches and potato cellars
— when the security the farm once of-
fered is disrupted by the very processes
of industrialization, urbanization and
migration bound up in technological
change? And what is health insurance
as Dr. Orr interprets it in England, but
a way for bringing medical practice
abreast of the strides in medical science?
Turn to larger shapes. The industrial
corporation itself goes back less than a
hundred years — an innovation then,
with many new advantages and gadgets
that partnership had never displayed —
continuity for one; freedom from per-
sonal risk for another. What is the Wag-
ner Labor Relations Board but a balance
wheel, new and incomplete model that
it is, between this established equipment
of the employer and incipient labor or-
ganization? What are the railway labor
board, the working scheme on Union
Arthur Kellogg
Pacific described by Miss Amidon, but
more perfected mechanisms in the trans-
portation industry which, like the gar-
ment trades, long since modernized
collective bargaining? What are Miss
Lasker, President Dykstra and Stuart
Chase talking about but invention in
housing, city and regional planning?
Social Team Play
TEAM PLAY NO LESS THAN INDIVIDUALISM
was inherent in American life from the
outset. The settler who cleared his own
land joined in a barn raising, in laying
a corduroy road over the swamp, in set-
ting up a school. The same thing holds
for social enterprise from its more mod-
ern start. Alexander Johnson, dean of
social workers, is in his nineties. His Let-
ters from An Old Functionary, which
we published twenty years ago, were
instinct with such craftsmanship and co-
operation. The charity organization
movement and the settlement movement,
from which The Survey originated,
were early manifestations of the principle
of team play. It is basic to community
organization, to group work, to case
work. Inventors in social work have
broken ground which has been brought
to crop by collective effort, lay and
professional.
Such team play is of the essence of
Survey Associates. Thanks to our field
workers and circulation managers, every
profession and walk in life is represented
among our readers. It is of the essence
of our company of members and con-
tributors whose rings of growth register
the deft initiative of Mrs. Brenner as
secretary over the years. Two presidents
of caliber have spanned the quarter cen-
tury of our cooperative society: Robert
W. de Forest, our founder (page 676a)
and Lucius R. Eastman. This essence is
Paul Kellogg
true of our board under the constructive
chairmanship of Judge Mack who alone
among our directors has served continu-
ously since he was first named in our
articles of incorporation. (His record only
matched by half a dozen members of
the staff). Two directors who bring rare
gifts to our board, Miss Wald and Mrs.
Leach, were such — and of long standing
• — when Survey Graphic was launched in
1921 under the chairmanship of Prof.
Henry R. Seager. Miss Wald, already a
director, had presided at our first annual
membership meeting in 1913. Team
play is true of our staff today and yes-
terday— true in the most intimate way
of all in the fellowship of my brother
and me as chief editors and executives
until his death in 1934, thirty years of
service to the venture together.
The Midmonthly Survey is team play
when it spans the fields of social work
with its exchange of information and
method, ideas, inventions, proposals.
Survey Graphic is team play when
it swings the arc of the professions and
reaches wider circles of the lay public.
Witness this special number with its
planners, lawyers, engineers, social work-
ers, journalists, educators and the rest.
BUT BACK OF THE PROBLEMS AND PROMISE
of what they deal with are the people
themselves — all sorts and conditions, men,
women and children, some of them still
with soil on their shoes as they look out
across fields toward their future. More,
who live in our industrial centers and
look down streets where the wind rattles
sooty leaves, who must get out to the
woods to breathe remembrance of the
wilderness they sprang from.
We have tried to draw what confronts
their kind — our people, one people — as
we find them and find them headed.
DECEMBER 1937
621
PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY
The
American
Evolution
as shown in
Mural Panels
By JOHN F. HOLMER
MODERN INDUSTRY
The public hearing room for industrial confer-
ences in the state office building at Columbus
is both impressive and cheerful, its walls col-
orful with murals that contrast pioneer and
modern life. The panels selected for these
pages are the dominating murals, the other nine
panels developing and carrying on the two
themes as a single composition around the room.
Though the setting changes from the sweep of
country to the towers of town, the artist has
brought out the same characteristics in the
people of both periods — resourcefulness, cour-
age, team play. The sketches shown are among
hundreds of the artist's preliminary drawings.
Working With Nature
by STUART CHASE
The Norris bill gives us a new blueprint for the Land of the
Free in its seven-star constellation of TV As from coast to coast.
It calls for more than a power program; more than conservation
of our gutted resource base which the ice pack left behind when
it moved north. It gives the author of Rich Land, Poor Land
his text in exploring fresh and tremendous implications bound
up in regional planning and self-sufficiency.
REGIONAL PLANNING USED TO BE AN ACADEMIC MATTER
where Lewis Mumford, Benton Mackaye, Clarence Stein,
Frederick Ackermann, Henry Wright, your author, some-
times Sir Patrick Geddes, and a few others, sat around
cafes on 45th Street and dreamed of a more orderly
America. In 1933, with the coming of the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority and the Mississippi Valley Committee, it
passed out of the realm of theory into tangible operation.
The demand for it grows. There is hardly a respectable
watershed in the nation where somebody is not advocating
a Valley Authority. President Roosevelt had the matter
on his agenda for the special session of Congress this fall.
Bills are before both houses.
Let us see if we can ground this lofty concept in con-
crete illustrations. What kinds of things are involved in
regional planning?
A woman in California recently wrote me a letter. She
had been reading my book, Rich Land, Poor Land, and
wanted to tell me what was happening where she lived.
She wondered if I could help her do something about the
salmon.
Salmon in the Upper Klamath
HER HOME is 100 MILES EAST OF THE PACIFIC COAST IN THE
high Siskiyous. Until a few years ago the annual migra-
tion of salmon up the mountain streams was an awesome
sight. In late February or March they would begin to run.
The East Fork and the South Fork of the Salmon River
rise in the high mountains at 7000 to 8000 feet, and then
come down through the Klamath Forest. Up these two
big streams and their ice cold tributaries the salmon came
to spawn. They came in millions. So solidly were they
packed, she says, as they fought their way upstream, that
a person might cross the river walking on a raft of fish.
During this season the Indians would take a supply of
salmon, smoke them, and have food for all the ensuing
year. Palefaces too had all they could eat.
Then the power companies began putting in dams. A
dam without a proper fish ladder was constructed at the
forks of the Salmon River. The salmon could not pass by,
and in a few years they stopped coming at all. The Indians
lost their food supply. The Forest Service tried to save the
situation, but the power crowd was too much for them.
In May of 1937 a large power company shut off the
water at its dam in the Klamath River. Every night dur-
ing the spawning season the water was held above the
dam. As a result the river below was choked with strug-
624
gling, gasping salmon. People went to the river to pick
up the dying fish for food. Armed guards warned them
off. So the fish died there in the shrunken river, died by
the tens of thousands, and rotted, and spread a dreadful
stench over the valley. Next year there will be fewer
salmon in this river; in a few years there will be none.
Birds and Burning Farms in the Lower Klamath
WILLIAM VOGT OF THE AUDUBON SOCIETY SENT ME HIS
recent study on the devastation of wild life caused by
senseless draining of swamps and marshes. He tells of a
journey by William L. Finley through the lower Klamath
region in 1905. Mr. Finley paddled in an old trapper's
boat down the stretches of the tule-lined river. He came
upon vast colonies of ducks — mallards, red heads, pin
tails, gadwalls, cinnamon teal and ruddies. In the sedge
grass he found their featherlined nests. Mothers with their
broods of ducklings swam ahead of his boat. Anxious
Canada geese led their goslings off into the tules. He saw
bittern, rail, snipe, killdeer. He listened to yellow-throated
warblers, yellow headed black birds and tule wrens. He
found flocks of ring-billed gulls, night herons, great blue
herons, cormorants, grebes, terns and pelicans. The
marshes were white with the nesting multitudes.
These shallow lakes and wide bordering marsh lands
were the chief water-fowl nurseries of the Pacific coast.
Malheur Lake in this region was strategically located for
migrants. Snow geese and wild swan, leaving their feed-
ing grounds in the far North, would drop down here
after a thousand-mile flight. Hungry and tired they would
rest and feed for several weeks before taking off for the
other half of their long flight south.
Now the snow geese and the wild swan do not come
any more. The water supply of the lake has been shut off.
Lower Klamath Lake and its surrounding marsh lands —
85,000 acres of water-fowl homes — are only a memory.
The region has turned to a desert waste of dry peat and
alkali. Over large stretches the peat has caught fire and
burned to a depth of two or three feet, leaving a layer of
ashes into which the traveller sinks to his knees. "One of
the unique features in North America," says Mr. Vogt,
"is gone. The destruction of such a museum of living
birds is a crime against our children." It is more than
that. Not only has the nesting ground been vastly
lessened, but the lower water table has poisoned the food
supply of the remaining birds. Meanwhile homesteaders,
who hoped to prosper on some of these swamp lands after
SURVEY GRAPHIC
the great expense of draining them, now know that they
were the dupes of speculators. "They are anxious to sell
out so that they can move to productive lands where they
can make a living." So the birds lost their homes, their
resting place and their lives; the settlers lost their savings
and years of useless labor. Only the speculators cleaned up.
Pine Forests in New Hampshire
NOT LONG AGO TO JUMP 3000 MILES TO THE EAST — 1
climbed Mt. Carrigain in New Hampshire. From its sum-
mit one looked into the East Branch wilderness, once the
last great area of virgin forest in the state. The lumber
companies have hacked their way through now. A spindly,
ragged second growth is all that is left of those great
pines, spruces and hemlocks. The big rains of 1936 filled
the streams with yellow ridges of sand and gravel.
The lumber was cut up in a town at the base of the
mountain. The huge mills and the houses of the town
are rotting away. Perhaps twenty people live in this
ghostly community where 2000 once lived. Competent
foresters tell me that had the exploitation of this wilder-
ness been planned, the town would still be full of people,
for the timber could have been cut forever, a perpetual
resource. By the time the old growth was down, the new
growth would be ready.
In the October Survey Graphic, Kinsey Howard gave
us a vivid picture of the slow strangling of the city of
Great Falls in Montana. The town depends, you recall,
on the icfineries of the Anaconda Copper Company. The
refineries depend on electric power. The power depends
on the Missouri River — "Old Muddy." Old Muddy de-
pends on a terrain which will release water to him slowly.
That terrain has been gashed and eroded from over-
grazing, fire, forest slaughter, overplowing. Dust storms
whirl over Great Falls. Old Muddy becomes increasingly
unreliable as a power source. See how these resources are
locked together — copper, power, stream flow, grass, forest,
soil. If one is tampered with, the whole equilibrium be-
gins to shake.
Salmon in the Upper Klamath, birds and burning farms
in the Lower Klamath, pine forests in New Hampshire,
stream flow in Montana. One dips one's hand into the
resources of any state in the Union to find parallel ex-
amples, some not quite so bad, some worse. To give an
overall picture, we are informed by the National Re-
sources Committee that at least one half of the original
fertility of the American continent has disappeared
through water and wind erosion, and mining the soil for
crops. Water erosion grows like compound interest. As
the gulleys cut down, they cut back. For ten acres of
good land which tumble in this year, fifteen may tumble
next year.
'Tor every field gullied, a man gullied"
WHAT ARE WE, OR OUR CHILDREN, GOING TO SWAP FOR AUTO-
mobiles, washing machines and electric ice boxes when
we have nothing below our feet to offer in exchange?
When our fish and birds lie dead, our topsoil has run to
the ocean, black drifts cover our barns, the pasture grass
has been uprooted and destroyed, the rivers no longer
run, and the forests are charred and rotted stumps?
It is an interesting question. It is interesting to know
that already some ten million Americans have lost their
resource base in land, water or mineral deposit, and have
nothing to exchange. So they go on relief. One does not
see why most of them should not stay there. What else
have they to do? One does not see why their ranks should
not grow as compound interest grows. For every field
gullied, a man gullied.
That is, one does not see why this cheerful progression
DECEMBER 1937
625
should not continue, if God is to meet Walter Lippmann's
prayers about liberty and freedom. Not that Mr. Lipp-
mann is the only one upon his knees. Planning, we are
told, destroys freedom. As freedom is an absolute good,
while salmon are only salmon, wild swan only wild
swan, pine trees only pine trees, and ten million citizens
without resources only ten million bums, planning must
be renounced. The earth antedates Mr. Lippmann by
some little time. The hard study of geologists, ecologists,
foresters, soil technicians, has disclosed many of the prin-
ciples upon which it maintains its equilibrium. It is well
for us and for our children to listen to what the scientists
have found out and to aid rather than to upset that
equilibrium. When all is said and done it is the most
vital thing in our lives. We are not creatures of Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary, we are creatures of earth.
Even if "freedom" and "liberty" are outraged by work-
ing with earth forces, is it worse to outrage two abstrac-
tions of a very high order, or to outrage the ground be-
neath our feet? We are not even forced to make this
choice. The people of Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, have
learned to hold their resource base without giving up the
freedom of their citizens to come and go, buy and sell,
vote and talk as they please. Only the freedom of killers
to kill, and of earth destroyers to destroy, is checked.
II
FORTUNATELY THE MATTER is ALREADY FAR BEYOND THE
stage of deciding either to do or not to do something
about it. As a people we have decided to try to balance
our accounts with nature. At a rough estimate more than
a million men and women are at this moment devoting
their working hours to the task. Elsewhere I have called
this army the Land Guard. They include members of the
Forest Service, the Soil Conservation Service, the CCC,
the PWA, the WPA, the Resettlement Administration,
the Biological Survey, the Reclamation Service, the Na-
tional Resources Committee, the Rural Electrification Ad-
ministration, the revised triple-A, the TVA, state and local
conservation projects, and many private organizations,
such as the Audubon Society and the American Forestry
Association. This work is often magnificent in detail — go
watch a crew of the Soil Conservation Service rescue a
whole county from death by erosion — but it is work which
lacks coordination. Only the TVA has tackled a whole
region.
The TVA has taken the watershed of a great river
traversing seven states, and is attempting to restore the
resource base of an area four fifths the size of England.
It is popularly regarded as a power project, but first hand
observations have convinced me that power is a secondary
issue, and that its major objective is to help the people of
the Tennessee basin maintain a viable region; to check
flood, drought, erosion, one crop farming and the spread
of tenantry; to build up soil, forest, grass, tree crops,
local industry and diversified agriculture. It is our greatest
demonstration in regional planning and Chairman Arthur
E. Morgan has projected its social promise in his series of
articles in Survey Graphic in the last three years; Bench
Marks of the Tennessee Valley.
The TVA has so stirred the imagination of other sec-
tions of the country that the administration is presenting
to Congress a bill to apply its methods over the nation,
divided into seven great regions. In each region a definite
626
group is to be charged with the study of the resource base,
and with formulating methods to maintain it. The map
on page 625 outlines the proposed seven districts. Observe
how they cut across state boundaries. Why? Because the
great river basins which determine the areas do not recog-
nize state boundaries or even the Interstate Commerce
clause. These are regions designed by nature, not by man.
Earlier this year Senator Norris introduced S. 2555
into Congress. Section I reads:
It is the purpose and policy of this act to develop . . . plans,
projects and activities for ... navigation, the control of floods,
the reclamation of public lands ... to conserve the water, soil
and forest resources of the nation, to stabilize employment
and relieve unemployment, and ... to promote the general
welfare of the United States.
President Roosevelt, when he opened the flood gates at
Bonneville Dam in October, told us what he hoped these
regional authorities would do. He said that the more we
study the water resources of the nation, the clearer it be-
comes that their use is a matter of national concern. Our
thinking about them must be in terms of great regions
as well as narrow localities. He said that if we had known
as much about land use a generation ago as we know
today, we need never have allowed overgrazing and over-
plowing on that vast area of scanty rainfall which runs
from the Canadian border to Texas. We could have pre-
vented in great part the abandonment of thousands and
thousands of farms in portions of ten states, and thus pre-
vented the migration of destitute families into Washing-
ton, Oregon and California. The President went on to say:
My conception of liberty does not permit an individual
citizen or group of citizens to commit acts of depredation
against nature in such a way as to harm their neighbors, and
especially to harm the future generations of Americans.
A sample of what forethought can do was furnished by
the TVA in the superflood of January 1937. The flood
waters on one arm of the Tennessee were held in the
great lake above Norris Dam. As a result, Chattanooga
escaped with no flood damage, and the Ohio River at
Cairo was at least two feet lower than if the unrestrained
Tennessee had come roaring into it. That two feet was
enough to save Cairo, as well as to reduce the crest on
the main stem of the Mississippi.
Ill
SOONER OR LATER WE SHALL CERTAINLY HAVE REGIONAL
authorities to help us work with nature. Too many people
are being hurt for want of this work. What general re-
source principles should guide the several authorities if,
as and when they are set up? How should regional re-
sources be appraised ? If you were sitting on one of these .
boards, what would you vote for first, and where would
you throw your weight?
The National Resources Committee, in its monumental
reports under Morris L. Cooke, outlines the general prin-
ciples for all regions, with a wealth of supporting material.
Your aim, Mr. Regional Administrator, is to hold soil,
water, wild life, cover crops, at par; to turn over the land
to the oncoming generation in at least as good condition
as you found it. It is your job to make your section of
America a healthy, vital, attractive homeland which your
children can earn a living from and enjoy. This assign-
ment is not rhetoric. To accomplish it you must build
SURVEY GRAPHIC
dams and reservoirs, control swamps, marshes, bird life,
keep the salmon running; check erosion by terracing and
contour plowing; halt overgrazing, keep annual timber
cut below annual growth, work for diversified agriculture,
prevent nitrogen and phosphorus from leaving the soil
faster than they are returned by fertilizer. The techniques
arc already available for your use.
For resources underground— coal, petroleum, iron, cop-
per, natural gas and the rest, you cannot stop a drain on
the capital fund, but you can cut down the rate of that
drain. How? By fostering the substitution of hydroelectric
power for coal and oil power where feasible, by fostering
the use of scrap metal, and the use of minerals which are
abundant in the earth's crust— like aluminum— in place
of minerals which are rare — like copper.
Keep land, water, wild life resources at par. Exploit
underground minerals at the minimum feasible rate.
These are the overhead principles of working with nature
in any region.
Beginning to Plan at Home
NOW AS TO LOCAL PROBLEMS. HERE THE REGION ITSELF MUST
determine the best resource use. The first task is to find
out what you've got. Call in the geographers, the ecolo-
gists, the biologists and the engineers, and draw up a
careful inventory of the region. What are average rainfall,
range of temperature, natural forest cover, grass cover,
marsh lands, water table levels, bird and fish life? What
crops are already grown and how good is the soil for
them, and they for the soil? What grazing animals are
bred? What are the mineral resources, power sites, navi-
gation possibilities, harbors? In brief, what kind of re-
source base has nature built here since the ice pack moved
north ? What advantages and what disadvantages are now
being taken of it?
When you have answers to these questions, then you
will be in a position to tell your fellow citizens what they
ought to do if they want to go on living in their home-
land, with a dependable supply of products to exchange
for things which are not raised and fabricated at home. A
study of human resources is also essential. How fast is
population growing? What diseases are prevalent? What
are the depressed areas and why? What skills and trades
have been developed? What is the racial admixture? Are
the Finns building any of their famous cooperative cen-
ters? What groups really give a damn about natural re-
sources, and how may they be encouraged to work
harder ? Who are the few wise men who know this section
of earth, and who can tell you what they know, before
you begin telling other people anything?
Suppose you are in Region 7, the northwest area deter-
mined by the Columbia River basin. What has nature
given to the people of this region? Much has been given.
Waterpower, Douglas fir, wheat lands, salmon, water-
fowl areas, many mineral deposits, fine harbors, coastal
fisheries, and incomparable scenery. Many of these re-
sources are going fast, as we have seen, but if you can
check that drain, not a man need ever go upon relief.
This is one of the richest and most beautiful areas on
earth. It is fantastically unnecessary to tolerate poverty-
stricken families here. Indeed a much larger population
could be adequately supported if some thought were taken
for their provisioning. The excess farmers of the semi-
arid belt in Regions 4 and 5 can find homes here. Let the
Great Plains be covered with grass again, and the num-
bers of sheep and cattle which can gaze thereon held to
the capacity of the grass. Throw out the plow where
nature, with her awful warning of dust, decrees that the
plow should never go.
There are three further factors, Mr. Administrator,
which need careful exploration before you venture to give
too much advice:
1. What assets has the region in terms other than food,
clothing and shelter? How about scenery, sunshine, recreation
possibilities, health centers? Such "services" are a very im-
portant part of the resource base. They have excellent ex-
change value, especially since the motor car has made mobile
the whole population of America.
2. How large a part of the physical resources of your region
is being drained to other regions with inadequate return?
Are you giving away ten beef cattle for one pair of shoes;
ten bushels of wheat for a loaf of cellophaned bread?
3. What are the possibilities in the light of biochemistry
and agrobiology of making your region more self sufficient,
to the end that you may not need to pitch down an economic
cliff every time the stock market breaks in Wall Street?
There is a point where centralization and interdependence
can be overdone. We seem to have reached that point long
since. A little sturdy regional independence is very much in
order, despite the cries and alarms which are bound to come
from national trade associations.
Let us consider these three topics a little more carefully.
They are new and interesting.
Service resources
WE MUST BE CAREFUL OF THE OVERSIMPLIFIED NOTION THAT
resources consist only of things which can be mined,
cropped, pumped, trapped or otherwise handled for fabri-
cation and sale. The major resource of Florida is not
phosphate rock or orange orchards, but winter sunshine.
This has a higher exchange value than mountains of phos-
phate rock. The major resource of New England used to
be soil and forest, but today it is scenery — mountains to
climb, lakes to paddle over, white ocean beaches and rocky
headlands. These are the resources that should be de-
veloped and conserved.
Let me give you a contrast between conservation and
destruction. From Plymouth, N. H., to North Woodstock,
runs a fine state highway. On one side is the tumbling
Pemigewasset River, the chief tributary of the Merrimac.
To the right and left steep hills rise abruptly, and tower-
ing above them the great mountains of the Franconia
range. This valley might have been designed to be one of
the fairest spots on earth. Yet the twenty miles of road-
side is now one dreadful, reeking slum of tourist camps,
filling stations, Burma Shaves, Come On Inns and Robins
Nest Rests. The natives call it Flush Toilet Road, and no
name could be more just. As you drive through this pan-
demonium, the lovely hills recede, great mountains fade.
Beyond North Woodstock, the state steps in. One enters
government land. The flush toilet signs abruptly end, to be
replaced by tall trees, flashing brooks and the natural
tangle of roadside. The driver, taut and tired in his seat,
suddenly breathes deeply and his clenched hands relax
upon the wheel. Burma Shaves can be inspected any-
where; this is the New England he came to sec. Stopping
to gaze up the cliffs of Cannon at the Old Man of the
Mountain, instead of a raw, touting commercialism, he
DECEMBER 1937
627
finds dignity and peace. He will come again and bring
the family.
The administrator need not advocate the state as against
individual enterprise, but one can certainly point out to
individual enterprisers that if they do not adjust them-
selves to preserve some semblance of the dignity of the
surrounding environment in areas like this, the scenery
resource will presently be valueless to them and to the peo-
ple of the region. Why drive 300 miles from New York
to New Hampshire, when one can get ten times as many
dancing lights and screaming signboards at Coney Island?
Many other areas where scenery and recreation are a
major resource come to mind — Southern California, Ari-
zona, the Adirondacks, the Great Smokies, Puget Sound,
the Michigan lake country. Certain sections meanwhile are
peculiarly adapted for health resorts — Saratoga, Atlantic
City, Colorado Springs, Warm Springs, Asheville.
Haves and Have-Nots
GOVERNOR MARLAND OF OKLAHOMA TOLD ME IN 1934 ABOUT
the riches of his state. He had the statistics at his finger
tips — the wheat, corn, cotton, oil, coal, minerals. "Yet to-
night," he said, "two hundred thousand children are going
to bed hungry in Oklahoma." He cursed the East and
Wall Street and the men who had picked up these riches
at bargain rates, and were now draining away the wealth
of Oklahoma, giving little in return. Professor Robert
Montgomery of the University of Texas has told me about
the similar situation which exists in his state. Many studies
have been made of counties and regions in the deep South
where much goes out and little comes back to desperate
tenant farmers. Professor Arthur F. Raper, author of Pre-
face to Peasantry, went so far as to give me a formula:
"The bankers rob the landlords; the landlords rob the
tenants; the tenants rob the soil." The land pays the final
bill in exhaustion and erosion.
It is clearly your task as a member of the regional
authority to find out how much serious blood letting of
this nature is going on. Your diplomacy can enlist im-
mense popular support in seeking to stanch the flow.
Self-sufficiency
BANKERS AND BUSINESS MEN ARE CLAMORING FOR LESS
centralization in government, and for more local auton-
omy. Take them at their word. A natural region should
strive to be as self-supporting as resources permit. Why
should people in Portland, Me. buy lumber from Portland,
Ore. with a long, costly haul across or around the con-
tinent, when north a few miles is one of the finest natural
timber regions on the planet? The timber resources of
Maine have been gutted, but they can be built up, and
in the end they will pay good dividends to the people of
the New England region.
Here is Dr. W. O. Willcox with his amazing formulas
for finding and achieving the maximum yield of any
plant that grows. Protect your runoff, give the plants
supplementary irrigation in the growing season, give them
the proper mineral food, and it is safe to say that any
one of the seven regions could take care of the bulk of
its food supply— at a lower outlay in human effort than
now obtains. Dr. Willcox has shown in his Nations Can
Live at Home how Italy, at a fraction of the cost of the
Ethiopian campaign, could have got most of what she
went after in Ethiopia, right from the Italian peninsula.
Says Lancelot Hogben in The Retreat from Reason:
The discovery of electricity and of the light metals has now
shown us how the power which drove those old water wheels
could do all the work of the dark Satanic mills, and do it
better. The manufacture of dyes, drugs, perfumes and anti-
septics does not rest on the miraculous properties of coal. It
rests on the fact that we know enough about the bricks from
which complex organic molecules are built up to make them
from the disintegration products of any organic matter we
choose to employ. Private enterprise condemned us to go
underground to look for them. We have covered ourselves
with soot in doing so. Biochemistry shows that we do not
have to wait till nature has converted forests into Stygian
gloom. I should be more impressed by the arguments of the
professional economist, if he could convince me that he
knows how easily mesitylene can be made out of acetone.
Professor Haldane's Daedalus is more relevant to a rational
choice between possible forms of social organization than any
generalizations which "economic analysis" derives by the
application of logic to verbal definitions of its subject matter.
Collectivists will not realize the strength of their own case
till they equip themselves with a little information about the
resources which a rationally planned society could make
use of.
What Mr. Hogben is saying is that with cheap, abun-
dant power, and almost any kind of organic material—
corn shucks, pulp wood, saplings — it is presently going to
be feasible — it is already possible — to build up from primi-
tive organic bricks many varieties of raw material now
imported at great labor and expense. These processes can
give us regional self-sufficiency with a vengence. Trans-
port of bulk goods can drop to a fraction of its present
total. Vast establishments now manufacturing for a na-
tional market may no longer be able to compete with
small local establishments. Megalopolis, the great city of
the machine age, will then have fulfilled its historical
function and may pass into limbo.
This happy state of bankrupt mass production factories
and abundant local goods will not come tomorrow. But
it is not Utopian dreaming to think that it is on the way.
In the laboratory, in many experimental plots, the mir-
acles of biochemistry and agrobiology are already accom-
plished facts.
Remember this when you come to give advice for the
resources of your region, Mr. Administrator. Do not think
of yourself as a mere cog in a national economic wheel.
In some respects you are a cog now, and will always be
one. Transportation, communication, are obviously con-
tinental matters. In other respects you are a cog now but
need not remain a cog, as in the case of foodstuffs, timber,
fish perhaps, which you could secure more cheaply at
home if you took the trouble to think it out.
The age of coal and iron made for centralization, dan-
gerous interdependence, vast roaring cities in the low-
lands, the gutting of the hinterland's resources, and an
ominous undermining of nature's equilibrium. It made
for colonies, imperialism, war. The age of cheap electric
power, light alloys, biochemistry and agrobiology turns
in another and a happier direction. More independence
and regional self-sufficiency; more light, air, sunshine, and
a restoration of nature's balance.
I know of no more exciting task than to work with
nature and with science as a member of a regional au-
thority. Go and talk to Dr. Harcourt Morgan. He is
doing it.
628
The Story of a River
The narrative passages and the photographs on
this page and the two pages that follow are from
The River, a motion picture just completed by the
Farm Security Administration of the Department
of Agriculture. The River might well be consid-
ered an epic poem of the Father of Waters, with
musical accompaniment and camera shots that
Homer would have welcomed. It incorporates
recent flood scenes, as did its predecessor in 1936,
The Plow That Broke the Plains, the havoc of
drought and dust. Both were written and directed
by PARE LORENTZ
From as far West as Idaho,
Down from the glacier peaks of the Rockies —
From as far East as New York,
Down from the turkey ridges of the Alleghenies —
Down from Minnesota, twenty-five hundred miles,
The Mississippi River runs to the Gulf.
Carrying every drop of water that flows down two thirds the
continent —
Carrying every brook and rill,
Rivulet and creek —
Carrying all the rivers that run, down two thirds the continent,
The Mississippi runs to the Gulf of Mexico.
. . . And we made cotton king.
We rolled a million bales down the river for Liverpool and
Leeds;
1860: we rolled four million bales down the river —
Rolled them off Alabama,
Rolled them off Mississippi,
Rolled them off Louisiana,
Rolled them down the river. . . .
We mined the soil for cotton until it would yield no more,
and then moved West. ...
. . We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns, but at what
a cost.
We cut the top off the Alleghenies and sent it down the river;
We cut the top off Minnesota and sent it down the river;
We cut the top off Wisconsin and sent it down the river.
We left the mountains and the hills slashed and burned, and
moved on.
For the water comes downhill,
Spring and fall, down from the cut-over mountains, down from
the plowed-off slopes,
From as far West as Idaho and as far East as New York,
Down every brook and rill, rivulet and creek;
Carrying every drop of water that flows down two thirds the
continent. . . .
. . . Thirty-eight feet at Baton Rouge:
River rising;
Helena: river rising;
Memphis: river rising;
Cairo: river rising—
A thousand miles to go,
A thousand miles of levee to hold. . .
. . . When we first found the Great Valley it was forty percent
forested.
Today for every hundred acres of forests we found we have
ten left —
Today five percent of the entire valley is ruined forever for
agricultural use —
Twenty-five percent of the topsoil has been shoved by the old
river into the Gulf of Mexico—-
Today two out of five farmers in the valley are tenant farmers,
ten percent of them sharecroppers. . . .
. . . And the old river can be controlled;
We had the power to take the valley apart; we have the power
to put it together again.
The Living Law
Sketches by Maurice Sterne
for Department of Justice
Building murals, Washington.
by WALTON H. HAMILTON
Singling out the decision of an English squire- judge just one
hundred years ago, Professor Hamilton shows how the law is
kept alive and then something of its sweep. Judges are artists,
he avers — the work of the courts is creative; but the materials
from which they must forever refashion the law come from
current realities and the folk. In the last twenty-five years those
materials have come in a stream so large and turbulent that the
courts have not been able to assimilate them.
ALMOST TWO MILLENIUMS AGO THE GREATEST OF SAINTS
turned his attention to the law and in the briefest of
essays declared that the spirit gives life and the letter kills.
Through the centuries his words have prompted rebuttal,
elaboration, and exposition; but whatever the rhetorical
trappings with which the declaration is denied, illustrated,
or adorned, the text for all its endless repetition remains
fresher than any gloss.
And yet the spirit has not achieved a decisive triumph
over the letter of the law. Any day in the year the cere-
monial which attends the worship of the literal can be
found in full swing. A host of petty officials — too stupid,
slothful, or pompous to associate their activities with the
social function they are there to perform — will arouse from
weeks of negligence to a vigorous campaign. As car after
car is ordered to move to the edge of the highway, there
is not the slightest interest in whether the driving puts life
and limb in jeopardy, but only in the fact that the rate of
speed is thirty-two miles per hour and the law says twenty-
five. If the victim happens to be a woman driving her
husband's car; and if his registration card and her driver's
license have different addresses upon them — woe be to
her, caught in the irrelevancies of a policeman's logic. Or
shift the scene to the nearest court — traffic, criminal, or
equity — and witness the worship of the letter in all its
ritualistic splendor. The issues must be crowded into a
cause of action; the conduct of the trial must make its
truce with a technical procedure; only so much testimony
is to be admitted as the rules of evidence allow; and the
judge in his rulings declares, "It is not I that speak but
the law that speaks through me."
HOW MUCH THE SPIRIT LIFTS AND THE LETTER HINDERS, NO
one knows. It is foolish to say that where ritual is, there is
no life; for men have many interests and the most adven-
turous spirit may love a ritual. Moreover, pomp and circum-
stance are the best of protective coloring and behind the
semblance of conservatism it is easier to get radical things
accomplished. One of the greatest of American judges has
the rare talent of sensing the rule which will best serve
current public necessity — and the divine gift of stating it
in a proposition that sounds so venerable as to command
the assent of his brethren. As yet we know far too little
of "the hidden sources of preference" to understand why
judges decide as they do. Their real reasons are locked
within their own minds — or within judicial council cham-
bers— even if they are known to themselves. Their good
reasons— or at least the best they can command for the
occasion — are displayed in the reports.
A Parade of Reasons
SOMEONE — PERHAPS SOME THREE OR FOUR PERSONS ACTING
separately— should attempt to see what they can make of a
thousand random cases. We used to accuse women of
being "illogical," "irrational," "unable to sustain a course
of argument," "making her reasons support her conclu-
sions," until we began to subject the opinions of judges to
critical scrutiny and to discover the same qualities there.
The law has a ponderous equipment — in concepts, proce-
dures, rules — but its mind-ways are only a refinement of
those of common sense. A writer, in a series of letters that
deserves to be a classic, has contrived alibis for the failures
of a pitcher trying to break into the big league; and the
similarities in the technical devices of rationalization em-
ployed in "You Know Me Al" and in Mr. Justice Suther-
land's opinion in Atkins v. Children's Hospital will re-
ward comparison with many a gleeful triumph. If movie
stars, debutantes, physicians, college professors, and legis-
lators were forced to borrow the practice of the courts and
produce a parade of reasons to support every action, their
conduct would slide off into the irrational. The world
would remain the same and yet become topsy-turvy.
The bother is that in the law reports "the letter" is taken
for a ride. The cause is worthy — yes I know. The statute
serves a social necessity — undoubtedly. The legislation
meets an imperative need of the people — not to be dis-
puted. The industry is in chaos and incapable of putting
its own affairs in order — no one can say to the contrary.
But the question is not one of social necessity, of the need
of a people, of an industry in disorder. It is one of the
power of Congress; and that means reference to the Con-
stitution. So the statute is "to be measured against the
Constitution," and if it "falls short," there is nothing for
this honorable court to do but to declare it "null and void."
Arm yourself with time, patience, and a microscope, which
will pry out meanings between lines. You will discover
not a line, not a clause, not a phrase in the Constitution
that stops either the national or the state governments,
within their separate orbits, from adventures in social
legislation.
Yet time and again the Supreme Court of the United
States has struck down; at times reluctantly, usually with
632
SURVEY GRAPHIC
sympathy for the object of execution; always out of a
deep sense of duty — a compulsion of the letter of the law
that did not exist. The good reasons spread on the record
are not the real reasons spoken in chambers or never
voiced. So the letter has been made the villain in the piece.
II
AN INTELLECTUAL SNOB LIKE MlNERVA MAY SPRING FULL-
fledged from the brain of Jove; it is the glory of the living
law that, like Topsy, it just grew. A music that endures
has its composers, but they voice the spirit of their times.
They are not likely to appear unless there has been a tre-
mendous outpouring of amateur song and the best of this
is caught up and refined by the master musician. Above
all folk tunes feed the streams of creative expression.
Law lends itself to the process of growth. Ritualists you
have with you always; a certain type of mind, with no
command of alternatives, can visualize a case only in
terms of a single rule of law and is powerless to escape its
own literalness. But the extraordinary case, fresh from life,
comes into court packed with its own distinctive assort-
ment of facts. And in the common law and the statutes,
in procedure and substantive law, in judge-made law and
that of more accredited origin, there is quite a corpus upon
which to draw. It is only the little man, whom no legal
statement can turn into an astute lawyer or a great judge,
whose mind grasps a case out of the ordinary in a formula.
His more resourceful brethren will find, along the line
where fact meets law, not one but a dozen separate ques-
tions. The result depends as much upon a persuasive
choice of issues as upon the arguments advanced; if one
road or another is blocked by previous decisions, there are
others which may possibly stand ready or perhaps a new
avenue of approach may be opened — and the court lured
down that way. If the issue is multiplex and of conse-
quence— the possibilities are inviting. Moreover, in the law
general propositions can never acquire the haughty aloof-
ness they possess in mathematics and in a number of
theologies which ape its pretentiousness. A rival proposi-
tion headed the other way is usually at hand with an at-
torney claiming its jurisdiction. Precedents cannot be
uncritically accepted by judges who assume that their
predecessors were men of sense and reason such as them-
selves. Attorneys are there, pitted against each other,
whose business it is to show similarities or to distinguish
former cases. As cause follows cause, year after year,
decade after decade, the general rules have to take the
impact of facts in thousands of suits out of life. In a
month, in a year, there may be little change in the law; in
a quarter of a century the marks of growth attend its
march. In this way the law, a creature of communal au-
thorship, is remade by the folk.
Lord Abinger and the Butcher's Van
THE MIND OF MAN LIVES BY CONCRETION AND A SINGLE
example will illumine the process. In 1837, just one hun-
dred years ago, an English court fumbled with its first
employer's liability case. It was just a few years before
the word "individualism" was to come into the language;
the term "unemployment" was still uncoined; and no one
had as yet heard of the "industrial revolution." But the
morning Lord Abinger delivered the opinion of the Court
of the Exchequer in the suit of Priestly v. fowler, he had
ridden up to London in a railway carriage. The case was
of obvious simplicity. The driver of a butcher's van ne-
DECEMBER 1937
glected its repair, overloaded the vehicle, drove it forth
upon its journey, and caused it to give way and break
down. Priestly, the driver's fellow-servant, was "thrown
with violence to the ground," his "thigh was thereby frac-
tured," and he sought recovery of the butcher. From the
vantage point of today it is amazing that the English law
reports are not filled with similar suits; at the time it was
curious that a servant should presume to bring suit against
his master. It is the prevailing opinion of the times which
makes the cases.
And decides them. Had there been a law on the subject,
Lord Abinger would doubtless have become a literalist,
recited it, and disposed of the case in a dull opinion. But,
without recourse to precedents, he was driven back to
common sense; and the only common sense he possessed
was his own — and that of the English squirearchy. So we
catch from him the pristine statement of law on the sub-
ject; a statement that smacks of the manor house and the
stable, of fox hunting and the countryside, of a system of
authority in which each had its place. There is none of the
decadence of book and candle here; instead it is talk, the
kind of talk an expansive squire addresses to his fellow
squires after dinner just before the host says, "Shall we
join the ladies?" This talk:
If the master is liable to the servant in this action, the prin-
ciple will carry us to an alarming extent. He is responsible for
the negligence of his coachmaker, his harness-maker, his
coachman. The footman may have an action for a defect in
the carriage or for drunkenness, neglect, or want of skill in
the coachman. The master would be liable to the servant for
the negligence of the chambermaid in putting him into a
damp bed; for that of the upholsterer in sending in a crazy
bedstead; of the butcher in supplying the family with meat
of a quality injurious to health. The absurdity of these conse-
quences affords a sufficient argument against the application
of this principle. The servant is not bound to risk his safety
in the service of his master, and may decline any service in
which he reasonably apprehends injury to himself; in this case
the plaintiff must have known as well as his master, and
probably better, whether the van was overloaded. To allow
this sort of action to prevail would be an encouragement to
the servant to omit that diligence and caution which he is in
duty bound to exercise on behalf of his master which are a
much better security against any injury the servant may
sustain by the negligence of others engaged under the same
master than any recourse against his master for damages
could possibly afford.
Justice and the Law of Compensation
633
Competition
Thus a rural England supplied a rising industrialism with
one of the most comfortable of legal doctrines.
Mr. Chief Justice Shaw and the Locomotive
THE SINGLE CASE WAS ALL THAT AMERICAN LAW NEEDED IN
the way of imports. A cause in South Carolina in 1841
brought the issue to American law and gave a bench of
judges the opportunity for a verbal display of ingenuity
and learning. But it was in 1842, in the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts, that the doctrine really made its
American debut. There, in the celebrated but unsuccessful
suit of Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad Corp.,
Mr. Chief Justice Shaw brought Lord Abinger's senti-
ments into the law. It is a translation from common sense
to decorous principle and abstract rule; little is added,
nothing is lost. The folkstuff is put on the anvil; the
marks of rural origin and service to a class are obliterated;
the here and nows are swept away; the carriage-maker,
the footman, the chambermaid, with the unwholesome
food and the crazy bedstead, fail to survive the crucible
and even the lordliness of the master and the diligence
which he demands of servants from the lower classes dis-
appears. England is converted into an everyland with its
universal principles solemnly enunciated. So we have a
parade — a solemn and imposing parade — of the kind of
obligations, imperatives, and propositions which later
scholars could set down as trump cards in a grand game
of escape — for the employer.
It is engaging — even to the layman — to note in detail
just what Mr. Chief Justice Shaw, and the lesser judges
who followed, did to Lord Abinger's common sense, for
in it lies the way of the law in its making. Shaw was a
realist; he saw, as few of his American contemporaries on
the bench, the coming industrialism and welcomed it. Shaw
False Witness
634
was an individualist who knew that we get great things
done by leaving them to the interested parties. Shaw was
learned in the law of contract, sound in classical econom-
ics, and wise with the wisdom of his own day and genera-
tion. Farwell, a railway engineer, had been injured
through the careless act of a switchman and sued his
employer, the company; witness Shaw's attack upon a
problem of first instance.
If the injured party were a "stranger" an action would
clearly lie in tort because of the negligence of the com-
pany's agent. But master and servant are bound by a con-
tract; and if the master has assumed liability for injury
to the servant while within his employ, it must be found
as an explicit stipulation or as an implication of the con-
tract. An examination of the contract shows it to be
neither the one nor the other; quite the contrary, for—
with his economics to the rescue — as an engineer, Farwell
was receiving a wage somewhat higher than he had been
previously getting as a mechanic. The inference is that the
differential is a payment for assuming the greater risks
of employment. May we add — although Shaw does not set
it down — that with the economic man pinch-hitting for
the more human reasonable man of the law, the differen-
tial would be neatly calculated to purchase insurance
against just such hazards as a locomotive engineer in the
late thirties of the last century would meet. Here is cre-
ated "the assumption of risk rule" — a trump card for the
defense.
Scrub Women, Superintendent et al
BUT LOGOMACHY IS ONLY ENTERING UPON ITS TASK.
Although he employed three times the space, Mr. Chief
Justice Shaw used up only a fragment of the materials
supplied by Lord Abinger. Although his opinion suggests
a number of other leads, the learned justice bottomed his
case too heavily in contract to be able to develop them fully
or to give them precise statement. As factories began to fill
the land, their unguarded machinery was a menace to
workingmen; but towns and states competed for the loca-
tion of plants and the courts could not remain immune to
a general disposition to make the way easy for them. In
general, rules of law were not consciously contrived by
courts in their interest; but as case followed case, rules of
law were established in an atmosphere favorable to a
coming industrialism and the living law reflected the
values which were current. The defenses of the employer
against the suit for damage because of industrial accident
were strengthened. A number of judges, forgetting for
the moment that the doctrine "sounded" in contract,
gave it quite a run in tort. Other fragments of Lord Abin-
ger's homely discourse were seized upon and converted
into legal verities. The master was responsible to a
stranger, but not to a servant, for the negligent act of a
fellow-servant. However low might be the task of the
injured party and however exalted the office of the negli-
gent agent — scrubwoman and superintendent is a case of
record — the fellowship held. Nor could the employe col-
lect if he had made a contribution of negligence to the
resulting accident. Any legal purist knows that "assump-
tion of risk" is contract and "negligence" is tort and their
mingling in a single doctrine, strangely called "employer's
liability," was a legal and logical perversion. But as it
comes up in the world a legal doctrine is aggressive; it
does not surrender one foundation when it has won
another; its pragmatism is not to be pent within logical
SURVEY GRAPHIC
categories. Its inconsistency lies only within its legal
moulds; the stuff of Lord Abinger, of common sense, of
the thought of the age — the contents of the moulds — is
vitality itself and all of a piece. Hence three neatly chiseled
rules — "assumption of risk," "the fellow-servant" and
"contributory negligence." And as against indemnity for
work accident they gave to the employer an all but per-
fect alibi.
These three rules remained the living law until men
began to think differently. When public opinion had
changed the courts themselves executed an about face.
How matters fell out in each of the states presents a dis-
tinctive story; and in the federal courts — and a number
of commonwealths — a great deal that has been set down
above lingers on. Take from the U. S. Reports fifty suc-
cessive cases of employers' liability. Try to date them by
ideological attack and you will discover that chronology
is no matter of years. A graphic example of the response
of the law to a changing scheme of values lies within the
records of the Pennsylvania courts. At the beginning the
law was the law of another jurisdiction — England via
Massachusetts — as stated above. And so it remained until
long after the Civil War. Then as case followed case in
endless succession, and brief upon brief flattened itself
against the foundations of Farwell v. Boston and Worces-
ter, the pretentious rock of ages began to crack.
Positions Reversed
IT PROBABLY TOOK AT LEAST TEN THOUSAND CAUSES AND AS
many arguments to do the trick; but in the end each of
the employer's three defenses had set against it a counter-
defense. It was true that the worker assumed the ordinary
risks of employment; but the employer was obliged to
provide a safe working-place. It was true that the master
was not liable for the act of the fellow-servant; but he
was responsible for the act of an employe acting as a vice-
principal. It was true that the injured man could not col-
lect if he had been guilty of contributory negligence; but
in respect to dangerous occupations the master was under
the duty to instruct. Moreover, this was a "non-delegable
duty." But did this mean that the master must personally
instruct ? that its performance could not be delegated ? Not
at all — only that his liability could not be delegated. An
argument in a circle, one that a student could never put
over on even the dumbest instructor in logic; yet the kind
of material which makes novelty look plausible — and of
which legal doctrines are fashioned. In this instance the
lack of logic did not make the rule less comfortable to the
workingman. The net result was almost to reverse the
positions of the litigants. Under the older rules of the
game the employer held three trumps and the employe
nothing; now the employe has a card to match every one
his adversary holds. But the gain to the workingman was
even greater; since he now had a trick to match everyone
held by his employer, he could get all the facts and every
issue before the jury — and the jury could usually be de-
pended upon to do the rest. Moreover, since the suit was
at tort, there was no real limit to the extent of damages.
Thus the stage was set for the final act. It is all but
certain that had the legislature passed no acts, the courts
would have come to accord to the workingman compen-
sation for injuries. A law which gave to the plaintiff a
better than even chance at recovery was not the legal rod
of old. Where legislatures had stripped away their right
to plead "assumption of risk," "contributory negligence,"
Brute Force
or "the fellow-servant" rule, employers were left without
defenses, and they were appalled by the benevolence of
juries with the monies of private enterprise. So the voices
of the business group, still a trifle off key, were lifted in
the chorus for reform. It seemed a little primitive for so
decorous an institution as the law to meet the hazards of
modern industry with a crude form of action devised long
ago to serve the ends of a private justice not untinged by
vengeance. Why not bring into the law an analogue to
the methodical ways of the machine and of business, ac-
cept the residuum of accident that cannot be prevented as
in the nature of things, establish definite schedules of rates
for particular injuries, and make compensation a matter
of administrative procedure? It took a heroic struggle —
the end of which lies in the future — to get appropriate
acts upon the statute books, and hardly was ink dry upon
necessary signatures before the legislation was hailed into
court that the higher law might be "satisfied."
Wrestling Judges and the Angels of Legalism
THERE THE COMMON SENSE OF AN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY HAD
to make its way against minds steeped in the absolutes of
a once common law — minds which clung to the view that
the acts stripped individuals of rights by abridging their
access to courts; that the employer's common law defenses
were inalienable and could not be stripped away by the
fiat of the legislature; or that where funds were paid into
a pool and benefits paid out, there was an unconstitutional
taking of property. In the end such verbalisms were bound
to fall before social necessity; but to many sincere judges
they were compulsions to which conscience commanded
obedience; and many a valiant wearer of the robe lay
awake night after night, torn (Continued on page 735)
Red Tape
DECEMBER 1937
635
What 19,000 Doctors Could Tell Us
by DOUGLASS W. ORR, M.D. and JEAN WALKER ORR
FIRST OF A SERIES
A young American physician leaves professional stereotypes
behind him and engages in a surprising line of discovery. Dr.
and Mrs. Orr have made the first intimate study ever attempted
of how wage earning families no less than panel doctors feel
about the health insurance system that Britain inaugurated
twenty-five years ago. Again our National Federation of Settle-
ments breaks ground for a fresh advance in social security.
WIDOWS
ORPHANS
AND
OLD AGE
CONTRIBUTORY
PENSIONS
UNEMPLOYMENT
TWO MEDICAL STUDENTS, A SENIOR AND A JUNIOR, JUMPED
off the street car at State Street and Chicago Avenue on
one of Chicago's blustering November nights. Just then
they saw a man on the opposite corner. About to cross the
street, he staggered and then collapsed on the frozen
ground off the sidewalk. When the young doctors reached
him the man's body was rigid, his arms flexed and taut,
his teeth grinding together.
"Epilepsy," said the senior; "typical grand mal seizure."
"What'll we do?" asked the other; the street was deserted,
the shops closed. "Well," said the first, "he'll get over the
attack, but he ought to be in a hospital." "Guess he
should," replied the junior; "I'll run down to the Chicago
Avenue Station and get a paddy-wagon."
The junior arrived out of breath. The desk sergeant
heard his story, but looked helpless. "Gosh, fellow, I can't
send a wagon now; they're all out. Probably can't get one
for half an hour. But I'll have
'em drive over there as soon
as I can." The junior, feeling
more helpless than the officer
looked, returned to find that
the epileptic had disappeared.
"He came out of it," said
the senior, "says he has them
all the time. Let's go home."
So they did, but not without
a thought of other possibili-
ties. What if the man had
fractured his skull when he
fell? Maybe his epilepsy was
brought on by a brain tumor ?
He ought to have had a look-
ing over in any case. What if
some graver emergency oc-
curred? Where would they
get an ambulance?
THREE YEARS LATER THE "ju-
nior" was walking with his
wife in London. The hour
was late and the street, per-
haps ten minutes from Pica-
dilly Circus, dark and almost
deserted. Suddenly there was
a commotion ahead; someone
HEALTH
50
British Social Insurances 1934
tory fees; black, net outlay by
cried out, and at once a Bobby appeared. By the time we
got there another police constable trotted up, and the first
went off to phone. A handful of curious people gathered.
On the sidewalk lay a middle-aged woman near the
end of a typical epileptic attack. The Bobby commanded
us to "keep moving, please." A bell clanged and a Lon-
don County Council ambulance swung round the corner.
In another ten or fifteen minutes, we knew, the patient
would be in the examining room of Charing Cross, or
Guy's, or St. Thomas's Hospital.
The second episode recalled the first, a case of free asso-
ciation by contrasting rather than similar ideas. In the
interim the young doctor had finished his medical course
and had served eighteen months in the Cook County Hos-
pital— "the world's largest, you know" — an experience
which served only to heighten the contrast. His mind's eye
reviewed dozens of Chicago police paddy-wagons rum-
bling up to "County's" exam-
ining room with cold and
miserable men and women —
pneumonia, fractures, drunks,
abortions, knife wounds — ly-
ing on army stretchers and in
the care of a couple of usually
good natured, willing, gum-
chewing cops! To get an am-
bulance in Chicago you must
be able to pay; there is virtu-
ally no city or county ambu-
lance corps, and the police
take care of emergencies.
So this was London! How
was it, wondered the doctor
who had developed the habit
of wondering about such
things, that London has 175
ambulances and a staff of 500
drivers and trained attend-
ants while Chicago has only
5 or 6, some of them borrowed
from the Fire Department?
There are American cities far
better off than Chicago — and
yet! But that is getting ahead
of the story. How did we get
to London, and why?
30
20
10
35. White indicates contribu-
central and local government
636
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Shadow of Canon Barnett
WE HAD JUST TAKEN UP RESIDENCE IN ToYNBEE HALL IN
the East End. Toynbee Hall we had been told was a set-
tlement like Hull-House and Henry Street and kindred
centers throughout the country. It is the prototype of five
hundred such neighborhood centers throughout the
world. Located in underprivileged areas, settlements
know the facts of life first hand and are thus able to in-
terpret the needs and aspirations of their neighbors in
advance of public opinion. Characteristic action on the
part of the American settlements — even before the de-
pression broke — took the form in 1928 and 1929 of case
studies of unemployment in the United States and of the
scheme of unemployment insurance in Great Britain.
These findings were brought to bear on subsequent state
and federal legislation.
Now settlement workers know sickness no less than
unemployment as a major cause of household disasters.
Moreover, the earlier study had disclosed how British
workers are protected by health insurance no less than
insurance against unemployment and old age. Why
shouldn't our social security act, they now asked, in-
clude provision against sickness? Hence this new study
of how National Health Insurance in England affects
the average working man and woman. Funds were
available from the Barnett Fellowship Trust. This me-
morial to Canon Barnett, who founded Toynbee Hall
something over a half century ago, had been set up by
British friends and admirers in conjunction with our
own National Federation of Settlements. This time the
exchange Fellow was to be an American and the Ameri-
can committee sought a young doctor who had lived in a
settlement. Here they ran into a snag: health insurance
was not, in the minds of his professional superiors, a sub-
ject for investigation and if he undertook it he might
lose his chance at later hospital appointment. In the end
the authors of these pages were selected. We are a doctor
and a social worker and the settlement point of view has
been added thereunto!
Crossing third class, our boat sailed just eight days
after the doctor made final rounds on Ward 31 "at
County." He jumped from listening to chests, sewing up
lacerations, and assisting at "cholecystelectroccagulecto-
mies," to initiating this piece of social research. In medi-
cal school he had gained the impression that the "panel
system" in England was a monstrous business by which
protesting doctors who couldn't make a decent living
themselves were seized by the government and ordered
to take care of a designated 2000 unwilling patients in a
given area. The change in work and outlook was not so
marked for the social worker, but there were lots of sur-
prises for both.
Breaking Through
"GOING TO ENGLAND, ARE YOU ? BE SURE TO SEE SO-AND-SO.
I'll give you a letter to him!" We had arrived well armed
with such introductions to Big Names in English Medi-
cine. "Fine," we thought, "we'll get the inside dope."
But a certain Dr. Hill changed our minds!
Dr. Charles Hill is deputy medical secretary of the
British Medical Association and to him we confided our
intentions. Several names were mentioned; those Big
Names to whom we carried letters. "See them of course
but they aren't typical," protested Dr. Hill. "So-and-So's
Johnny Bull Joins Up
When Johnny Bull, the average English boy, leaves school,
the chances are that he will go to work. If he is a manual
worker or if what he earns is under £250 ($1250) a year,
the law requires him to be insured under the national health
insurance acts as soon as he turns sixteen. An employer is
subject to stiff legal penalties if he employs uninsured per-
sons between that age and sixty-five.
* * *
In most instances Johnny knows just what to do because his
Dad or an older brother or sister has gone through the ropes.
If not, the cashier or "governor" at his place of work will
tell him. He can connect up through the post office but ordi-
narily his first move will be to join an Approved Society.
These are "carriers" of National Health Insurance and are
affiliated with trade unions, friendly societies, large corpora-
tions, or industrial insurance companies. A little foresight
would lead Johnny to discover that some Approved Societies
pay better "additional" benefits than others. As he is young
and fit, without a thought of ever becoming sick, it is likely
that an agent from one of the large insurance companies —
"they are always on the doorstep" — will sign him up.
* * *
As soon as accepted, Johnny gets a medical card and a
booklet of instructions. His next step is to select the doctor he
wishes to take care of him in the event of sickness, and get
him to sign his medical card and accept him as a patient.
He has also a "National Health and Pensions Insurance
Contribution Card," for it happens that the contributions for
both health and old age insurance are collected together. This
he presents each week to his employer for stamping. In prac-
tice, the employer keeps these cards on file and each week
affixes appropriate contribution stamps which he gets from the
post office. Each stamp represents the value of the combined
contributions of the employer and the employe for one week.
Twice a year the fully stamped cards are sent to the respective
Approved Societies and new cards are issued. The societies are
thus kept posted as to whether their members are at work,
their contributions paid up and their title clear to benefits.
* * *
Suppose, then, that Johnny Bull gets sick. He goes at once
to his doctor, or sends for him if he is bedridden; and there
are no doctor's fees to pay for these visits. The insurance takes
care of that. He does not get complete medical service, but he
does get everything within the competence of the general
practitioner of his choice. The important fact is that Johnny
is seen early, and in a great majority of cases his doctor can
treat him adequately. If he requires hospital or other special
care his doctor is ready to refer him to the right agency.
Moreover, Johnny's income does not stop entirely since, un-
der National Health Insurance, he is entitled to a weekly cash
benefit as long as he is sick — 15s. a week for men (12s. for
unmarried women; 10s. for married) up to 26 weeks; there-
after half that in disablement benefits; together with any ad-
ditional benefits paid by his Approved Society, if prosperous.
DECEMBER 1937
637
National Research Project, WPA
The village blacksmith then and now.
The smith (above) can still be found:
(left) smith with the forge of today
National Research Project, WPA
Hosiery worker at a modern machine;
and (right) an elderly hosiery worker
using a hand-operated knitting ma
chine more than a hundred years old
The precision mechanic builds a bigger and better machine
tional Research Project, WPA
while the junkie breaks up an outmoded loom to make room for a new model
The Thrust of Invention
by WALDEMAR KAEMPFFERT
ISOTYPES
by Otto Ncurath
After the whittlers, tinkers, lone inventors, come the trained
corporation scientists and engineers — a new caste which upsets
and regiments us and is caught in its own net. Yet this editor-
expert traces how a people's liberation opens the way for inven-
tion; how Freedom of Thought is their common characteristic.
At his hands, science holds out the method whereby democracy
can save itself. And "without democracy there can be no onward
sweep of science."
THERE WERE MACHINES IN GEORGE WASHINGTON'S TIME.
Clocks, for example, and looms, and waterwheels, and in
England some wheezy Newcomen steam pumps that kept
mines dry. But George Washington, for all the part that
he played in encouraging American invention, never spoke
of "the machine" as he undoubtedly spoke of "the church"
or "the law." It remained for our time to sweep into one
all-embracing symbolic generalization the countless mech-
anisms that light houses, drive trains, carry us across the
ocean, convey speech across continents, make clothes, can
food, build houses, dig canals, spread the voice of an abdi-
cating king over the whole earth, gather and print the
news of the world for presentation on the morrow's
breakfast table.
As soon as we begin to talk about "the machine" in this
way personages melt into a vague anonymous background
of roaring furnaces, streamlined trains, canning factories,
gas works, fast presses. We grew up with heroes of inven-
tion such as Morse, Bell, McCormick, Westinghouse, Edi-
son and Marconi, but there will be fewer for our children's
children to admire. It is not that invention is in a decline
but that its character has changed. Unknown corporation
chemists actually design invisible molecules, as architects
design houses. They link atoms into chains to produce
artificial fibers like silk or wool, or they compact the loose
molecules of gasoline into ball-like masses that will not
"knock" in an automobile engine, or they juggle atoms
and molecules in various ways to produce an unbreakable
plastic as transparent as glass. Or a hired physicist sits
down and sketches a new lamp which will glow with a
predetermined efficiency. In a word invention is no longer
the business of ingenious whittlers and tinkers alone. The
trained corporation scientist and engineer already reigns.
Homo Sapiens Stretched to the nth Power
WHETHER IT is THE MAKING OF BEER BOTTLES OR BATHTUBS,
furniture or clothes, rolling and packing cigarettes we
behold human capabilities multiplied a thousandfold by
fingers, hands and arms of steel. What is even more impor-
tant we behold a transference to the machine of dexterity
and something that at times looks weirdly like intelligence.
We see an adding machine totaling a column of figures;
see photo-electric cells opening and closing doors auto-
matically, counting vehicles as they pass a given point,
sorting perfect from imperfect articles on a belt or gaging
the thickness of paper as it forms on a Fourdrinier machine.
Walk through a modern steel mill. An overhead crane
with a single man in a cab picks up a twenty-ton casting
and lowers it neatly on a flat car. A reverberatory furnace
is tilted and tons of white-hot metal pour into a ladle,
whereupon the ladle travels along and pours the steel into
a line of molds, one after the other. Not more than half a
dozen men are engaged in the whole process. And the
energy at their command! The pull of a lever, the turn of
a wheel, the movement of a switch releases ten thousand,
twenty thousand horsepower, whereupon huge masses be-
gin to move, rolls begin to turn, rails to come out. Turn
this way or that and look about for human hands. They
are there of course. Yet the mill seems singularly empty. It
is destined to be emptier still. Even during the depression
the laboratories and development departments were re-
cruiting designers of new machines and draftsmen. The
few machine tenders know what is happening and
wonder — wonder when more short-cuts will be taken,
when, for example, the process of rolling will be so far
developed that there will be no more reheating from steel
ingot to finished sheet, with the consequence that more
men will find themselves out of work.
Watch the mechanism of the wireless telephone. It is
like seeing a colossal, infallible brain at work — rods that
slide up and down, links that move just so far, selectors
that pick out just the right combinations of gears and
wheels to complete just the right circuit to ring just the
right bell in response to the twisting of a distant dial.
The mechanism is beyond the grasp of a single designer.
It needs a crew of specialists. To be sure the chief engi-
neer sees the mechanical brain as a whole — sees in his
mind's eye all those rods rising and falling and making
the right connections. But he could not design every detail.
Or step into one of the great automobile factories. You
see a hydraulic forging press. It cost probably |150,000;
perhaps more. Essentially it is a steel fist that descends
upon a sheet of steel, squeezes it into a mold with one
relentless push and so forms the fender of a car. Thirty
years ago fenders used to be tailored like trousers. An in-
genious mechanic might conceive the principle of the
press, so simple is it. But he could no more specify the
particular kind of steel to be used to build it or the dimen-
sions of the parts or the pressures to be hydraulically ap-
plied, without a vast amount of prohibitively costly
empirical experimenting, than he could smash atoms.
Individuality is disappearing more and more. In great
643
Workers had to work in the neighborhood of the old steam engine
Electricity can be conducted to the worker
plants the machine tools are set by the engineers at the
top. The man who guides a traveling crane or who con-
trols the motors of a rolling-mill may be astoundingly
skilful in his manipulation of levers and switches, but
other minds dominate the mechanism — design it, improve
it, keep it in repair.
Invention and Resistance
ALL THIS HAS BEEN MORE APPARENT SINCE THE BEGINNING
of the century than it was before. The average worker
did not see it clearly, but he realized that he was in the
presence of a force that could crush him. Hence the his-
tory of invention is a history of resistance to technological
advance.
Sometimes it was the state that interfered, as it did
when Queen Elizabeth and James I refused to grant a
644
ISOTYPE
patent to the Reverend William Lee for his stocking
frame, or when the manufacture of Giambattista Carli's
looms was forbidden because of the effect on Venetian
stocking knitters, or when various German principalities
prohibited the use of the ribbon loom. Usually it was the
worker who protested. Cottage spinners destroyed Har-
greave's jennies. Arkwright's mechanically-driven carding,
roving and spinning machines were the objects of syste-
matic attack and the subjects of appeals to Parliament. In
the Nottingham Luddite riots of 1811-1812 knitters de-
stroyed machines that could cut large pieces of inferior
material into gloves, socks and sandals. Jacquard lamented
the demolition of the looms that he had invented for
weaving brocaded silk. The uniform factory of Thim-
monier was destroyed in 1841 by workers who saw noth-
ing but starvation for them in its sewing machines.
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Threshing machines were broken up in England by sea-
sonally employed farmhands. The same grizzly fear of
displacement hangs over the worker today. Sabotage is
not unknown, and a few very strong unions can and do
insist that new labor-saving devices are not to be intro-
duced if workers are to be dismissed.
Paradoxical as it may seem, much invention has been
stimulated by the unions themselves. It was they who in-
sisted on the passage of immigration laws which made it
more difficult to recruit cheap European labor for trench-
digging or shoveling ore in steel mills or doing the manual
work of the mill and the mine. The result is that when
an oil or gas line is to be laid hundreds of miles a trench-
digger now does most of the work — a colossus that buries
toothlike shovels into the ground and gnaws its way from
one end of a state to the other. There were steamshovels
before the major restrictions on immigration were im-
posed, but not the Titans now busy on the Mesaba range,
where iron is dug up at the surface like so much dirt.
We had labor-saving machines when wages were far
lower than they are now. The point is that when wages
go up it becomes possible even necessary from a business
angle, to invent machines of a new type and of unprece-
dented productivity.
When, therefore, a manufacturer protests against fresh
demands for higher wages or shorter hours and vows that
he must either close or move to non-union territory, or
when a financier decides that he will not invest his money
in an industry because of high labor costs and small profits
he assumes that production costs cannot be reduced, that
inventors are unable to meet the exigencies of a new
situation.
In the decade from 1920 to 1930, one of steadily rising
wages, the nation's output increased 46 percent but the
labor force only 16 percent. It would be fallacious to at-
tribute this remarkable decline in opportunities entirely
to new and more complicated inventions; David Wein-
traub,* a close student of technological trends, finds
"definite meaning" in the percentage.
Regimenters and Regimented
BUT MORE THAN THE EFFECT OF INVENTION ON THE WORKER
is involved. The tireless machine is the despot of our age.
"Regimentation" is an overworked word, but we must
invoke it. The machine stands for mass production. And
mass production means regimentation on a vast scale —
what the engineers more politely call standardization. It is
the machine in the last analysis that makes us dress more
or less alike, ride in automobiles that are more or less
alike, see at night by lamps that are absolutely alike, live
in houses that resemble one another and are even identical
when they are built in rows for the occupancy of mill-
hands, eat canned and packaged foods that are indistin-
guishable from one another. Fifteen million people a day
see precisely the same films. Donald Duck is as familiar to
western ranchers as to Rumanian shopkeepers on New
York's East Side. By radio an entire continent listens to
some popular comedian who is "sponsored" by an oil-
refining company with gasoline to sell. Water comes from
a common reservoir, gas from a common gasometer, elec-
tricity from a common central station. Living has become
a collectivistic activity. For life in Lima, Ohio, in its tech-
nological aspects is much like life in Chicago, San Fran-
* Director for the Works Progress Administration of the extensive National
Research Project on Reeraployment Opportunities and Recent Changes in
Industrial Techniques.
cisco or New York. Collectivism is forced upon us whether
we want it or not.
Mass consumption, mass recreation, mass distribution of
energy and the collectivistic utilization of identical things
are impossible without control of mass production, with-
out organization. If gunpowder, in Carlyle's famous
phrase, "made all men the same height," the inventors
have standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes. Because of
invention there is less individual liberty than there was a
century ago; there will be still less tomorrow. The patents
speak eloquently enough on the point. In the first third
of the twentieth century 1,330,000 were granted in this
country, with more than that number expected in the
second third. Few are supremely important, but their in-
creasing number indicates that technological thinking is
more than ever directed toward utilizing energy for the
production of goods.
Control. Organization. We come back to these. For
without them mass production is impossible.
Who are the controllers, the organizers? A few experts
at the top of the pyramid — efficiency engineers who see to
it that even the hugest steel mill operates as if it were a
single organism with a super machine-tender in charge
called the "president." Hired designers or inventors of
ever more complicated automatic labor-saving devices,
technicians who do nothing but keep the machines in
perfect condition constitute a new caste that owes its sta-
tion not to birth or privilege but to sheer mentality and
opportunity.
Strange to relate these rulers are themselves ruled by
their own inventions. The standardization which they
have insisted upon, because mass production is impossible
without it, also restricts them. There is no phonograph
monopoly, yet no wide use has yet been made of Poulsen's
telegraphone which was invented late in the last century
to record a whole opera electromagnetically on a steel
wire. The reason? Scores of millions invested in stand-
ardized disks on which the music of great artists has been
engraved. Monorailway systems have been devised with
an astonishing attention to detail, with gyroscopically con-
trolled trains that can make 150 miles an hour on a single
rail and dash across an abyss on a steel cable. Have they
a chance? Not against a highly standardized railway net-
work, with standardized trains on standard tracks stop-
ping at standardized stations and barely scraping stand-
Power Equipment in Industrial Plants in U.S. A
1900
1920
1930
Power purchased Power generated
Each horse's head represents 10 million HP isorr«<jp
DECEMBER 1937
645
ardized bridges with smokestacks of a standard height.
How many aristocrats of test tube, electromagnet, and
gearwheel are there? No one knows. The total for the
world cannot be more than a million, with perhaps two
hundred thousand in the United States. Suppose they were
to perish in a night — these million. Back we would slip
to the eighteenth century. People in cities would starve
to death or die in two weeks of epidemics.
And yet with experts on top of the structure inventing
and controlling the mechanism, and above these financiers
Wheat Production
Man labor per acre
1878-1882
prior to harvest
1898-1902
and industrial control, all arising out of invention; on
the other a colossal mechanism of production, designed
and operated by highly competent experts who are guid-
ing our lives. So we ask : Are the technical experts to run
a whole nation because they happen to run its industrial
machinery? Or is the government to run the experts, the
inventors, the creators of this evolving culture?
The totalitarian states have made up their minds. Hitler,
Mussolini, Stalin have decided that the course of scientific
research and of invention must be socially directed. The
harvest
IMNMMMNI
1928-1932
Each clock represents 1 hour
who rule all, what is to become of us? We are brought
face to face with the problem of government.
Will Democracy Survive the Machine?
DEMOCRACY AS WE KNOW IT is A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CON-
ception of the eighteenth century. There were no steam-
engines, no railway trains, no gas works, no central sta-
tions, no machines to turn out thousands of cigarettes a
minute or seal thousands of cans of tomatoes an hour or
bend, twist, punch and squeeze steel for skyscrapers and
ocean liners. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! They are brave
words — words that still thrill men who stand at blast
furnaces, or who dip ore out of Great Lakes' freighters
with gigantic electric shovels, or feed bars of steel to an
"automatic" which converts them into threaded bolts. Yet
there is no denying that as against a ruling military caste
of hereditary aristocrats, invention has given us another
ruling caste of technologists and financiers. And die new
ruling class is far more powerful than the old. It has had
to be curbed by such democratic devices as compensation
laws, shorter working days, unions, interstate commerce
and federal trade commissions, public service commissions.
The curbs are the evidences of a deep conviction that
the very existence of democracy is at stake. Social prob-
lems have become largely technological problems. On the
one hand we have democracy trying to settle by popular
vote highly intricate problems of finance and taxation,
4MMM)
*
260 research laboratories of Soviet Russia take their orders
from the Academy of Sciences, and the academy is an
integral part of the government. Germany has a four-year
plan which is to achieve what is possible in economic self-
sufficiency by indicating to the university and industrial
laboratories exactly what discoveries and inventions are
wanted. Mussolini has a National Research Council, of
which the late Marchese Marconi was the guiding spirit
and which is primarily concerned with Italy's industrial
problems. Every totalitarian state plans for the future and
holds scientific research to the plan.
To an engineer this may be a wholly satisfactory method
of dealing with what is called "the impact of science and
invention." To him there need be no violent, destructive
collision between human rights and methods of produc-
tion if there is a social plan. Discover human needs, is his
formula. List them. Satisfy them with the aid of trained
groups of chemists and engineers. Let a highly competent
government directorate of scientific research assign the
problems to various laboratories. Planning implies strict
control. Society must be told what is good for it. Design
society as you would a locomotive, and run it as if it were
a railway train. Fascism and communism are both apply-
ing the formula. Outwardly at least, the fascist and com-
munist countries seem to be happy.
Planning is distasteful to a democracy. It clashes with
individualism, with the egalitarian right of every voter to
646
SURVEY GRAPHIC
decide what he wants his government to be and to do. So
instead of the clear-cut program of totalitarian and com-
munistic states we have much floundering. It is not that
democracy is unaware of its danger, but that it does not
quite know how it shall deal with the machine and the
social problems that it has raised. In President Hoover's
time, we had the report of a Committee on Social Trends,
which discovered that social invention lagged behind tech-
nological invention, meaning that some social mechanism
must be devised to soften the impact of scientific advance.
President Roosevelt appointed the National Science Ad-
visory Board, which insisted that we needed new indus-
tries to absorb the unemployed, and that inventions in the
long run always create new industries. It went so far as
to indicate what problems should be assigned to research
physicists, chemists and engineers in a systematic effort
thus to cope with the economic problems of the depression.
More recently we have had the report on Technological
Trends by the National Resources Committee, an attempt
at predicting what H. G. Wells calls "the shape of things
to come" on the theory that if we can foresee that shape
we may be able to avert the disastrous consequences of
carelessly introducing the formidable inventions that are
even now in the making. The prophets who wrote that
report argue that it takes from twenty to thirty years for
industry to adopt a revolutionary invention — time enough
to read the handwriting on the wall, time enough to fore-
see more obvious social effects, time enough to prepare
for the inevitable by formulating adequate legislative and
economic policies.
There are manifest impossibilities in thus attempting to
predict the shape of things to come and preparing for
them. Did Arkwright foresee the slum when he trans-
ferred the textile industry to the factory? Or Watt when
he converted Newcomen's mine pump into a steam en-
gine, capable of driving other machines? Did Daimler,
Duryea and Ford imagine that the automobile would
transform rural education, reduce many railway dividends
to zero and inspire 500,000 Americans to lead a gypsy life
in trailers? Did Whitney know that his cotton gin would
revive a dying slavery and that a Civil War would have
Surplus Food Produced by 19 Farmers in U.S.A
about 1800
today
vmv,v
or
•MAW
to be fought to settle some of the issues raised? Or did
Otis and his backers realize that his elevator would give
us the skyscraper and with it a rise in real estate values
and a problem in transportation whenever a single build-
ing discharges on the sidewalk some 50,000 people between
five and six o'clock?
The Public Feels Its Muscle
INVENTION AS WE SEE IT HAS GROWN UP IN A PROFIT-
making society. Whether or not a given machine shall be
introduced still depends on its money-making future. No
better example can be found than in the electrical industry.
Central stations were naturally erected at first in crowded
communities where purchasers of energy were huddled
together and where it paid to install a complex generating,
transmitting and distributing system. But the farmer? He
was utterly ignored. Even now as a rule he is no better
off (except in the irrigated West) than he was in the days
of McKinley, so far as electric motors and lights are con-
cerned. There are only three of him to the average rural
mile. Unless he pays for the transformers and the distribu-
tion system that make it possible to reduce to 110 or 115
volts the 100,000-volt current that flows in the high-tension
lines, strung perhaps across his very land, he must burn
kerosene, and his wife must do without electric refrigera-
tion and wash clothes by hand.
The TVA, the REA, and similar organizations, so bit-
terly opposed by public utility companies, must be re-
garded as quasi-social inventions that set the benefits of
electricity above profits. Possibly the avowed object of
obtaining yardsticks whereby rates are to be determined
will not be attained. But whether or not it is attained
there can be no question of the change that will be brought
about not so much on the farm itself as in the barnyard
and the home. In the days of the old National Electric
Light Association the problem was attacked by deliberate-
ly suggesting profitable rural uses for electricity, so that
enough current would be consumed to justify the erection
of poles and distributing apparatus at a cost that the
farmer would be willing to pay. Yet the history of
all public utilities is
m nr w wt
abroad
Each basket symbol represents enough food for one non farmer
a history of services and uses
that consumers discover for
themselves. For example Bell
never dreamed that some day a
resident of New York would call
up his brother in San Francisco
to congratulate him (at a cost of
$8.75 for three minutes) on hav-
ing attained his fiftieth birthday.
Nor did Marconi suspect that
fishermen would regulate their
catches by market demands as-
certained by wireless. Nor were
the gas companies, which did
their best to thwart Edison in his
effort to introduce electric light-
ing, able to see at first that gas
would be used for cooking al-
most to the complete exclusion
of coal in cities. In the end elec-
tricity triumphed. It took its
place in the community not as
a competitor of gas but as a new
force of unlimited social poten-
tialities. (Continued on page 714)
DECEMBER 1937
647
THE WORLD OF 1937
A masterpiece of technical perfection but rather
perilously balanced and therefore easily upset
By Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Earth, Air and Mind
Drawings
by Hendrik Willem Van Loon
by H. G. WELLS
In his Outline of History, Mr. Wells pointed out that the Alex-
andrian civilization went down not because its great library
burned (nor ancient wars) but because it lacked cohesion. Like
our own, its scheme of life and scholarship was overspecialized.
Sand without cement. We took his analogy much to heart in
conceiving our two magazines as "shuttles of understanding";
and count it a stroke of fortune that in our anniversary number
he develops this idea — and what to do about it: his projection
of a Brain Organization for the Modern World.
OUR WORLD IS CHANGING WITH AN EVER-INCREASING VIO-
lence. An old world dies about us. A new world struggles
into existence. But it is not developing the brain and the
sensitiveness and delicacy necessary for its new life. That
is the essence of what I have in mind when I say that the
time is ripe for a very extensive revision and moderniza-
tion of the intellectual organization of mankind.
It is, so to speak, a matter of current observation that
in a century and a half there has been an enormous in-
crease in the speed and facility of communications be-
tween men in every part of the world. Two hundred years
ago Oliver Goldsmith said that if every time a man fired
a gun in England, someone was killed in China, we
should never hear of it and no one would bother very
much about it. All that is changed. We should hear about
that murdered Chinaman almost at once. Today we can
go all round the world in the time it took a man to travel
from New York to Washington in 1800, we can speak to
anyone anywhere as soon as the proper connections have
been made and in a little while we shall be able to look
one another in the face from the ends of the earth. In a
very few years now we shall be able to fly in the strato-
sphere across the Atlantic in a few hours with a cargo of
passengers, or bombs or other commodities. There has in
fact been a complete revolution in our relation to dis-
tances.
And the practical consequences of these immense ap-
proximations are only now beginning to be realized.
Everybody knows these facts now, but round about 1900
we were only beginning to take notice of this abolition of
distance. Even in 1919 the good gentlemen who settled
the world forever at Versailles had not observed this
strange new thing in human affairs. They had not ob-
served that it was no longer possible to live in little horse-
and-foot communities because of this change of scale. We
know better now. Now the consequences of this change
of scale force themselves upon our attention everywhere.
Often in the rudest fashion.
Our interests and our activities interpenetrate more and
more. We are all consciously or unconsciously adapting
ourselves to a single common world. For a time, North
America and the great sprawl of Russia and Siberia, are
for obvious reasons feeling less restriction than, let us say,
Japan or Germany, but, as my glancing allusion to the
stratosphere was intended to remind you, this relative
isolation of yours is also a diminishing isolation. The
abolition of distance is making novel political and eco-
nomic arrangements more and more imperative if the
populations of the earth are not to grind against each
other to their mutual destruction.
Our Power to Hurt One Another
THAT IMPERATIVE EXPANSION OF THE SCALE OF THE COM-
munity in which we have to live is the first truism I
want to recall to you and bring into the foreground of
our discussion. The second truism is the immense in-
crease in our available power that has been going on.
I do not know if any precise estimate of the physical
energy at the disposal of mankind now and at any pre-
vious age, has ever been made, but the disproportion
between what we have and what our great-grandparents
had, is stupendous and continually increasing. I am told
that two or three power stations in the United States are
today pouring out more energy night and day than could
be produced by the sustained muscular effort of the entire
United States population; and that the Roman empire at
its mightiest could not — even by one vast unanimous
thrust, not a single soul doing anything but push and
push — have kept the street and road transport of New
York State moving as it moves today. You are almost sick
of being told it, in this form or that, over and over again.
But we all know about this sort of thing. Man was slower
and feebler beyond comparison a century or so ago than
he is today. He has become a new animal incredibly swift
and strong — except in his head. We all know — in theory
at least — how this increase of power affects the nature of
war.
None of our new powers in this world of increasing
power, has been so rapidly applied as our powers of mu-
tual injury. A child of five with a bomb no bigger than
my hand, can kill as many men in a moment as any
paladin of antiquity hacking and hewing and bashing
through a long and tiring battle. Both these two realities,
these two portentous realities, the change of scale in human
affairs and the monstrous increase of destructive power,
haunt every intelligent mind today. One needs an excep-
tional stupidity even to question the urgency we are under
to establish some effective World Pax, before gathering
disaster overwhelms us. The problem of reshaping human
affairs on a world scale, this World Problem, is drawing
649
together an ever increasing multitude of minds. It is be-
coming the common solicitude of all sane and civilized
men. We must do it — or knock ourselves to pieces.
The Blessed, but Ignorant Peacemakers
I THINK IT WOULD BE PROFITABLE IF A GROUP OF HISTORY
students were to trace how this World Problem has dawned
upon the popular mind from, let us say, 1900 up to the
present time. To begin with it was hardly felt to be im-
portant. Our apprehension of what it really amounts to
has grown in breadth and subtlety during all these past
seven-and-thirty years. We have been learning hard in the
past third of a century. And particularly since 1919. In
1900 the general sense of the historical process, of what
was going on in the world, 'was altogether shallower than
ours today. People were extraordinarily ignorant of the
operating causes of political events. It was quite possible
then for them to agree that war was not at all a nice or
desirable thing and that it ought to be put an end to, and
to imagine that setting up a nice little international court
at The Hague to which states could bring their grievances
and get a decision without going to the trouble and ex-
pense of hostilities would end this obsolescent scandal.
Then we should have peace forever — and everything else
would go on as before. But now even the boy picking
cotton or working the elevator, knows that nothing will
go as before. The fear of change has reached them.
You will remember that Andrew Carnegie set aside
quite a respectable fraction of his savings to buy us world
peace forever and have done with it. The Great War was
an enlightening disappointment to this earlier school of
peacemakers, and it released a relatively immense flow
of thought about the World Problem. But even at Ver-
sailles the people most immediately powerful, were still
evidently under the impression that world peace was
simply a legal and political business. They thought the
Great War had happened, but they were busy politicians,
and had not remarked that vastly greater things were
happening. They did not realize even that elementary
point about the unsuitable size of contemporary states to
which I recall your attention— much less did they think
about the new economic stresses that were revolutionizing
every material circumstance of life. They saw the issue as
a simple affair upon the lines of old-fashioned history. So
far as their ideas went it was just Carthage and Rome over
again. The Central Powers were naughty naughty na-
tions and had to .be punished. Their greatest novelty was
the League of Nations, which indeed was all very well
as a gesture and an experiment but which as an irremov-
able and irreplaceable reality in the path of world adjust-
ment has proved anything but a blessing. It had been a
brilliant idea in the reign of Francis I of France. Still we
have to recognize that in 1919 the Geneva League was
about as far as anyone's realization of the gravity of the
World Problem had gone. It is our common quality to be
wise after the event and still quite unprepared for the
next change ahead. It is an almost universal human fail-
ing to believe that now we know everything, that nothing
more than we know can be known about human rela-
tions, and that in our limitless wisdom we can fix up our
descendants forever more, by constitutions, treaties, bound-
aries and leagues. So my poor generation built this insuf-
ficient league. For a time a number of well-meaning people
did consider that the League of Nations settled the World
Problem for good and all, and that they need not bother
650
their heads about it any more. There were, we felt, no
further grounds for anxiety, and we all sat down within
our nice little national boundaries to resume business ac-
cording to the old ways, securing each of us the largest
possible share of the good things the new Era of Peace
and Prosperity was to bring — at least to the good coun-
tries to whom victory had been accorded. When later the
history of our own times comes to be written, I imagine
this period between 1919 and 1929 will be called the
Fatuous Twenties.
The World Fright of the 'Thirties
WE ALL KNOW BETTER NOW. NoW THAT WE ARE LIVING IN
what no doubt the historian will some day call, the Fright-
ened Thirties. Versailles was no settlement. There is still
no settlement. The World Problem still pursues us. And
it seems now vastly nearer, uglier and more formidable
than it ever did before. It emerges through all our settle-
ments like a dangerous rhinoceros coming through a reed
fence. Our mood changes now from one in which offhand
legal solutions were acceptable, to an almost feverish
abundance of mental activity. From saying, "There is the
Hague Court and what more do you want?" or "There
is the League of Nations, what more can you want?" or,
"There is the British Peace Ballot and please don't bother
me further," we are beginning to apprehend something of
the full complexity of the situation that faces mankind,
that is to say all of us, as a living species. Our minds are
beginning to grasp the vastness of these grim imperatives.
That change of scale, that enhancement of power has
altered the fundamental conditions of human life — of all
our lives. The traditions of the old world, the compara-
tively easy traditions in which we have grown up and in
which we have shaped our lives, are bankrupt. They are
outworn. They are outgrown. They are too decayed for
much more patching. They are as untrustworthy and
dangerous as a very old car whose engine has become
explosive, which has lost its brake lining and has a loose
steering wheel. What I am saying now is gradually be-
coming as plain in men's minds as the roundness of the
earth. New World or nothing. We have to make a new
world for ourselves or we shall suffer and perish amidst
the downfall of the decaying old. This is a business of
fundamentals in which we are all called upon to take part,
and through which the lives of all of us are bound to be
changed essentially and irrevocably.
With this realization of the true immensity and penetra-
tion of the World Problem we are passing out of the
period of panaceas — of simple solutions. As we grow wiser
we realize more and more that the World Problem is not
a thing like a locked door for which it is only necessary
to find a single key. It is infinitely more complex. It is a
battle all along the line and every man is a combatant or
a deserter. Popular discussion is thick with competing
simple remedies, these one-thing needful proposals, each
of which has its factor of truth and each of which in itself
is entirely inadequate. Consider some of them. Arbitra-
tion, League of Nations, I have spoken of. World Social-
ism? The socialist very rightly points out the evils and
destructive stresses that arise from the free play of the
acquisitive impulse in production and business affairs, bu1
his solution, which is to take the control of things out of
the hands of the acquisitive in order to put it into the
hands of the inexperienced, plainly leaves the bulk of the
world's troubles unsolved. The communist and fascist
SURVEY GRAPHIC
>rized about and experimented with the seizure
entration of power, but they produce no sound
for its beneficial use. Seizing power by itself is
:r's game. You can do nothing with power ex-
der and destroy — unless you know exactly what
h it. People tell us that Christianity, the Spirit of
ity, holds a key to all our difficulties. Christianity,
has never yet been tried. We have all heard
: trouble is that Christianity in all its various
/er does try. Ask it to work out practical prob-
it immediately floats off into other-worldliness.
lere is much that is wrong in
:rty-money arrangements, but
in prescriptions for a certain
ivith currency and credit, seem
in themselves to solve the
roblem. A multitude of such
is are bandied about with in-
passion. In comparison with
ding age, we are in a state of
nental fermentation. This is, I
in inevitable phase in the de-
t of our apprehension of the
litude and complexity of the
oblem which faces us. Except
ddists and fanatics we all feel
despairing inadequacy amidst
storm of suggestions and rash
;s. We want to know more,
digested facts to go upon. Our
e not equipped for the job.
ships in uncharted seas. We
ime hunters without weapons of precision. To
point we have reached, I repeat, our minds are
ped for the job.
TV Nationalists
ENT UPROAR OF INCOMPLETE IDEAS WAS AS INEVIT-
he Imperialist Optimism of 1900, the Futile
nt of the Great War, and the self-complacency
uous Twenties. These were all phases, necessary
the march of our race through disillusionment
anding. After the phase of panaceas there comes
pe, a phase of intelligent coordination of creative
:s, a balanced treatment of our complex difficul-
ire going to think again. We are all beginning
that the World Problem, the universal world
if adapting our life to its new scale and its new
as to be approached on a broad front, along
hs and in many fashions,
start I stressed our spreading realization of the
of a great catastrophe in world affairs. One im-
ansequence of our full realization of what this
ablem before us means is dismay. We lose heart,
hat anyhow we cannot adjust that much. We
the sponge. We say, let us go on as long as
nyhow, and after us, let what will happen. A
lie and a growing number of people are per-
it a drift towards a monstrously destructive war
:h may practically obliterate our present civiliza-
svitable. I have, I suppose, puzzled over such
s rather more than most people. I do not agree
inevitability of another great war. But I agree
jssibility. I think such a collapse so possible that
yed with it imaginatively in a book or so and a
film. It is so much a possibility that it is wholesome to
bear it constantly in mind. But all the same I do not be-
lieve that world disaster is unavoidable.
It is extraordinarily difficult to estimate the relative
strength of the driving forces in human affairs today. We
are not dealing with measurable quantities. We are easily
the prey of our moods, and our latest vivid impression is
sure to count for far too much. Values in my own mind,
I find, shift about from hour to hour. I guess it is about
the same with most people. Just as in a battle, so here,
our moods are factors in the situation. When we feel de-
Man has become a new animal — incredibly swift and strong — except in his head
pressed, the world is going to the devil and we meet de-
feat half-way; when we are elated, the world is all right
and we win. And I think that most of us are inclined to
overestimate the menace of violence, the threats of na-
tionalist aggression and the suppression of free discus-
sion in many parts of the world at the present time. I
admit the darkness and grimness on the face of things.
Indisputably vehement state-ism now dominates affairs
over large regions of the civilized world. Everywhere lib-
erty is threatened or outraged. Here again, I merely re-
peat what the whole intelligent world is saying.
Well. . . .
I do not want to seem smug amidst such immunities
as we English-speaking people still enjoy, nevertheless I
must confess I think it possible to overrate the intensity
and staying power of this present nationalist phase. I
think that the present vehemence of nationalism in the
world may be due not to the strength of these tyrannies
but to their weakness. This change of scale, this increment
of power that has come into human affairs, has strained
every boundary, every institution and every tradition in
the world. It is an age of confusion, an age of gangster
opportunity. After the gangsters the vigilantes. Both the
dying old and the vamped-up new are on the defensive.
They build up their barriers and increase their repression
because they feel the broad flood of change towards a
vastly greater new order is rising. Every old government,
every hasty new government that has leapt into power, is
made crazy by the threat of a wider and greater order,
and its struggle to survive becomes desperate. It tries still
to carry on — to deny that it is an experiment — even if it
survives, crippled and monstrous. The dogmatic Russian
Revolution has not held power for a score of years and
I
•R 1937
651
yet it, too, is now as much on the defensive as any other
upstart dictatorship. A lot of what looks to us now like
triumphant reaction may in the end prove to be no more
than doomed, dwarfed and decaying dogmas and tradi-
tions at bay. None of the utterances of these militant fig-
ures that most threaten the peace of the world today
have the serene assurance of men conscious that they are
creating something that marches with the ruling forces
of life. For the most part they are shouts — screams — of
defiance. They scold and rant and threaten. That is the
rebel note and not the note of mastery.
Can the Common Mind be Confined?
WE HEAR VERY MUCH ABOUT THE SUPPRESSION OF THOUGHT
in the world. Is there really — even at the present time —
in spite of all this current violence, any real diminution
of creative thought in the world — as compared with 1800
or 1850— or 1900, or 1914 or 1924? You have to remember
that the suppression of free discussion in such countries as
Germany, Italy and Russia does not mean an end to
original thought in these countries. Thought like gun-
powder, may be all the more effective for being confined.
I know that beneath the surface Germany is thinking in-
tensely, and Russia is thinking more clearly if less dis-
cursively than ever before. Maybe we overestimate the
value of that idle and safe, slack, go-as-you-please discus-
sion that we English-speaking folk enjoy under our demo-
cratic regime. The concentration camps of today may
prove after all to be the austere training grounds of a ne\
freedom.
Let us glance for a moment at the chief forces that are
driving against all that would keep the world in its ancient
tradition of small national governments, warring and
planning perpetually against each other, of a perpetual
struggle not only of nations but indi-
viduals for a mere cramped possessive-
of still wider necessities, are finding themselves and each
other and getting together to ride.
That is to say their minds are getting together.
We are all Citizens of the Air
ONE GREAT LINE OF DEVELOPMENT MUST BE TOWARDS A COM-
mon control of the air. The great spans of the Atlantic
and Pacific may prevent this from beginning as a world-
wide air control, but that I think is just a passing phase
of the problem. I submit to you that a state of affairs in
which vast populations are under an ever increasing threat
of aerial bombardment with explosives, incendiary bombs
and poison gas at barely an hour's notice, is intolerable to
human reason. Maybe there will be terrible wars first.
Quite possibly not. It may after all prove unnecessary to
have very many great cities destroyed and very many
millions of people burnt, suffocated, blown limb from
limb, before men see what stares them in the face and
accept the obvious. Men are, after all, partly reasonable
creatures — they have at least spasmodic moral impulses.
There is already in action a movement for World Air
Control. But you can't have a thing like that by itself.
Who or what will control the air?
This is a political question. None of us quite know the
answer, but the answer has to be found, and hundreds of
thousands of the best brains on earth are busy at the
riddle of that adjustment. We can rule out any of the
pat, ready-made answers of yesterday, League of Nations
or what not. Nonetheless that implacable necessity for
world air control insists upon something, something with
at least the authority of a world federal government in
these matters, and that trails with it, you will find, a
revelation of other vast collateral necessities. I cannot now
develop these at any great length. But in the end I be-
ness.
Consider now the drives toward re-
lease, abundance, one World Pax, one
world control of violence, that are going
on today. They seem to me very much
like those forces that drove the United
States to the Pacific coast and then pre-
vented the break-up of the Union. No
doubt, many a heart failed in the cov-
ered wagons as they toiled westward,
face to face with the Red Indian and
every sort of lawless violence. Yet the
drive persisted and prevailed. The vigi-
lantes prepared the way for the reign
of law. The railway, the telegraph and
so on followed the covered wagon and
knitted this new-scale-community of
America together. In the middle nine-
teenth century all Europe thought that
the United States must break up into a lawless confusion.
The railway, the printing press, saved that. The greater
unity conquered because of its immense appeal to com-
mon sense in the face of the new conditions. And because
it was able to appeal to common sense through these
media.
The United States could spread gigantically and still
keep a common mind. And today I believe in many ways,
in a variety of fashions and using many weapons and
devices, the vigilantes of World Peace, under the stimulus
We are big-game hunters without weapons of precision
lieve we are led to the conviction that the elemental
forces of human progress, the stars in their courses, are
fighting to evoke at least this much world community as
involves a control of communications throughout the
whole world, a common federal protection of everyone in
the world from private, sectarian or national violence, a
common federal protection of the natural resources of the
planet from national, class or individual appropriation, and
a world system of money and credit. The obstinacy of
man is great but the forces that grip him are greater
652
SURVEY GRAPHIC
and in the end, after I know not what wars, struggles and
afflictions, this is the road along which he will go. He
has to see it first — and then he will do it. I am as sure
of the ultimate necessity of this federal world state — and
at the backs of your minds at least, I believe most of you
are too — as I am sure that, whatever clouds may obscure
it, the sun will rise tomorrow.
When Schoolmasters Face the Facts
AND NOW HAVING RECAPITULATED AND BROUGHT TOGETHER
this general conception of human progress towards unity
which is forming in most of our minds, as an answer to
the ever more insistent World Problem, I come to the
discussion of one particular aspect of this march towards
a world community, the necessity it brings with it, for a
correlated educational expansion. This has not so far been
given anything like the attention it may demand in the
near future. We have been gradually brought to the pitch
of imagining and framing our preliminary ideas of a
federal world control of such things as communications,
health, money, economic adjustments, and the suppression
of crime. In all these material things we have begun to
foresee the possibility of a world-wide network being
woven between all men about the earth. So much of the
World Peace has been brought into the range of — what
shall I call it? — the general imagination. But I do not
think we have yet given sufficient attention to the prior
necessity, of linking together its mental organizations into
a much closer accord than obtains at the present time. All
these ideas of unifying mankind's affairs depend ultimately
for their realization on mankind having a unified mind
for the job. The want of such effective mental unification
is the key to most of our present frustrations. While
men's minds are still confused, their social and political
relations will remain in confusion, however great the
forces that are grinding them against eath other and
however tragic and monstrous the consequences.
Now I know of no general history of human education
and discussion in existence. We have nowadays — in what
is called the New History — books which trace for us in
rough outline the growth in size and complexity of or-
ganized human communities. But so far no one has at-
tempted to trace the stages through which teaching has
developed, how schools began, how discussions grew, how
knowledge was acquired and spread, how the human in-
telligence kept pace with its broadening responsibilities.
We know that in the small tribal community and even
in the city states of — for example — Greece, there was
hardly any need for reading or writing. The youngsters
were instructed and initiated by their elders. They could
walk all over the small territory of their community and
see and hear, how it was fed, guarded, governed. The
bright young men gathered for oral instruction in the
porch or the academy. With the growth of communities
into states and kingdoms we know that the medicine
man was replaced by an organized priesthood; we know
that scribes appeared, written records. There must have
been schools for the priests and scribes but we know very
little about it. We know something of the effect of the
early writings, the Bible particularly, in consolidating and
preserving the Jewish tradition— giving it such a start-off
that for a long time it dominated the subsequent develop-
ment of the Gentile world; and we know that the survival
and spread of Christianity is largely due to its resort to
written records to supplement that oral teaching o£ dis-
ciples with which it began. But the growing thirst for
medical, theological and general knowledge that appeared
in the Middle Ages and which led to those remarkable
gatherings of hungry minds, the universities, has still to
be explained and described. That appearance and that
swarming of scholars would make an extraordinary story.
After the lecture room, the book; after that the news-
paper, universal education, the cinema, the radio. No one
has yet appeared to make an orderly story of the develop-
ments of information and instruction that have occurred
in the past hundred years. Age by age the world's Knowl-
edge Apparatus has grown up. Unpremeditated. Without
a plan. But enlarging the possible areas of political coop-
eration at every stage in its growth.
Why We Are at Sixes and Sevens
IT IS A VERY INTERESTING THING INDEED TO ASK ONESELF CER-
tain questions. How did I come to know what I know
about the world and myself? What ought I to know?
What would I like to know that I don't know? If I want
to know about this or that, where can I get the clearest,
best and latest information? And where did these other
people about me get their ideas about things? Which are
sometimes so different from mine. Why do we differ so
widely? Surely about a great number of things upon
which we differ there is in existence exact knowledge?
So that we ought not to differ in these things. This is
true not merely about small matters in dispute but about
vitally important things concerning our business, our
money, our political outlook, our health, the general con-
duct of our lives.
We are guessing when we might know.
The facts are there, but we don't know them completely.
We are inadequately informed. We blunder about in our
ignorance and this great ruthless world in which we live,
beats upon us and punishes our ignorance like a sin. Not
only in our mass-ruled democracies but in the countries
where dogmas and dictators rule, tremendous decisions
are constantly being made affecting human happiness,
root and branch, in complete disregard of realities that
are known.
You SEE WE ARE BEGINNING TO REALIZE NOT ONLY THAT THE
formal political structures of the world and many of the
methods of our economic life are out-of-date and out-of-
scale, but also another thing that hampers us hopelessly
in every endeavor we make to adjust life to its new condi-
tions: our World Knowledge Apparatus is not up to our
necessities. We are neither collecting, arranging nor di-
gesting what knowledge we have at all adequately, and
our schools, our instruments of distribution are old-
fashioned and ineffective.
We are not being told enough, we are not being told
properly, and that is one main reason why we are all at
sixes and sevens in our collective life.
This is the second of three articles by Mr. Wells. The third — A Brain
Organization for the Modern World — will appear in the January issue.
DECEMBER 1937
653
Woodcut by J. J. Lankes
Westward Under Vega
by THOMAS WOOD STEVENS
So MANY CLERKS IN WASHINGTON, AND KEYS
For clerks to strike, and intricate wheels
To click and check and sum the counting up;
For each ten years the careful Government
Must know how many souls, how many mouths
To feed, how many bodies to be housed,
There are between the oceans. Row on row
The quick machines are clicking up the count,
And men feed in the answers from the rolls,
Vital statistics, children born, households
Of this or that creed, color, race and trade,
Owning their homes, or not — in all sixteen
Impertinent questions asked and facts ticked off
By census takers up and down the land.
They make you reel, these totals, if you let
Your mind rest on the people, women, men,
Children, adults, black people, red and white,
Households, and mouths to feed, and mortgages,
And fires to build o' mornings. . . .
But if you were a census office clerk
Like John, and pressed the keys of a machine,
Or April, who just filed the yellow sheets
When John had totaled them, you got to know
That these were only papers, numbers, names,
Not living souls — they were too far away — •
No pulse in them — no moment in their answers.
But if John said, as April passed, "Say now,
Will you be home to-night?" — and she said, "Yes,"'
There was a question with a stake in it,
An answer with a whirl of joy behind.
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS AND A MoDEL T,
That was their fortune — if you'd call it that —
Their passport to the opening westward road —
The sum of all that John and April had.
There were some other items, yes. Six books
Of verse, a map o' the stars, a compass, not
So accurate as it might have been, some tools
And a surveyor's kit — for who can tell —
You might by good luck find a gold mine there
In the far West where the great spaces lie,
And you'd as well stake out your claim by rule,
Not trusting to Polaris for your bounds.
And if you found a gold mine, then you'd need
A pick and shovel; they were tied across
And helped to hold the bumper-rod together
Where it was broken. That was all they had
To start with. Later on they lost the compass,
And acquired — five dollars went for it —
A document, set forth in legal terms
With both their names, and a device of doves
And roses, from a Justice of the Peace.
Out on the Cumberland Pike,
Step on the gas, my lad!
Never a key to strike,
Never a sum to add,
But a road through the Maryland hills a-winding
And the wind in your face and the sunset blinding.
Road where the wagon trains
Long ago to the West
Wound in the wintry rains
Over the bloody crest,
And the redcoats marched through the mud and the sleet
And the sodden drums were too slackened to beat.
Here was where Stuart spurred
Under the stars and bars —
Dixie the tune they heard —
Greycoated avatars
To the bridge by the forges, the hunger and trouble,
To the field of Antietam — to death — at the double!
Out on the Cumberland Pike,
Road now of joyous love,
Over canal and dike
Up to the hills above,
And the five green mountains to cross and climb
With pulses singing and hearts in rhyme.
654
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Step on the gas, my lad,
(Fools — young fools at the wheel)
Luck may be good or bad:
Life strikes the flint and steel:
But the Cumberland Pike is the road to follow
From Washington west. . . . It's my road, Apollo.
IN WEST VIRGINIA, UP FROM BERKELEY SPRINGS
That night, the one-eyed Ford went blind
And John swung off the highway in a pasture
That smelled of violets, faintly, in the dark.
"Far as we go," John said, and April, "Check,"
Though never in her guarded maiden life
Had she so faced the unsheltering firmament.
They lay upon the grass, and saw above
The Lyre, and steel bright Vega swinging clear
Of the dim tree tops, and saw Mars go down
Gold in the dark leaves following the moon.
They had not planned for this. They had no plan.
They had not talked of it, nor talked at all,
Save as a thing apart from them, of love.
But now they talked, low-voiced and hungrily,
About the constellations, greeting them
As they so slowly drifted up the sky
In the warm night. She crushed a violet cluster
Beneath her hair, and the full scent came rich
Into her breath. The stars were very near.
But while she half-way lifted up her head
To mark where Sagittarius swung free
From the black leafage to the south, she knew
The secret stars would never scorn, nor break
Their lonely silences. She loved the stars.
Then, "John," she whispered, and his head, so near,
Blotted out Vega, blotted all the stars,
And their lips clung, and would not come apart.
THEN, IN OHIO, WHERE IT FLATTENS OUT
From the blue hills the river sidles through,
Where the brown furrows lengthen in the fields,
They paused to reckon maps and mileages,
And dollars, for the Ford, insatiable,
Drank up both gas and oil beyond their fears.
In the long field beside the road a man
Stood leaning on a tractor, and the earth
Was drying on the furrow he had turned.
They heard him cough, a lean and sandy man,
And saw blood streaming sudden from his mouth;
He lurched, clutching the tractor, spun and fell.
John went to him. He could not speak, but signed
On, to the farmhouse at the hill edge. "Take,"
He gasped out, "take me home." John carried him
Out to the car. In the field beyond, a team
Was dragging an old harrow, and their driver,
A Swede with bushy eyebrows, paused, and shot
A keen, cold glance at them, and slapped the reins
To start the team again. Before the house
A woman like some Teuton goddess stood
And waited. "Mag, I'm done," the man groaned out
As John laid him down, so weak and broken,
At her feet. "I knew you shouldn't work today."
"You never said so." She looked down the field.
"Ole can't run the thing." She turned to John.
"Want a job, mister?" Children with pale hair
Came 'round the house and sat beside the man
On the green grass. "I wouldn't mind," said John.
"He's a mechanic. I must work the farm,"
The woman said. And John and April stayed.
DECEMBER 1937
John drove the tractor 'round and 'round the fields,
And the sun burned his tace and arms to bronze;
Behind him, Ole harrowed, doggedly;
While April helped about the house, and fed
The hens, and washed the children's faces. Mag
Was always silent, and at table sat
Looking before her. Adolf too was still,
Lying upon a couch, and his face whitened,
All but the scarlet patches on his cheeks,
As John's took on its color. Ole spoke
But seldom, only to Mag, never in English.
"It's all experience," John said. "I get
Afraid," said April, evenings, in the swing
Beneath the maples. They put in the corn
Checking the seed rows squarely, north and south
And east and west. . . . And then a midnight came
When Mag was knocking John and April's door.
"John, John," she called, "come help me. Adolf's worse."
John swung the door. She stood there with a candle,
Her nightgown buttoned underneath her chin.
"A moment," John said, slipping on his trousers,
He found Adolf in terror, breathing hard,
And bright blood down his nightshirt. Mag's eyes gleamed.
"I'll get the doctor," John said. "No, don't leave."
"April can go." "Do as you like," she said,
"Nothing does any good." But John called April,
And cranked up the Ford, and April started.
When John came back into the room, Mag sat
Leaned back against the wall at Adolf's head,
And now her gown was open, and her breasts,
Her great globed breasts, gleamed in the candle flare.
"This is the end of him," she said, and smiled,
A long, slow smile, and looked up in John's face.
The door swung open quietly, and Ole
Stood there, and gazed from under bushy brows.
"Get out," said Mag. But Ole shut the door
And stood against it, gazing sullenly.
Adolf's eyes were closed. "I hope to God I die,
But if I do, bring in the children first,"
Was all he said. Then Mag sat up, and wrapped
Her gown about her close. "Get out." The Swede
Shook his head once, said, "No," and so they waited.
John muttered softly, "I don't understand."
"I do," said Adolf, in a tired, thick voice.
The doctor came, and John and April went
Back to their bed. At morning, by the well,
Ole was waiting, and when John came out,
He spoke. "We got the corn in. Better now
You go." John said, "You're right." He cranked the Ford.
Mag paid him off. And April, looking back,
Saw in the doorway, standing, with still eyes,
Mag, like a goddess, waiting for some god.
You'll come to know the field
When you've plowed it and seeded it;
You'll come to know love
When you've utterly needed it.
And some men you get to know
By the tending of sheep;
And some nights you'll only learn
If you can't get your sleep.
There are folk you understand
By taking care of swine,
And some that only hunting wolves
Will give you the sign.
It's a grand world to learn about,
And its eating and its drinking,
But there's only a mite of it
You can sit and get by thinking.
655
ALONG THE ROAD THEY PAUSED AND RECKONED UP
And found they still had just the sum
That they had started with. "We're square," John said,
"For stopping in Ohio . . . more than square."
Then they fell silent. They were more than square
For every farm along the road had come
To sound with voices, and no wall so blank
But through it they could feel the beat of blood
And the blind onset of some hidden longing;
No house was just a house, for a dim film
Of men and women struggling peopled it.
They spoke no more of Adolf, nor of Mag,
But both of them remembered, knowing well
That they had seen a bubbling in the spring
Of life, and smelled a fire-damp of dark Nature
And never would the pool again be still
Or look so shallow and so innocent.
April was driving when they came to town.
As they passed through, she stopped before a house
Where an old sign hung, dingy gold and black.
A woman sat on the porch. April went up
And spoke with her and came back to the car
With a faint light of pity in her eyes.
"Why did you stop?" She drove clear past the town
Before she answered:
"When I came last night,
She tried to send me on for someone else.
I said the need was too immediate.
She turned and said, 'He must decide it then.'
She did not want to let him go. His heart
Had given warning — has not strength to bear
These night alarms and rigors. 'What's this man,
This farmer, what's his failing spark to you
That you should go?' she said, protesting hard.
The doctor smiled, 'I must.' And then I knew.
He had so short a span of life before him —
So much to sweeten and enrich that span —
And yet he came. He wore death like a cloak
That muffled him against the night, and came.
For life to him, living beneath his doom,
Was infinitely precious, and no matter
Whose life it was, he must do all to save it.
I stopped and spoke to her. I had to know.
Last night, between here and the farm,
I saw a man ... a man so great in pity,
So great in courage. . . . You had better drive.
I cannot see the road."
Her eyes brimmed over.
THE MAN TOBIAS STOOD AND LAUGHED ALONE
And looked down on the river and the lands
New rising as the flood went down, and splashed
With bright pools of reflected sunset sky;
And so they found him when they stopped to ask
If they might set their tent up in his orchard.
"Yes, if ye ain't afeared," he said, and laughed
Again, still looking out across the flats.
"Afeard of what?" John asked him, wondering.
"Afeard o' me, and of the widder's curse.
She's comin' yender. Set and hear," he said.
Far down below, across the bright-pooled mud
A boat was making for the shore. "The river's shifted."
Again he laughed, full-throated, as the boat
Was hauled up on the bank. And then they watched
A woman pick her way amidst the pools
Sky colored, in the ancient river bed
And come, tall and bedraggled, up the slope.
She faced the man Tobias for a space.
"You'll claim on this?" she said.
"Don't have to claim.
It was an act of God. The law says so.
I always said there warn't no God, but now
It looks ongrateful. I'm an atheist,
I always said, and you was feared of me
Because I said it. Well, your man was drowned.
You said God took him. You looked down on me.
God gives me half a section of good land
And leaves you just a strip of rocky pasture
For all your prayers and piety." No laughter now.
"But God can turn the river back again."
"He won't do that."
"So you acknowledge Him."
"Not yet, unless I must to get the land."
"It was your fishing pier that started it,"
She said accusingly. "If there's a law,
It must take some account of that."
"Guess not.
God and the old Missouri take no 'count
Of where I build a fishin' pier. The law
Is on my side. And I'd be thanking God
If I could find Him, for your farm, my dear."
The twilight air went sudden very still.
The woman stood and looked at him, and seemed
Somehow to have no anger in her eyes —
No more reproach. "If you could just find Him,"
She said at last, and turned to go. The man
Tobias stopped her.
"There's one way, you know,
For you to get it back." She bent her head
Slowly, and slowly moved down the steep path.
The man called after, "Rachel, wait." She stopped.
"I'll row you over. She's still mighty swift."
The woman waited, looking back at him.
He turned to John. "You never mind your tent.
Go in the house and rustle up your supper.
I can't afford to turn no one away
Tonight. The ground's wet. Make yourselves to home.
I always said I was unlucky. Now,
I ain't so sure." He strode off down the path.
April went in and raked the kitchen coals
And set the lonely table for themselves
And for one more: perhaps their host would come.
But three hours later, when the man Tobias
Came back again, he was too drunk with joy
(Or else with Rachel's former husband's rum)
To eat or sleep or be an atheist.
The high stars wheel in their courses;
You may map them and measure them true,
You may calculate distances, forces —
But that's about all you can do.
The mountains that rose in the morning
Of earth, you may wonder and climb,
Hut if you would move them, take warning
You can't — you must leave them to Time.
The great river flows as it pleases;
You may sail it, or swim it, or stay
Where you are on the bank till it freezes
But you never can make it obey.
The heart when it quickens and quivers
Is a peril no life is above,
And the stars and the mountains and rivers
Are as easy to manage as love.
656
SURVEY GRAPHIC
A GAy SMILE AND A TWISTED FOOT ARE WORTH
No end of thumbs and curses by the road —
You simply can not pass a man like that
For all the front seat of a Model T
Is built for two. They picked up such a man
And found him rich in wisdom of the land.
On his suggestion — he gave no advice —
They turned to southward, to the Ozark Mountains,
For the long road had been a monotone
Through the flat mileages of wind-blown corn
That ran to flat horizons and they longed
For the blue lift of hills. And as they drove,
The smiling man who had the twisted foot
Talked wonders, while they watched for jagged peaks
To rise against the sun. Hills folded in,
There were no peaks, no blue immensities,
But round hills, gentle, forested, and calm.
The day was hot, and John took off his coat.
No farm lands stretched beside this trail
But cabins in the clearings, hides nailed up
To dry, and men with dogs and guns,
Lean men, and women shy, in calico,
Who seemed forever fetching wood and water.
'This road," the genial passenger explained,
"Will take us to Big Spring. You'll see it soon —
The biggest water spring in all the world.
It feeds a river, by itself alone.
And you can camp there — none'll chase you off."
The sun went down before they came to it,
But gazing at it, John and April felt
The day well spent that brought them. From the foot
Of a steep hill they saw the spring gush out
And tumble foaming into a great pool
Whose farthest edges trembled with the surge
That brimmed it over, and a river took
Its source from this one pool. The shadows fell
And chilled them as they marvelled. John turned back
To get his coat. His coat was gone. And there,
Where he had thrown it was another coat,
A ragged coat, with empty pockets. "Where
In hell?" — He looked around. The passenger
Was also gone. They had not seen him go
As up the steep blind trail across the hill
He strode, unsmiling, with no twisted foot.
APRIL COULD EAT NO BREAKFAST THE NEXT DAY
And hardly noticed it. She had to rip
The pocket she had sewn into her dress
To get the folded crisp ten dollar bill
She kept there for emergencies like this
Along with the certificate with doves
And roses they had got in West Virginia.
That day they did a deal of counting up.
This dimmed the prospect. . . . Who'd have thought a man
With such a smile and such a flow of cheer
Would prove a thief? For in John's vanished coat
Was what was left of their Ohio stake,
And more the man Tobias paid them when
They left him. They had stayed a month
To help him rush a crop into the flats
The river gave him. John had engineered
A rip-rap dike — "lest God should change His mind,"
Tobias put it — 'cross the old stream bed;
And John had worked with axe among the willows,
And an old tractor that Tobias borrowed,
To make the new lands safe. And while he worked
Along his dike, Tobias, with his mules
And Rachel's, plowed the slowly drying field.
Tobias paid them well, and they had left
The day Tobias had brought Rachel home.
April had trimmed the house for her, and shed
Some tears about it, for no reason. Now
All they had earned was gone, and John was wearing
A ragged coat that might at any time
Be recognized for highway larceny.
"We'd best get out of this." "We won't get far."
They turned northwestward, leaving the round hills,
And when the sun began to burn, John hung
The coat upon a fence post, and drove on.
April was pale. The mountain curves, she said.
Made her a little car-sick. It would pass.
They had no lunch that day, and when at night
A farmer's wife provided chicken dinners
"In Southern style, with fixin's, for four bits,"
She and her hunger still were fighting hard.
John's face was troubled, but the farmer's wife
Smiled shrewdly, came and patted April's cheek
And said, "It's only natural. Don't cry.
But do your best — you have to eat for two."
They drove on from the farm a dozen miles,
Talking by spurts in a forced gaiety,
And found a camp site. When the tent was up
And blankets spread, a silence fell on them.
John could not jest again about the man
Who seemed to have the twisted foot. The jests
Were dry. They faced it now. He had no coat.
They'd broken their last ten. The farmer's wife? . . .
John's thoughts went racing out ahead of them.
He could not ask his question. April sat
And traced the leafy pattern of the shadows
The trees against the moon cast on the tent.
"She may be right," she said at last. "And if — . . .
"It's plain," John said, "that I must get a job."
"Don't worry, dearest." April's smile was wan.
He could not tell, by moonlight, in the tent,
Whether her eyes had fear in them or joy,
But he could see she smiled. That night they slept
With her head on his shoulder, not as always
Till then, with his on hers. The morning sun
Etched the leaf patterns clear, and when he woke
Her eyes were open, tracing them again.
THERE WAS A FARM NEAR LAWRENCE WHERE THEY WORKED
A week. The household had a son who fixed
Blue amorous eyes on April. They moved on.
Then near Topeka where they stopped a while
The farmer's sister took to following
John to the wheat field . . . and they moved again.
A census bureau phrase ran through their heads.
"We're 'casual labor'," John said soberly,
"We know the tables — seasonal employment —
And how it rates in economic scales,
But what else is there? We must see it through."
The wheat fields burned. His eyes were red with dust.
There was one comfort: no one had a coat.
Then for a month they joined a threshing outfit
Where John earned more, and sometimes April too
Would take her turn beside the kitchen stove
And help the women with the threshers' dinners
And after sundown help to wash the dishes.
John got three dollars, April only one.
For by that summer farmers never knew
How soon the farms would follow down the banks
Into some ruin no one understood.
"There's wheat enough," John said, "and wheat is food."
'"The car won't run on wheat. We'll get through Kansas
But who would think a state could be so long?"
"We'll get through somehow. When the wheat's all in
DECEMBER 1937
657
What do we do?" "I wish you wouldn't look
Nine months ahead as if the world would end
Some night next spring. I'll be all right." She smiled.
"You'll do your part. I'm not so sure of mine,"
John muttered, thinking of the talk
That ran among the threshing crew — the talk
Of men who never in their lives had looked
Ahead to years like this — all promise blank —
And only planned for some escape to states
Where they could get themselves too drunk to think.
"We might go back," John thought. . . . She read his thought.
"To what?". . ."Your aunt in Washington — she might — ". . .
"Not on her pension." . . . April's eyes were calm
And he read something from the way she sat
Facing the sunset. . . . But no word of this
Was ever spoken out, aloud, between them.
The last high load of golden sheaves came up.
The thresher boss paid off the crew, hooked up
His caravan and trundled northward. John
And April loaded up their tent and turned
West on the road a hundred years ago
Those bolder caravans had followed through
To find their desert fortunes. Where they watched
For trace of buffalo or Indian signs,
John scanned the dumps for wreckage of old Fords
That he might pillage for spare parts. The gasket
Had given out and every puff of power
Came through with a sharp gasp of pain.
And Number One, the bearing of most risk
In the old Model T, was ripe to go;
And any wayside junk pile might give up
A gasket and a bearing Number One
If you had strength and patience to extract it.
Two days, and fifty slow and sunburnt miles
And hours of struggle with enrusted bolts
Yielded the parts. They stopped beneath a maple
That had a strong branch level over them,
And sweated off the head block. April swung
Her weight upon a piece of braided fence wire,
Thrown pully-wise across the limb above,
To lift the block, and John rebuilt the engine.
They took their hour to rest. Harvest was in:
They had their portion: they had put their gear
In order for new marches: all was well. —
But something of the future had gone dim
To John: what if those men were right? He knew
They had no grasp of things, no marshalling
Of the great ebb and flow of gold and time,
No prophet-craft — and yet — their eyes were dull
Looking ahead. Their instincts had gone cold.
And John's thin slogan-braced collegiate creed
Was wearing through. What if those men were right?
The soft warm twilight died away. The sky
Was great with more stars than they'd ever known:
Too many stars. John lay upon his back
And looked up, but he had no heart to trace
Familiar constellations. April sat
As quiet as the prairie and the night
And looked and looked at Venus going down
Bright in the west. Her instincts were unblurred.
She knew. Those days she always faced the west.
Horace Greeley told my father
To "Go West, Young Man, go West"
And my father took his counsel
Thinking Horace must know best.
And my father took the ague
Like a foolish pioneer
And my mother had to nurse him
And nurse me, poor patient dear.
Horace Greeley sat and thundered
Bolt on bolt he forged and hurled
From the office of the Tribune
Down upon the stupid world.
While the 'hoppers ate the corn crop
And the rust devoured the wheat
And the drought killed off the cattle
(And the in-ter-est to meet!)
But old Horace seldom wandered
From his sanctum and his beer
And who says he wasn't wiser
Than some docile pioneer?
But if father hadn't heeded
What old Horace had to say
And gone out to take the ague
What would Kansas (or Wisconsin
Illinois or loway
Or Missouri or Nebraska or Dakota) be today?
PAST NEWTON, UPON EVERY ROLL OF PRAIRIE
In spindling pyramids, oil derricks stood
Against the sky. A side road there led off
"To GUSHER— Future Oil Metropolis,"
And a still louder signboard marked the way
"To SIMON ROCKETTS BLACK GOLD EL DORADO."
The road was rutted deep by many trucks.
John took it: here there must be work. That day
On Simon Rockett's tract, the timekeeper
Was drunk, and so John got his job.
The "future city" was two rows of shacks
Beside the rutted road. And not one tree
To break the wind that seemed about to blow
The tent away. Two restaurants, the Greek's
And Sari's New Hungarian Cafe
Stood cheek by jowl to feed the swarming crews
Of hungry drillers from the Continent Oil
And Simon Rockett's lot. It was a race,
Since the two rival leases lay so close,
To see who first would reap and waste the field.
The Continent people worked efficiently
With keen geologists to watch the discs
Of each drill's cutting. But the other crew
Was of a different stripe. They called themselves
The wild cats — and they proved it, too. Each day
Came Simon Rockett in his Cadillac
To boss his drillers. Simon was a man
Who said his thumb could analyze a crude
Better than any chemist. . . . But he washed
His thumb and put on gloves before he sold
The stock certificates in El Dorado.
He tramped the field in high laced yellow boots,
Twirled his mustache, and called upon his God,
To verify his least asservation.
He was an oil man, Yes sirree, by God,
And he swore El Dorado would be good
For twenty million barrels. He knew. No need
For these geologists — -they only guessed
And he guessed better — Yes sirree by God . . .
Yet no one knew how he acquired the lease.
Well Three was yielding; and at One and Two
He kept the pump beams rocking, though no oil
Came up their tubings. And when Number Four
With a great crash came in, it proved a gasser,
And Simon stood to windward, threw a match
To set it off, and let the flames roar up
To light the sky, and Gusher, for three nights
Before its blast went down. In Hutchinson
He pasted on his gleaming office window
658
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The cubage of Dorado's latest strike
In liberal estimate. It might sell stock.
He had no time for gas — he drilled for oil.
He loved the oil-smell. Gas was just a stink.
John earned his money there on Rockett's lease
And April worked in Sari's New Cafe
For Sari's gnarled hands could not keep it up
For all her peasant tirelessness. Each month
Old Sari went to town and lettered out
An unpronouncable old world address
And sent her profits off — to Hungary.
The winds turned bitter cold. April and John
Moved into Sari's shack and took the room
She'd used for wine — for she had made a vintage
From grape-bricks, sugar and odd lots of fruit,
That gave her tavern popularity
Until the law came down and shut it off.
With winter, and the falling price of crude,
The Continent Oil crowd lifted out their drills
And half the men in Gusher left. The Greeks
Gave up the battle. For a little while
Sari was prosperous. The winter seemed
To give old Simon Rockett higher spirits.
His stock was selling, though no wells came in,
And even Number Three was slowing down.
Then, on a pay day, something went amiss.
There was a system in old Simon's pay days:
He came with a great roll of bills and peeled
The wages for each driller off from it;
He seemed to keep no books, beyond John's time-sheet.
But this day, Simon didn't come at all.
The men showed no surprise. Wild catter's trick.
They telephoned to Hutchinson. No sign
Of Simon Rockett. No one answered there.
They crowded into El Dorado's trucks
And drove to town, and tore the iron fence
From Rockett's lawn, swarmed in, and broke
His windows, systematically, fought
Ten minutes with police and deputies.
And vanished, tools and trucks and all,
While John and April sat in Sari's kitchen
And waited, vainly, for a customer.
That night two feet of snow came down. The roads
Were blocked. The weeks went by. The coal gave out.
They burned the fences, then a shack or two,
And lived on Sari's stock of canned goods, bought
With credit while the Gusher boom was on,
And some spare hams and bacon she had hung
In the back shed . . . April was heavy now
And Sari did the housework, while each day
They scanned the sky for sign of winter's breaking.
The first thaw came. The snow fields patched and bare,
The derricks black. The road a stream of mud.
And at the door, first sign of spring — the sheriff.
John stood him off with half the cash he had.
He'd come again, he said, and Sari might,
Unless she had some good collateral,
Go with him to the County Farm. Next week.
"I'll go," said Sari, "if they'll let me cook.
It's not so bad. I been on county farms
Before. But you— you better take her out
Of this. This is no place for have a kid."
April came over and kissed Sari's eyes —
So old and wrinkled and so undismayed.
Next week the sheriff came, and Sari went.
A million years, the slogans say
Dame Nature took to brew
In secret sands her deodands
And trillions of fat and spongy creatures
With scaly cadavers and vacant features
Died to carry her recipe through.
And we hurl ourselves through the stratosphere
And we hit the road at eighty
And we speed and slay on the State's highway
And financier and piano tuner
Die to get there a moment sooner
As though the matter were really weighty.
And we must strike oil or we can't have gas,
Till we find some other scheme,
So we drive and drill and we pump and spill
And millions of years we waste in a minute
And still we shout — There are millions in it —
But who knows where the black oil flows
Till Fortune tips the beam?
THE ROADS IN KANSAS ALL LOOKED JUST ALIKE —
No landmark — nothing they could quite remember—
Until they came to one that ran for miles
Along beneath a limestone outcrop wall;
Then, winding upward, slowly winding upward,
A grade they hardly noticed, to a crest,
A sudden crest, and there, another land.
All treeless, fenceless, boundless to the rim
Of a horizon level as taut wire,
And farther off, beneath a farther blue
Than any eastern and hill-fettered eye
Could sweep to. Here the road ran straight.
And here the mind shook off its last record
Of sheltering elms and fireside certainties,
And motion was a drift of tumble-weed
The long winds captained, and the whirls of dust
That rose and spun and scattered like blown cloud.
The miles slid under them. They lifted voice
And sang above the rattling of the Ford.
Long miles. And nothing . . . but the open world.
Lean cattle, tiny in the distance, stood
In false ponds of the plains mirage, their legs
Seeming to disappear in glimmering lakes;
And a far ranch-house, riding in the sky
As if it stood in some mysterious sea
Of cloud, or wave, or propped on stilts above
A sea-blue water with no farther shore.
They sang through all the songs they knew,
And started over. All day long they sang.
And when the sun began to cut, blood red,
Into the sharp horizon, they first glimpsed
A blur of smoke . . . Dodge City . . . and the end
Of the old Chisholm Trail, and long ago
The rail head — for a time a place of wrath
And glory, in frontier mythology.
To John and April, Dodge was just a place
To end a day they never could forget —
An end of sunshine and of singing miles.
For the next morning, everything went strange,
And hung with fate. . . . That day they did not sing.
(The concluding section of WESTWARD UNDER VEGA
will appear in the January issue of Survey Graphic.)
DECEMBER 1937
659
Exports and Imports Canada
1911
Asia and
other countries
American Ups
Downs
nd
U.S.A.
Europe
Trends over a quarter century: — cycles in pro-
duction and foreign trade, the shutdown in
immigration, the spread of great cities and
the rise in literacy. Shown in Isotype by
Otto Neurath and his associates.
1920
Asia and
other countries
1935
Asia and
other countries
Europe
I
U.S.A.
i
Europe
Latin America
Each arrow represents 100 million dollars value
Arrows inside rectangle represent imports, outside exports
Otto Neurath invented Isotype,- and the First publication of his work in the United States was
carried in SURVEY GRAPHIC. Under his direction, the International Foundation of Visual
Education, with headquarters at The Hague, has prepared these pages for our anniversary issue.
"Hieroglyphics of Our Times," they represent a universal language in which complex statistics
and social data are presented in popular but authoritative form. The subjects were chosen to give,
within the space of a few pages, the highlights of a generation in changing America.
Annual Immigration into the U.S.
Annual Automobile Production in the U.S.
1911-1914
1915-1917
1918-1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925-1929
1930
1931
1932-1935
1911-1915
1916-1918
1919-1920
1921
1922
1923-1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1936
Each man symbol represents 100,000 immigrants ISOIYPE
Each symbol represents 500,000 automobiles
Illiteracy
Urban population
Rural population
1910
iitft mmmt
1930
m mm
Each man symbol represents 1 illiterate person 10 years of age and over per 100 population
Cities of 500,000 population and over in 1910
i Boston
_t tntmm
<—W • XXX New York
'eland I Pittsburgh 1 \ f
Each man symbol represents 500,000 population
Cities of 500,000 population and over in 1930
VBoston
tttmmmtt
A A A A A A New York
•Pittsburgh n n
AUfhiladelphia
Baltimore
Each man symbol represents 500,000 population
Westward the Course of Great Cities . . .
America goes to town. Cities multiply and grow. Great new populous areas
founder in problems of taxation and the provision of public services for which
they as yet have not adequate powers and resources. In the last twenty-five
years San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Detroit and Buffalo have
taken their places in the constellation of municipalities of half a million or
more. They spread to the West, registering unequivocally that, in words of
the National Resources Committee, "The United States may be said to have
come of «ge."
If the City Fails, America Fails
by C. A. DYKSTRA
URBANIZATION MAY BE USED AS A MEASURE
of the maturity of a country. During the
last half century it has revolutionized
the lives of our people and the character
of our nation. Nonetheless the product
that has come with this dramatic change
in our national life, namely, the Ameri-
can city, has not been adequately recog-
nized by our governmental establish-
ment, national and state. Nor have we
realized that the city as an entity calls
for explicit consideration by the people
of the United States.
Rural life and agriculture have chal-
lenged our government for generations.
America as symbolized by the city has
not in the same way entered into our
public consciousness. The result has been
an almost complete neglect of its signifi-
cance as a force that is helping direct
our life and destiny.
The time has come to recognize the
new and preponderant place of our cities
in the national economy. But the gaps in
the official federal information concern-
ing them are shocking. The reporting of
urban information by the government is
less satisfactory than it was several dec-
ades back. No adequate data exist with
which to study some of the most basic
factors. Such data as we have are not
collected with uniform standards, are not
recent enough or available to all cities
and are in such form that comparison
between cities and between metropolitan
areas, for instance, is quite impossible.
SUCH INFORMATION AS WE HAVE, HOW-
ever, gives us a beginning, as the Urban-
ization Committee of the National Re-
sources Board has demonstrated. Census
statistics tell us, of course, that there
has been a continual shift from rural to
urban dominance insofar as population
is concerned. In 1790 there were six
places in the United States which could
be called cities. In 1930, 3165 urban com-
munities were listed. Only 3 percent of
the total population in 1790 lived in those
six cities; as late as 1880 urban dwellers
made up only about 25 percent of the
population. Today almost 60 percent
live in incorporated city areas. Adjacent
to large metropolitan districts are other
millions who, though not within incor-
porated local government areas, live and
work under the influence of the city.
Metropolitan districts are still recruit-
ing population from the hinterland.
Since conditions of country life are the
pre-conditions of urban life tomorrow,
low rural standards are of concern, not
only to the agricultural regions, but to
cities and to the nation as a whole.
The new president of the University
of Wisconsin drops cap and gown to
write as former city manager of Cin-
cinnati and authority on urbanism for
the National Resources Committee.
In 1930, 45 percent of the nation's
population resided in 96 urban areas,
each with over 100,000 people. Of these
54 million urbanites, 17 million were sub-
urbanites. In these metropolitan districts
we have a startling concentration of en-
terprise. In 155 out of the 3000 American
counties live 74 percent of our industrial
wage earners and 81 percent of our sal-
aried employes. These counties are the
setting for 65 percent of our industrial
establishments. Here are paid 79 percent
of the wages and 83 percent of the sal-
aries; here we find 80 percent of all
values added by the manufacturing
processes. Considering such facts it is
easy to understand why the tremendous
impact of unemployment has been so
severe in our urban communities. They
began to feel the -consequences of unem-
ployment two or three years before 1929.
As cities have grown problems ot
many kinds have developed. As political
entities they have had to undertake more
and more public services. One third of
all the nation's public employes now
serve cities, their services costing, in 1932,
more than $4^2 billion.
THE STUDIES OF THE URBANIZATION CoM-
mittee of the National Resources Board
brought to light the vulnerability of city
life as we know it in the United States.
The most drastic inequalities of income,
widespread poverty and cyclical unem-
ployment together with so much inse
curity were shown, that the inevitable
conclusion was that neither urban indus-
try nor mass production economy can
continue to function properly unless
something is done to stabilize the pur-
hasing power of urban workers. We face
A stark imbalance of economic develop-
ment in many places. Various industries
are so lacking in articulation that it is
impossible to achieve a maximum em-
ployment for the available labor supply
in these communities or a minimum of
seasonal and cyclical fluctuation in their
payrolls. This fundamental weakness
brings in its train migrant labor, an in-
creased unemployment load, lower
wages, shrunken purchasing power, loss
of business, untenanted property, tax ar-
rears and curtailed municipal services.
It is impossible in brief compass even to
list all the problems studied by our com-
mittee. Among them are city deteriora-
tion as well as city growth; the rapid ob-
solescence of the city plant; real estate
booms and depressions; the lack of a
sane urban land policy; the tragic hous
ing conditions among millions of urban
workers; menaces to health; juvenile de-
linquency; and the great burden which
unprevented crime places upon civiliza-
tion. Vocational education, re-education
and rehabilitation, together with adult
education, were immediate challenges
which our public schools must meet.
Cities are still mere legal creatures of
guardian states. Most states refuse to
function adequately with respect to them.
Overlapping governmental agencies,
conceived for a rural existence, hamper
growth and life. This situation is ag-
gravated when urban communities strad-
dle state lines or answer to different
jurisdictions.
Among the specific recommendations
made by the committee, the chief one is
that the federal government should con-
tinue its recent policy of cooperation and
assistance to urban populations. In a day
of national industrial organization, it
has become impossible for the city to
meet its problems alone. The establish-
ment of an agency of urban research
comparable to the services now given
agricultural areas is urged. So long as
cities are subject to periods of economic
distress, the committee believed a federal
credit agency should be available to them
as well as a permanent public works
authority to provide a national program
of useful employment when private em-
ployment fails. A grants-in-aid policy for
the attainment of certain objectives, a
national housing policy, a permanent
national planning board and a compre-
hensive tax survey are recommended.
To help solve metropolitan problems
which cross city and state boundaries,
interstate compacts are suggested.
I'f IS HIGH TIME TO ATTACK CIVIC BLIGHT
and corrosion. Standards of city life can
yield improvement without neglect of
the difficulties facing rural areas. We look
forward to a day when national urban
preparedness can meet urban insecurity
and unemployment. If the city cannot
of and by itself solve the deeper problems
of industrial organization we must look
to the higher strategy of planning as ba-
sic to decent city life and the conserva-
tion of our human resources. Nor can
the nation flourish without its urban in-
dustrial centers or without the country-
side; or without an organic balance be-
tween them. As never before the fact of
the city must be reckoned with.
663
CLEVELAND (Cedar Central Apts.)
New Stepping Stones for American Homes
by LOULA D. LASKER
BROKEN FLAGS OR FLAT BOULDERS LED UP
through mud or grass to the front
doors of colonial and frontier America.
Today we have the first stepping stones
that, from such rookeries and shacks as
those pictured opposite, lead on to a con-
certed national program of public low
cost housing. One which in the long run
confronts a staggering shortage of two
million dwellings and the replacement of
three million more that are obsolete.
These stepping stones are relatively small
at the start and naturally enough in these
days of concrete each is or must be a mo-
saic of one sort or another.
1 THERE ARE HALF A HUNDRED PROJ-
•*•• ects in our first stepping stone laid
by the Housing Division of the Public
Works Administration. Twenty-three al-
ready occupied; tenants already selected
for most of the others — little detached
houses, or multiple dwellings, built on
slum areas or vacant sites, north, south,
east and west.
On a crisp morning in October, I vis-
ited the largest of them — Williamsburg
Houses leased and operated by the New
York Housing Authority — located in one
of Brooklyn's most blighted areas. Vans
were drawing up before one doorway in
this new twelve-block development.
Early in the new year, 1600 families will
be inhabiting its bright, airy, modern
apartments, overlooking landscaped
courts and playgrounds. Across the street,
shabbiness and deterioration hang on, al-
though already there are signs that this
modern newcomer is stimulating its old-
fashioned neighbors to spruce up.
They are not to be sneezed at, these
projects. Look at the pictures that follow
and bear in mind that more than 20,000
families, well toward 100,000 men, wo-
men and children, will soon be living in
their like. And that in moving in, most
of them will have left dark indecencies
and discomforts behind. They will pay
no more for the sunlight and conve-
niences of the new than they can afford
— although their annual incomes are
$1500 or less, mostly $1000 and below—
incomes which ordinarily cannot provide
decent shelter if other equally important
household needs are to be met. The ex-
planation is that their rents — averaging
$5.32 per room per month — will cover
only 55 percent of the cost. Under the
exigencies of the depression, really to
stimulate employment in a stricken basic
industry, the difference comes out of the
collective family budget of the United
States. Out of a total outlay of $135 mil-
lion, grants from the federal treasury have
covered $60 million — or $10 million less
for all these fifty housing demonstrations
than it takes to build one battleship.
This takes no account of the savings to
be looked for as a by-product of the in-
vestment. For slums are luxuries. Take
the site of the Cedar Central project at
the top of this page. This occupies less
than one hundredth of the land area of
Cleveland on which one fortieth of all
Clevelanders lived. (The percentages are
.73 percent and 2.4 percent to be exact.)
Yet 7 percent of the delinquency known
to the city authorities issued from this
district; 21 percent of the murders dur-
ing the last twelve years were committed
in it; 26 percent of the houses of prosti-
tution lined its streets; 13 percent of
Cleveland's deaths from tuberculosis took
place here. The area absorbed 14.4 per-
cent of all the money spent in the city
for fire protection; 6.5 percent of that
spent for police. It turned in a nominal
tax income of $225,035 in 1932 against
public expenditures in the same area
(city, county and board of education) of
$1,356,980. To this add $490,836 spent
by private agencies for visiting nurses,
day nurseries, associated charities and
other welfare agencies. A total of $1,747,-
402 represents the initial annual cost to
the community of maintaining this small
slum area. Some of these public services
should go on — be enhanced; but the
Cedar Central housing project strikes
at the wastage in money and life.
O OUR SECOND STEPPING STONE IS MADE
* up of provisions of the United States
housing act — better known as the Wag-
ner-Steagall bill which Congress passed
last August — foundation for our first
permanent national housing program.
We should never have had it without
that first stepping stone, with its fifty
projects, their honest shortcomings, their
creative promise, born of experiment and
emergency. As result $500 million is now
available for loans over a three-year
period for public low cost housing; in
addition to $25 million annually for an-
nual or capital subsidies. Under appoint-
ment of President Roosevelt, we have our
first housing administrator — Nathan
Straus, New York business man and
executive, sponsor of Hillside Houses in
the Bronx and former member of the
Housing Authority of New York City.
Nonetheless, in contrast to its predecessor
of depression days, the new housing
program is a decentralized one. Under
the new set-up Uncle Sam, through his
new United States Housing Authority,
is counselor, banker, standard setter; but
no longer will he undertake to build and
operate directly.
3 FOR OUR NEXT STEP WE COME TO A
* pudding stone made up of the forty-
eight states, and it is slippery footing as
yet. Eighteen of them have wholly failed
to set up enabling legislation for local
housing authorities which is prerequisite
to the receipt of federal funds. Even the
thirty farsighted states have many of
them not seen far enough, for their
enabling legislation is inadequate, marred
by legal pitfalls, fails to provide for tax
exemption or is limited to a single city.
(Continued on page 668)
664
BROOKLYN
New Housing Has Replaced These Slums
CHICAGO
ATLANTA
CAMBRIDGE
CHICAGO (Julia C. Lathrop Homes)
CHICAGO (Jane Addams Houses)
BROOKLYN (Williamsburg Houses)
ATLANTIC CITY (Stanley S. Holmes Village)
CAMBRIDGE (New Towne Court)
(Continued from page 664)
A WHICH BRINGS us TO A VERITABLE
*• mosaic of unpreparedness on the
part of American municipalities. The
need is there. In 1925, according to the
U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 491,222
new dwellings were put up in 257 typical
American cities; ten years later the figure
had dropped to 22,063. To help make
up for these heavy arrears, few cities are
legally ready to take part in the public
program. Only fifty have housing author-
ities; fewer are in position to make finan-
cial contributions in the form of tax
exemptions, free public services or what
have you, that will open their way to
federal grants or loans in the next three
years.
Here European cities have outstripped
ours as participants in national housing
programs in the post-war years. In Co-
penhagen every fifth person now lives
in a dwelling put up either by the town
or what are called public utility societies
— and therefore out of the speculation
market. In Holland from 1919 through
1922 one family out of thirteen was
housed in a new dwelling. Half received
some form of public backing. The same
is true of Sweden, where 130,000 houses
have been built between 1917 and 1929.
In England every industrial center is
rimmed with new construction and over
three million dwellings have been built
since the war— 1,180,000 with some
form of government aid.
To match these showings, conservative
estimates put the minimum American
need at one million houses annually for
the next ten years. Here, too, we have at
length accepted the challenge that to pro-
vide good housing is a public responsi-
bility. So doing, through government
subvention, we have done a goodly bit in
broaching the low rent problem; but the
problem of low cost housing has scarcely
been touched. Cut down standards, cry
the critics of our experimental projects.
Then you can build for many times this
number. But build what? No one has yet
offered a convincing answer. So far as
the government goes, the fund for re-
search included in the original Wagner-
Steagall bill fell by the wayside.
C PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, WHICH MAY BE
•"^ looked to for the broadest stepping
stone of all to American homes of the
future, has not as yet matched the prow-
ess and research through which autos
and radios, for example, have been
brought within the reach of the masses.
The lower income groups need better
homes but equally, capital needs this po-
tential market if the peaks and curves
in construction are to be ironed out.
Until low cost housing is an actuality
this basic industry can never be stabil-
ized. Until a dwelling cheap enough to
meet the requirements of the nearly two
thirds of our population whose incomes
are below |2000, it will not happen
here.
But enlightened selfishness should in-
duce industry not to leave a stone un-
turned that might pave the way to a
product in low cost housing that will
satisfy and pay. The prefabricated house
has so far overshot this mark. New mate-
rials and building units offer one line
of attack. An overhauling of what is
and is not essential to good housing of-
fers another. Guaranteed employment a
third — as a substitute to alternating peri-
ods of high pay and seasonal idleness.
There might be an unanticipated re-
sponse if the federal housing administra-
tion should bring real estate interests,
credit agencies, the construction indus-
try, labor and housing consumers, to-
gether in search of new and concerted
lines of attack in bringing costs down
and homes up.
As IT IS, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS
focused public attention on the problem
and set new styles in household and
neighborhood planning. We are begin-
ning to think in modern patterns of
group if not mass production. Mean-
while there is every reason to predict thai
our public program will stimulate pri-
vate enterprise in housing rather than
put it out of business. European experi-
ence for two decades goes to show as
much. Without it, our stepping stones to
good homes have been few and far be-
tween. Today, at last, they make a path.
I fit! IJ^.jfl
iJw*l-~
•*
ATLANTA (University Homes)
668
How Far Have We Come?
by WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
The editor of The Emporia Gazette gives us a sprightly close-up
of his midwestern community — and a searching "continuity"
for his U.S.A. He himself needs no introduction as dean of
our interpreters of American life.
"BEHOLD," SAID PAUL, "I SHOW YOU A MYSTERY!" AND FIRST
of all, like him I want to show you a strange, and, to me,
inexplicable thing. It's the town of Emporia typifying
American urban life and Lyon County symbolizing our
rural life. Twenty-seven thousand people lived in our
town and county a quarter of a century ago and the cen-
sus shows almost exactly the same number of people living
here now. But a survey of life at the end of this quarter
of a century indicates an amazing change. It is a change
in the standard of living.
The town depends almost entirely upon the surround-
ing county. Certainly upon trade conditions in the en-
vironing state. The production of wealth in this county
has not greatly increased in these twenty-five years. The
number of acres under cultivation is about the same. The
amount of brains and brawn fertilizing those acres is
today what it was when Taf t was president. Yet,, for some
reason, the things we are using now in our daily lives to
make them brighter and happier cost two or three times
as much as the things we used a quarter of a century ago,
and yet for all our excess spending our bank deposits have
more than doubled, which shows that with our prodigality
we are saving. It's crazy as a bedbug — but there it is!
ITEM 1. EQUIPMENT — In that twenty-five years in Emporia
and round about we multiplied the number of automobiles,
trucks, and gasoline motor vehicles by ten. We have now
more than eight thousand pleasure cars — one for every fam-
ily. We had less than two hundred a quarter of a century ago.
And the motor industry, with its filling stations, its garages,
its automobile sales stations, its stores selling accessories, has
brought a new and unbelievably profitable industry into the
county. Who supports it? Mostly the farmers and townspeople
who twenty-five years ago were grumbling because they
couldn't make ends meet. They are carrying on their shoul-
ders this great industry employing probably upwards of a
thousand people. And we are still grumbling that we can't
make ends meet.
In addition to that, we have paved Lyon County with two
hundred fifty miles of all-weather roads, twenty-five of it
concrete, seventy-five of bituminous mat, and the rest gravel
or macadam, and we have paved it without using bonds. The
state helped but most of the help has come out of our own
pocket. We have no state road debt. And in addition to these
good roads, we are supporting the radio industry which is, o!
course, small compared with the automobile industry but is
still an expensive toy. We have tripled the number of tele-
phones in use in the county. We have about as many tele-
phones as there are houses in the town and county. The
telephone saturation point is reached. And in eight houses in
ten in Emporia, and seven in ten in the county, are radios.
With one car and one telephone for every family there
is an appalling load upon the gross income of this county
when one realizes that the gross production has not in-
creased and taxes have risen 20 percent! It just doesn't
seem to be true and yet the figures in the county clerk's
office show that it is true. It's a fairy tale based upon reality.
Nor is that all. Emporia is the retail center of the county.
ITEM 2. GOODS — Our stores carry larger stock than they did
in 1912. Where a quarter of a century ago the turnover was
two or three times a year, now the turnover is from thirty to
sixty days. Instead of two or three big stores that used to get
their dry goods and hardware and groceries in carload lots,
in great wooden boxes, now we have innumerable small shops
to which ready-to-wear is shipped from New York and Chi-
cago every week in pasteboard cartons. It is sold sometimes
on big special sales advertised in the Gazette before the cartons
are burned. Here is an amazing change in the merchandising
business. It is nation-wide. The change, of course, requires
higher transportation charges because these cartons come into
town by express, by truck, by parcel post, and once in a while
by airmail. A style is not splashed on Fifth Avenue in New
York a week, until it appears on Commercial Street in Em-
poria and in all the Emporias of this great land. Freight has
been superseded by the other transportation services in much
of the merchandising, yet the car handlings of America in a
quarter of a century have jumped upward as has everything
else in the twenty-five year boom.
ITEM 3. FOODS — A quarter of a century ago, in the windows
of the grocery stores were the seasonal fruits of the country-
side and the vegetables grown within hauling distance of the
town. In addition to that, a few citrus fruits, bananas, and at
Christmas half a dozen exotic foods were hurried across the
land by fast freight to feed the few rich people in the town.
Now the whole year round in the grocery windows of Em-
poria, in thirty stores at least, are to be found always cauli-
flower, fresh peas, green beans, lettuce, carrots, and great
luscious citrus fruits of kinds undreamed of by our fathers.
In addition to that, are avocados, melons, Japanese persim-
mons in season, strawberries the year round. In the fall and
winter, artichokes, brussels sprouts, mountains of spinach,
Chinese cabbage, pomegranates, priced cheaply enough so that
everyone can enjoy them. Certainly they come in quantities
which makes it easy for the common man on a salary of less
than $1500 a year to enjoy these things.
So we are better fed and better dressed than we ever
were before and we are spending, if the number of gro-
ceries is any indication, three or four times more for food
than we were a quarter of a century ago. And it's vastly
better, more nourishing food. So unquestionably we are
better clad, at least more attractively clad and better fed
and are better able to pay for our good food and decent
looking clothing than our grandfathers were and we have
more money in the bank than they had besides — even in
these hard times.
ITEM 4. HOMES — In 1912 we had a dozen or twenty big
669
houses, houses that required two hired girls and a gardener
who also was a chauffeur for the aristocracy that owned the
few motor cars in town. The local plutocrats who owned those
houses are dead. The houses were changed first to fraternity
and sorority houses for the college students of the town.
Then, the big houses disintegrated into boarding houses. But
boarding houses were displaced by hamburger joints and
cafes downtown on Commercial Street. Then the big houses
became rooming houses, and then just naturally went to
pieces. And are now for the most part old rookeries.
Hired girls' wages in the days of the first Roosevelt ranged
from $2 to $7 a week and a hired man could be had for $20
or $25 a month and board. Now a hired girl is worth from
$5 to $15 a week in Emporia according to her talents and
you pay $30 for the meanest kind of a man about the house
who doesn't work full time.
So the big house in the small town is passing. But in the
outskirts of every town are new "developments." Flashy,
handsome, little houses from four to seven rooms, stuck full
of electrical gadgets to help with the cooking, the sweeping,
the washing and ironing. From most of those houses the hired
girl is gone. A woman comes in to clean the house Fridays
and Saturdays. What's become of the hired girl? She's down
clerking in the little ready-to-wear shops that have multiplied
so fast on Commercial Street. And she's happier, she has
more status, more self-respect, and an eight hour day. Shorter
working hours and less physical grime and grind have digni-
fied labor more than all the politicians' oratory and with the
dignity has come the chief end of it all. The growth of self-
respect. For indeed the air of social progress is development
in the spirit of man and only because man's environment af-
fects his spirit, is a change of environment worthwhile. Inso-
far as shorter hours, better wages, a wider participation in the
civilization that rises from a man's toil makes the man a
happier, kindlier, wiser, more self-respecting man, is it worth-
while to struggle in the contest for social change.
I THINK WE ALL HAVE MORE SELF-RESPECT AND WE HAVE
bought it with a price. It has come with the miraculous
growth of economic surplus. But where did that come
from? The soil is supposed to be the source of wealth.
Yet here in this county the same number of acres is being
farmed by the same number of people and they are prob-
ably taking the same gross income out of the soil. Here
is this new world. Our fathers who died in the first decade
of the old century, if they could see us today, would be-
hold here the Utopia of which they dreamed. The farmer
is in debt. His tenancy has multiplied. But even so he lives
an easier life than his father knew. How does it happen?
Behold, I show you a mystery. And now, let's take some
thought for a moment on the matter of how it happened,
the history, political, social and economic of this strange
and beautiful thing — the coming of a wider self-respect in
American life!
II
LOOKING BACK OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS DURING WHICH A
steady fight has been made by those who believe that a
constant militant struggle to readjust our national income
is necessary in view of the tendency of capital to amalga-
mate, it is easy to say that the rich have grown richer. But
it doesn't mean much. We should ask ourselves:
Have the rich grown comparatively more powerful than
they were in the exercise of dieir acquisitive faculties in gov-
ernment, in business and in our social life and order, in cam-
parison with the middle class? No one can question but that
in twenty-five years the middle class American has gained
tremendously in comfort and in the luxuries which he enjoys.
But has he with these comforts and luxuries as much freedom
of movement, as strong a voice in, say, government and busi-
ness, as he had in the days of the first Roosevelt?
And another thing, a most important thing, what about
labor? For instance, that section of unskilled labor insecure in
employment and always on the edge of want? Has that group
bettered its condition actually and comparatively?
Twenty-five years ago progressive politicians like the
elder La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt believed that if
the environment of the underprivileged could be im-
proved, the free exercise of their latent qualities would
guarantee them a better place than they held in the social
order. We have been watching during this quarter of a
century in America the struggle of the environmental
theory to reconstitute our social and economic order for
benefits of the proletariat and for the middle class. To
that end we have been trying to use government as an
agency of human welfare. The environmentalists in our
politics, and they included practically all the liberal and
progressive leaders, were not revolutionists. They believed
in the evolutionary, political and social and economic
process. First of all they stood for law and order. No bar-
ricades blocked the streets even in their wildest dreams.
To UNDERSTAND THESE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL REFORMERS OF
the first decade of the century it is necessary quickly to
look behind them at their background. Theodore Roose-
velt and Robert M. La Follette were the residuary legatees
of William Jennings Bryan. They rejected Bryan's mone-
tary theory but adopted his complaint against monopoly,
particularly against the railroad monopoly and the rapidly
organizing industrialists. Bryan was the child of the popu-
lists who were led by General James B. Weaver in 1892
and whose populist platform written in the late eighties
and early nineties came directly out of the social vision of
the Greenbackers and the Grangers who rose and flour-
ished in the Middlewest in the seventies and eighties. Back
of that, before the Civil War, the slavery question over-
shadowed all other social reforms. So that one may say
that it was fifty years ago that America's fight opened for
social and economic justice which culminated in the pro-
gressive or Bull Moose party platform of 1912.
It is from there, the Bull Moose platform and the
Wilson policies, that we must start when reviewing the
progress Americans have made in the last quarter of a
century in chaining the lion of plutocrat rapacity.
It is hard to realize that a generation ago United States
Senators were elected by legislatures and that only by a
subterfuge of the primary law was it possible for the peo-
ple to get a direct vote upon United States Senators. It is
obvious that the character of the Senate has changed since
the adoption of the amendment providing for direct elec-
tion of United States Senators.
It has been nearly twenty years since the last of the Wall
Street senatorial bosses passed. Forty years ago Senator
Hanna controlled the Senate. After Hanna came Aldrich.
After Aldrich came Penrose and there the line stops.
Lodge and Curtis were entirely different types. The Senate
committees were reorganized after the Wall Street bosses
left and the progressive bloc has held a balance of power
in the Senate since then.
WHAT HAS THIS BLOC DONE WITH ITS POWER? WELL, THE
Constitution was amended to provide for the income tax.
Certainly there was a major weapon for economic democ-
racy. Following the income tax came woman suffrage, a
670
SURVEY GRAPHIC
democratic measure, which has unquestionably engaged
the intelligence of women if it has not purified American
politics greatly. Prohibition as a noble experiment came
into the Constitution and went out proving perhaps clear-
ly that the popular will may find easy expression in our
fundamental law if that will is definitely declared. The
recent lame-duck amendment brings the people a little
closer to their government.
Now these amendments which have come as the result
of the political activities of liberalism have affected the
political relations between the people and their govern-
ment. Even the income tax amendment has its political
phase. For it has stripped the rich of some of their surplus
which once was devoted to political control. But in this
quarter of a century we have seen other major changes
come into our federal government, changes which the
environmentalists fathered. After Theodore Roosevelt took
the progressive platform to the people in 1912, it was ob-
vious that a third party could not exist in this country
while the electoral college remained as an institution. So
the Progressive Party passed. But it had some funds on
hand and after the election of President Wilson moved its
headquarters to Washington where a group began draft-
ing bills and putting them into the Democratic hopper,
bills which expressed the ideals of the Progressive Party.
Those bills became laws and we have the established
Federal Trade Commission, the United States Tariff Com-
mission, the strengthened Interstate Commerce Commis-
sion, and a Communications Commission; we have hedged
about in many ways, activities which fifty years ago were
the unquestioned privileges of organized wealth. We may
not have taken the wolf away from the door of the poor
but we have certainly manicured the claws of the wolf
and he doesn't scratch so destructively as he did before
the Progressive fight of 1912.
When Wilson left the White House the conservatives
walked in. But they had to fight with a recalcitrant Con-
gress. Neither Harding, Coolidge nor Hoover ever at any
time had control of the U. S. Senate though the Republi-
can majority there sometimes was uncomfortably large.
The progressive bloc voting with the Democrats when
they chose and with the Republicans when the Republi-
cans would take the progressive course shaped most of the
legislation in the third decade of the century. During that
decade the socialization of federal credit which began in
the Wilson administration with the establishment of the
federal reserve act became American public policy. The
farmers forced it. Federal agencies were established during
that third decade to lend money — more or less govern-
ment money — to farmers. And when the crash came in
1929, Herbert Hoover took America far into the realm of
socialized credit when the Reconstruction Finance Cor-
poration was established. Benjamin Harrison and Grover
Cleveland probably turned restlessly in their graves when
they saw the government lending money to banks, to rail-
roads, to insurance companies, to stabilize our economic
system. Even before the election of Franklin Roosevelt,
American banks were stuffed full of government bonds.
Moreover, these banks were so drastically regulated that
they were virtually government agencies acting under
government supervision and control and all but federal
management. Moreover, in the Hoover administration
price-fixing for farm products had given agriculture a
semi-public status. The farmer's wheat, corn, cotton, cat-
tle, hogs and his land were in a way affected by public use.
DECEMBER 1937
The Common Man Comes to Power
POSSIBLY THIS WAS A GOOD THING. POSSIBLY NOT. BUT IT
was opposed heartily by the centripetal forces of organized
commercial greed and they lost their fight. Good or bad,
this gradual socialization of credit and agriculture in the
third decade indicated that the primary, the direct election
of the United States Senator, and the various gadgets for
political control of the masses, had given the common man
power to express himself in government and to make his
private sentiment, public sentiment. Never before in the
history of our Constitution has political power in the
hands of the middle class voter exercised such direct influ-
ence for good or for evil upon the federal government as
it has exercised that influence in the last twenty-five years.
Not since Woodrow Wilson came into the White House
and scarcely for a decade before that has any major fight
in the American Congress been won definitely and cer-
tainly by the forces of plutocracy except in passing the
tariff bills in that time. In making tariffs the political
horse-trader was able to serve his industrial masters. But
even there the establishment of the tariff commission is at
least a potential weapon to strip the winner of his victory.
So much for major restrictive federal legislation. Minor
laws have come out of Congress which greatly cramp the
directing forces of that acquisitive collectivism which for
want of a better name we call capitalism. One significant
law requires them to go through the state district and
supreme courts and bars them from the lower federal
district courts on all cases affecting utility rates in inter-
state commerce. A thousand abuses were wiped out with
that statute. Every year has seen similar cinching of the
forces of greed in our industry and in commerce. Time
and again Congress either through legislative enactment
or through its confirmation power or the power of investi-
gation has seriously rebuked and crippled those who
would use government as a shield for special privilege.
The investigation of the oil scandals, the passage of the
Adamson law establishing the right of Congress to set an
eight-hour limit on railway labor, the appointment and
confirmation of Justice Brandeis, and the rejection by the
Senate of senatorial candidates or members of the Senate
whose seats were secured by the use of tainted money or
corporate influence, the refusal to confirm men for high
places whose plutocratic bias was too obvious, and even
sometimes the threats unjustly presented against confirma-
tion of some open-minded men, have revealed a latent
power in the hands of the liberal bloc in Congress which
has been wholesome even when the threat was unjust. The
power may have been abused, but it did exist.
In the states, during the last generation, the same forces
which have kept Congress moving forward, have brought
the state legislatures and governors back of the liberal
bloc into line with congressional achievement. Politically,
the ballot laws have been strengthened, making corrup-
tion more difficult, giving the average voter more power
in state affairs through the initiative and referendum
which now is in use in more than half the states and in
practically all of the liberal states, and in various other
ways cramping the power of organized privilege. But it
has been a battle. Losses have come along with the gains.
Reaction often has followed ill-considered liberal move-
ments for which states were not prepared. Sometimes but
not often the lower courts have undone what legislatures
have tried to do. Except in the case of child labor legisla-
671
tion the Supreme Court has been probably on the whole
more liberal than either the Republican or Democratic
majority or the average President in the White House in
the last thirty years. In the matter of labor of women and
children, the Court has taken three positions in that time,
two of them distinctly liberal. In the states the gain in
child labor legislation has been definite and everywhere
the liberals have seen a marked advance in matters of sani-
tation and hygiene. Here is one salient which has not been
successfully captured by the forces of reaction.
"Passing Prosperity Around"
THE STATUS OF ORGANIZED LABOR IS MUCH STRONGER BEFORE
the law today than it was in Theodore Roosevelt's time.
Slowly the power of the lower courts to enjoin workmen,
picketing in labor disturbances, has been checked. The right
of collective bargaining which was formerly promised in
three Republican platforms before it was established in
federal law is certainly stronger in the states than it was
two or three decades ago. Hours of labor have been short-
ened in those decades by law and by usage in many indus-
tries and in practically all the manufacturing industries.
However it does bring us to the question: What about
the underprivileged, the man with one talent? How far
is the unskilled worker's economic position determined
by his intellectual equipment? How have the environ-
mentalists succeeded with the proletariat? What about
the cruel social injustices which stirred man's rage a gen-
eration ago? Have they been increased or lessened for
those who do the rough work of our American world ?
These are questions which cannot be answered by sta-
tistics. But that the underprivileged have had some share
in the obvious advance of the middle class seems fairly
evident. They use the roads to an extent. They occupy the
motor cars. They are somewhat protected by hygienic and
sanitary legislation. Their children go to school more
hours per year, and to better schools than they enjoyed a
quarter of a century ago. Ready-made clothing has given
them a more attractive exterior than they displayed in the
days of their fathers. Except in the South among those
who live in the lowest economic levels, standardized foods
packaged by mass production have given the poor a
somewhat, but not much, wider diet. They have shared
something of the benefits of our machine age which have
been so bountifully lavished upon the middle class. A little
gain, but not much, in the housing of the poor has been
achieved since the World War was declared and the
grosser forms of vice which ate like cancers into the poor
have been checked and today are to a certain extent re-
moved from their environment; but there the gain is only
slight. As for the very poor, those who live in the inde-
cently low economic levels, no one can say that they have
shared as the middle class has shared the blessings and
the benefits of the American social and economic advance.
Some gains, small gains, they have seen. But that is all.
And what about the farmer? Statistics will prove
nothing there. He has gone in debt. That, statistics will
show. He has lost his farm and is a tenant, much more
widely than farmers were in the days of their fathers.
He seems to have a smaller net income than the farmer of
Taft's day, but he has more goods. He certainly has more
luxuries, motor cars, radios, telephones, store food, store
clothes, good roads, better schools, and through the movies
more diversion than any farmer ever has had on the planet
before. But the liberals cannot brag much about what they
have done for the farmer. They have tinkered a lot. His
case is improved. But certainly he has not recovered from
the economic ills which oppressed him twenty years ago,
or forty years ago for that matter. Yet, he sends more chil-
dren to school and to highschool and to college, dresses
better, sleeps later, eats a more varied diet and is relieved
from back-breaking labor more generally by machinery
than he was in the days of his father. But when you have
said that, you have told the story of progress on the farm.
Now how about the rich who are everlastingly getting
richer? Certainly we have more millionaires than Taft
and Theodore Roosevelt knew. They live now in greater
luxury than formerly. But they live less exclusively in
comparison to the really near-rich and the pretentious
would-be-rich and even in comparison with the substan-
tially well-to-do definitely middle class burghers. Yet prob-
ably there is a wider dissemination of the conscious
arrogance of unconscious class than the rich knew in the
old rough-and-ready shirtsleeve days of Harriman, Frick,
Schwab, Gary and "John D. the elder." But certainly
hereditary wealth takes more handicaps today than it did
a quarter of a century ago. The income tax and inheritance
tax cut deeply into its potential accumulations. Everywhere
amalgamated wealth in the high realms of plutocratic
collectivism feels the leash of democratic law even if it
does not feel the axe of the revolutionary guillotine.
Have we kept up with the growing power of wealth in
our democratic attempt to regulate and control industry
and commerce? There again is the question. It's a guess.
Evidence in plenty may be piled up to substantiate either
an affirmative or negative answer to that question. But
this much is sure: There is hope, more than shadowy
hope, that we are gaining on the problem of the control
of organized capital. At least we recognize the problem,
even the capitalists themselves excepting a few encrusted
reactionaries realize that they are a problem. They and
the poor are problem-children.
Today
IN THESE PAGES I HAVE COME UP TO THE SECOND RoOSEVELT
administration. That we have gone forward rapidly in
five years with the liberal program no one can question.
That we are going further, no one can doubt. That it is an
evolutionary progress is too plain to be gainsaid. Also no
one may deny that in the evolutionary process we have
jumped a wide gap. We are in a new era. No politicians
and few business men would care to go back to the days
of the Coolidge bull market, the days of the "big boom."
The social ethics, the political morals and the business
philosophy of that day now have but an archaic interest.
We are thinking in new social, political and economic
terms. Moreover nothing can stop the steady process of
democratic evolutionary growth in our economics and in
our politics, giving the average man more political power
and more intelligence to use his political power for his
economic welfare — nothing can slow down this move-
ment but revolution. Our danger is not that we will move
into reaction. The menace of these days is that we may
go too fast and promote reaction.
The lesson of the last thirty years is to trust evolutionary
processes that lie in our democracy. They have done work
that justifies the democratic faith. They are here today.
These gains are the "evidence of things not seen" in the
eyes of the generation that fought at Armageddon. They
are indeed the substance of things hoped for.
672
SURVEY GRAPHIC
The Rise of Public Welfare
by FRED K. HOEHLER
For a counterpart to what has been happening, we must go back
to the early spread of public education. Not so long ago the post
of local poor master was the small change of political prefer-
ment — only a step above a dog catcher. First has come the
conviction that the welfare of citizens is the concern of all three
levels of government — local, state, federal. Next organiza-
tion — the effective implementation of this broad public re-
sponsibility the country over.
TODAY THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA ARE UNCERTAIN JUST WHAT
public welfare means. In little more than a decade they
have been called on to take the jump, philosophically, from
the poor relief concept of Queen Elizabeth to the general
welfare concept of Mr. Justice Cardozo. In practice they
have seen a relatively simple and limited conglomeration
of services and aid for the dependent, the sick, the aged,
the widowed and the blind, burgeon into a broad, compli-
cated, interlocking program to increase the security of all
the people. The jogging horse and buggy of the twenties
is now a motor omnibus loaded with "categories" of public
assistance, with relief, social insurances, institutions, agen-
cies for the prevention of social distress, while more and
more special services jerk hopeful thumbs "as it rolls along.
Unique to this country has been this dramatic change.
Last summer, in a motor trip to the west coast, I saw
the new concept struggling to implement itself, saw public
welfare administration in its infancy and in its early
adolescence. Three state departments were barely started
— not yet licked into shape; others were wrestling with
responsibilities far beyond their original function. Every-
where, it is the same story of new obligations for the wel-
fare of citizens being fitted into the permanent framework
of government. The actual mechanism goes by various
names — department of public welfare, department of so-
cial welfare, department of social security — and has a wide
variety of functions; but on the whole it has a fairly con-
sistent pattern starting with the social security services of
child welfare and public assistance together with such
general relief as the state may provide. Some states add to
their correctional and mental hygiene programs, others
maintain them separately. In most states unemployment
compensation and the employment service is administered
by a department of labor or by a special commission, but
in one conspicuous example unemployment compensation
is a responsibility of the state department of social security.
The arrangement is working well and may indicate a next
step in the consolidation of state bureaus and departments.
Relief and Public Welfare
TODAY THE FACT OF FEDERAL PARTICIPATION IN BROAD PUBLIC
welfare service is so readily accepted that we forget that
only five years ago it represented a radical departure from
tradition. In 1932 President Hoover's Organization on
Unemployment Relief gave its considered conclusion:
first, unemployment relief is a local responsibility; second,
DECEMBER 1937
if by some chance the situation gets worse, relief may
become the business of the state; third, if and when the
states can no longer bear the relief burden we will face
the situation when we come to it. The change in philoso-
phy between 1932 and 1937 is reflected nowhere more
clearly than in Mr. Justice Cardozo's opinion, upholding
the social security act:
Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be
interwoven in our day with the well-being of the Nation.
What is critical or urgent changes with the times.
The problem is plainly national in area and dimensions.
Moreover, laws of the separate states cannot deal with it
effectively. . . . States and local governments are often lacking
in the resources that are necessary to finance an adequate
program of security for the aged.
When money is spent to promote the general welfare, the
concept of welfare or the opposite is shaped by Congress, not
the states. So the concept be not arbitrary, the localities must
yield.
One measure of the change is the increase in New
York's state welfare expenditures. In the fiscal year 1930-
31, just before unemployment relief broke into the picture,
the total budget for the then state department of public
welfare, exclusive of institutions was $5,361,635 (in 1900 it
was $88,140). Came then the Temporary Emergency Re-
lief Administration which during its six-year lifetime dis-
bursed $738,930,000 for unemployment relief alone. The
estimated budget for the Department of Social Welfare
for the next fiscal year, exclusive of institutions, is approxi-
mately $70 million.
On the public welfare calendar of this country two
recent dates are written large, May 2, 1933, when the
President signed the bill creating the FERA; and August
14, 1935, when he signed the social security act. Both rec-
ognized nationally that all three levels of government —
federal, state and local — share responsibility for aid to
needy persons. Until their enactment the federal partner
had been lacking though there had been a wide develop-
ment—general in the acceptance of principles but spotty
in execution — of state-local partnership in old age as-
sistance, and aid for dependent children variously called
mothers' aid and widows' pensions. Of all the forms of
state-promoted assistance, workmen's compensation had
had the widest acceptance in practice. State-local partner-
ship in unemployment relief was under way in New York,
New Jersey, Wisconsin and other states. Federal money,
673
STATE PLANS FOR SPECIAL TYPES OF PUBLIC ASSISTANCE
APPROVED BY THE SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD
STATUS AS Of OCTOBER 25. 1937
AU- THREE PLANS
OLD-ACC ASSISTANCE AND AID TO THE BLIND
OLD-AGE ASSISTANCE AND AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN
AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN ONLY
OLD-ACE ASSISTANCE ONLY
NO PLANS
but not federal partnership in administration, came into
the relief scene through the "loans" of President Hoover's
Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
FERA was organized under pressure — it was not sur-
prising that there should have been administrative ineffi-
ciency, decisions made and reversed with startling rapidity.
The emergency was acute and money, large sums in the
aggregate, had to be gotten through quickly to people in
need. But even in its hectic beginnings and aside from its
actual provision of relief, FERA was responsible for a
sharp change in the popular attitude toward unemploy-
ment, the unemployed and the whole relief problem.
Under the impact of FERA's facts and figures the notion
that "a man could get work if he really wanted it" gave
way to the sober realization that literally millions were
"unemployed through no fault of their own."
From the start, FERA granted funds to existing state
public welfare agencies held sufficiently well organized
to administer them properly. Where such agencies were
lacking new ones were established. In most cases the state
agencies granted funds to local communities, to be admin-
istered by public or private agencies, depending on the
particular situation. Soon however, and for a number of
reasons, FERA adopted the policy that public funds should
be expended only by public agencies. It was at this point
that the widespread coverage of the public welfare struc-
ture as it exists today had its beginnings, but it should be
remembered that federal participation was still in terms
of "emergency."
With the social security act federal participation in as-
sistance and services for the needy became a permanent
Courtesy Social Security Board
function. The act laid down a pattern of shared responsi-
bility for the care of the aged, the blind and dependent
children; provided grants-in-aid to the states for these
programs and others, such as child welfare services, crip-
pled children's services, maternal and child health services;
provided for two programs of social insurance, old age
insurance set up on a federal basis, and unemployment
compensation as primarily a state responsibility with fed-
eral supervision and aid.
As federal participation shifted from the FERA to
agencies administering grants under the social security
act, state and local oragnizations began to adapt their
form to the permanent program contemplated by the fed-
eral legislation. In less than a year, a pattern emerged
almost nation-wide in scope. The provision that public
assistance should be either administered or supervised by
a state agency resulted in a number of new state depart-
ments of public welfare and in many reorganizations. In
New England the traditional city-town system continues,
and in some states, chiefly in the South and West, local
administration is through district offices of the state
agency; but most states have provided state-wide systems
of county public welfare agencies.
Planning and Programs
THIS SHIFT IN THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC WELFARE AND IN ITS
instruments has had many facets. Most notable to me is
the changed attitude of the public agency itself toward
persons in need of assistance. They now are seen as human
beings involved in personal and family situations that can
not be resolved by a sack of coal, a basket of groceries or
674
SURVEY GRAPHIC
even by the cash equivalent of "minimum subsistence."
There is a growing realization on the part of officials and
public alike that behind the figures and the charts of the
public assistance programs are anxious bewildered people,
people even as you and I.
A second new facet is the concern of public welfare
agencies with the causes of dependency. We now have a
federal program of old age insurance. All forty-eight states
have enacted unemployment insurance statutes. All levels
of government are increasingly aware of the significance
of housing conditions. Local public welfare agencies here
and there are cooperating with other agencies in crime
prevention efforts. A few places are undertaking construc-
tive programs for vocational training. Cincinnati, for ex-
ample, is inaugurating a four-point program of vocational
education for young persons; retraining for adult workers
whose skills have been lost during unemployment or who
must develop new skills to meet the new demands of local
industries; organization of the casual labor market; and
proper study, treatment and, so far as possible, rehabilita-
tion of the so-called unemployables. More and more we
are realizing that proper preventive measures can reduce
economic hazard and avoid individual disaster, and that
such measures are of the fabric of the public welfare.
The experience of the past few years has shown that
planning is essential to public welfare programs. A num-
ber of states have surveyed needs and existing facilities to
meet them. New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri
are among the states where reorganization of state and
local public welfare administration was preceded by care-
ful study by an independent survey commission. Perma-
nent state planning commissions are coming to recognize
their responsibilities in the public welfare field. Many city
and county agencies are also trying to estimate ahead their
needs and resources in relation to dependency.
The acceptance of the term "public welfare" connotes a
change from blanket treatment by rule and rote to per-
sonal treatment of individuals. For example, the alms-
house, our oldest provision for the indigent, has declined
in practically every state. Thus a bulletin from the Univer-
sity of Alabama stated that between November 1935, and
August 1936, thirty-two county almshouses were closed
with plans made by county departments of public welfare
for the individual care of 415 persons. In the following ten
months, twelve more were closed, leaving only eighteen
where sixty-one had been less than two years before.
Clearly such a scheme, looking to the welfare of those
involved, means a new approach, and a personnel different
from that held good enough for the almshouse.
Personnel
THE CHANGE IN STANDARDS OF PERSONNEL IN PUBLIC WELFARE
administration has been one of the most important out-
growths of the last changing years. The fight has not been
easy, nor is it yet won. New legislation, almost without
exception, has included provision for the establishment
and maintenance of certain minimum standards. The
whole matter of recruiting, retaining and training quali-
fied personnel in public welfare administration is at pres-
ent in an uneven stage of development. In nearly all the
states I have visited in the past year — and that means most
of the forty-eight — I found administrators struggling to
find competent people. They are talking in terms of per-
sonnel procedures, merit systems, training on the job and
so on, but in practice many of them are handicapped be-
cause these things are not secure in basic legislation, are
not wholly understood by the public and are resisted by
old school politicians.
It is heartening to come on instances of good stiff back-
bone in defense of the public welfare service. One day last
fall in a prairie state I witnessed the descent of the presi-
dent of a women's political club on the chairman of the
welfare board. She had come for a job, held at the moment
by as competent a public servant as the state possessed.
Patiently the chairman explained the requirements of the
job, the qualifications it demanded. She brushed them
aside with "I'll have that job — or else. . . ." With complete
courtesy he dismissed her, "Madam, until you can prove
your competence it will have to be 'or else'."
There are many indications of the growing pains which
have checked public welfare administration in the per-
sonnel area, but there are encouraging signs also. Indiana
has placed its personnel problems for public welfare and
unemployment compensation under the jurisdiction of a
joint personnel agency. Michigan has put the personnel
of its new state public welfare agency under the terms of
the state civil service law. Pennsylvania has set up a state
employment board to work with the Department of Public
Assistance in the administration of a merit system for that
department. In Arkansas, when the legislature passed a
civil service bill blanketing in all encumbent employes,
Governor Bailey discharged all members of the state and
county staffs the day before the law became operative, then
reappointed them on a temporary basis, thus necessitating
competitive examinations for all. This drastic action may
have been less desirable than a non-competitive or quali-
fying examination, but certainly it was truer to the spirit
of the merit system than a freezing of public welfare
employment at the level of the moment, regardless of
individual qualifications.
State government in general, and public welfare agen-
cies in particular, are looking more and more upon public
personnel administration not simply as a matter of en-
trance examination and protection of tenure, but as being
concerned with in-service training, service ratings, work-
ing conditions, policies on salaries, promotions, sick-leaves,
vacations, transfers, and other day-to-day affairs of any
functioning organization. The executive of a large metro-
politan public welfare agency told me recently that one
of his most pressing problems was dealing with his staff,
organized along union lines, on these very problems. The
newer public welfare legislation has been written with
these considerations in mind.
One of the serious difficulties of public welfare adminis-
trators today is to maintain a balanced public welfare pro-
gram. Take, for example, assistance to children and to the
aged. FERA experience indicated that we have in this
country approximately as many dependent children as
aged in need of assistance. Yet the figures of the Social
Security Board show that in April 1937, there were 1,297,-
321 persons over sixty-five with average grants of $18.71
a month in forty-two states receiving federal matching
funds, while 338,869 dependent children had average
grants of $9.93 a month in twenty-eight states cooperating
with the federal government. The reasons for this dis-
parity are clear. First, the Social Security Board reimburses
states for 50 percent of their expenditures for the aged,
for only 33}/j percent of their expenditures for children.
Second, things being as they are in our democratic gov-
ernment, legislators must hold themselves answerable to
DECEMBER 1937
675
the voters. Now almost every voter either is or expects to
be over sixty-five years of age; on the other hand, every
voter has passed through the stage of being a child. If this
seems too cynical a view of the motives that accomplish
social legislation, let me refer again to a recent trip to the
West and Northwest. Without exception governmental
officials and legislatures were under pressure for an in-
crease in old age assistance allowances which if granted
would crowd other services out of the picture. While I
was in Denver, a conference of Associated Pension Or-
ganizations was demanding larger pensions and lower
age limits for the aged with no conception of the total
assistance problem. Pressure groups, such as that confer-
ence represented, are a potent political influence in many
states but they are blind as bats when it comes to the needs
of the whole dependent population. It seems obvious that
child welfare services and aid to dependent children will
not be financed adequately if the great pressure for more
money to the aged continues.
Health
THE QUESTION OF PROVIDING MEDICAL AND HOSPITAL CARE FOR
recipients of public assistance and for persons of low in-
come is one of great current importance to public welfare
agencies. In most places such provision is perfectly possi-
ble under existing legislation, depending simply on the
availability of funds. As a result, provision of free care for
persons of low income is non-existent far too often. The
story of a Negro housemaid in Chicago illustrates the
shortsightedness of such lack of provision. Ellen is hard
of hearing and is further handicapped by a bad ankle and
by an abdominal tumor requiring surgical treatment. For
the past year or so, she has managed to earn perhaps $30
a month. Her application for admission to a public hos-
pital for the tumor operation was denied on the ground
that such service is available only to persons who are
"destitute." In other words, if she would give up her strug-
gle to keep working and go on relief, the hospital would
accept her and the operation would be performed. A strong
feeling of independence keeps her from taking that step,
so she goes on with part time work, while her health
declines as a result of a condition easily correctable by
surgery. On what characteristics, one may ask, do our
legislators set a premium when a citizen is penalized for
refusing to ask for relief?
Hospital care in most places is provided in public insti-
tutions up to the limit of their facilities with the overflow
cared for in privately maintained hospitals paid on a per
diem basis. Recent studies by the American Public Wel-
fare Association in this field indicate, however, that much
remains to be done in working out satisfactory relation-
ships between hospital authorities and public welfare
agencies.
Budgets
A PROBLEM OF PRIMARY IMPORTANCE IN ANY PROGRAM IS
where the money is to come from. The vast expenditures
required for public welfare activities throughout the coun-
try have necessitated a specialized grant-in-aid structure.
Federal funds are available directly for work relief and
rural resettlement, and to the states on a grant-in-aid basis
for categorical public assistance — the aged, the blind, de-
pendent children — some services to mothers and children,
vocational rehabilitation and public health work. Funds
for social insurance are raised by payroll taxes. The fed-
eral government no longer aids states and cities in the
matter of direct relief. Most states have appropriated funds
to aid the localities, but in others, the whole financial
burden for this type of assistance has been turned back to
the cities and towns, although limited sources of revenue
make those units least able to raise the necessary funds.
A number of cities — Chicago, Cincinnati, Toledo for ex-
ample— are back to the days of relief crises. The situation
in Chicago has centered chiefly around a lack of city
funds, in Toledo and Cincinnati around the unexpected
withdrawal of state aid after city budgets had been made
up and taxes levied for the current year. In this confusion
the need for definite, intelligent planning is clear.
Local governments depend for revenue chiefly on the
general property tax. Of recent years there has been con-
siderable feeling that these taxes are too high and in
various places both the assessments and the rates have
been reduced. Tax limitations, statutory or constitutional,
make it impossible for many localities to increase this
form of taxation to meet the needs of the general relief
program. In some states, homestead exemptions have re-
duced further the revenue from this source. If these move-
ments continue as part of the local tax structure, the need
for state participation becomes clear. The American Pub-
lic Welfare Association, along with a number of other
organizations, is on record as favoring federal grants to
states for purposes of general relief. Certainly one of the
pressing needs at the present time is a thorough-going
study of our national, state and local financial structure
with, if possible, some tentative conclusions regarding the
resources of the various states and localities.
CUTTING ACROSS ALL BRANCHES OF PUBLIC WELFARE ADMIN-
istration as it is growing up are interstate problems. The
old problems of stringent state and local settlement laws
are still present; new ones are being created as fast as new
programs are inaugurated. In unemployment compensa-
tion, interstate problems are staggering. In public as-
sistance they are far from being solved. The general
attitude on the part of each unit of government has been
that the transient part of the dependent population is the
concern of somebody else.
Looking at the whole American scene today, it is clear
that public welfare has come a long way in the past ten
years. The statement that it has been universally accepted
as a regular function of government lacks any note of
the spectacular, unless we recall where we were ten
years ago. Under the pressures of these years, public wel-
fare services have been expanded in scope and made avail-
able to a large number of the people. In states where for-
merly there was no local public welfare structure we see
today city and county agencies cooperating with newly
created or reorganized state agencies. We have achieved
by no means a complete pattern of well-rounded, ade-
quately financed public welfare. We can, however, look
back on the last ten years and feel a degree of satisfaction
in what has been accomplished, realizing all the while
how much remains to be done. The most encouraging
factor is the knowledge that we, the people of the United
States, have developed a social conscience which requires
the provision of public assistance and services to those in
need on a basis at least roughly comparable to a minimum
standard of living. Once a democratic nation assumes such
a responsibility as this, "all the King's horses and all the
King's men" can never pull it back again.
676
Some Pages from the Survey Scrapbook
VOL. XXI
JANUARY 2.
We like to think the name we
go by looks out on the future.
Yet the name itself runs a
long way back. The Dooms-
day Book, if you please, car-
ried the sociological and eco-
nomic findings of a "Survey
of Saxon Land and Folk."
Which may have been for
bettor or worse for the Saxons!
Your county surveyor today
may not have as crusty a
lineage as his next door
neighbor, the sheriff, but his
forebears long ago ran away
with our name for their pro-
fession. Booth in London,
Rowntree in York, Patrick
Geddes in Edinburgh, were
pioneers in the modern study
of cities; but so far as we
knew at the time, The Pitts-
burgh Survey of 1907-10,
which gave us our name, was
the first to recapture the an-
cient meaning of the term and
put it to work.
•
An Oxford scholar, one of
the ranking international ex-
perts at Geneva, once selected what to him, because of their
innovations, were the three most original American periodicals.
Of these, he singled out Survey Graphic as the one which in its
combination of qualities was without counterpart in Europe.
As a publication we go back quite a bit, though not so far as
our name. Fifty years ago Edward Everett Hale was editing
Lend-A-Hand; forty-five years ago, John H. Finley and Paul
Leicester Ford were editing The Charities Review. So we can call
the creator of The Man Without a Country, the editor of the
New York Times and the author of The Hon. Peter Sterling,
prenatal editors of ours. At least those early periodicals were of
the family tree. Forty years ago, Edward T. Devine founded
Charities (published by the New York Charity Organization
Society, our parent body). This was our main taproot, and an-
other was The Commons, founded by Graham Taylor, warden
of the Chicago settlement of that name, and his associate then,
ours today, John Palmer Gavit. A third root was Jewish Charity,
edited by Lee K. Frankel.
The architect of our membership corporation in 1912, whose
constructive interest in philanthropic publications had reached
back for twenty years, and was to reach forward for twenty
more as president of Survey Associates, was Robert W. de
Forest. Our cooperative society itself was without precedent as
a new sort of educational institution.
NO. 14
CHARITIES
AND THE COMMONS
THE PITTSBURGH
SURVEY
'JK
A JOURNAL OF
THK CHARITY ORC.AN
THIS ISSLT TWENTY-
•RU
THRDfY
Pittsburgh was chosen for
that first survey as the type
industrial city of America.
We projected a close range
inquiry into life and labor in
the Pennsylvania steel district
to see how far human engin-
eering was matching mechan-
ical. The findings were first
published in Charities and
The Commons, and then in
six volumes by the Russell
Sage Foundation, which under
the directorship of John M.
Glenn had made our Pitts-
burgh Survey the object of
one of its initial grants. Those
findings included the first
appraisals of overwork and
overstrain — 12-hour days
and 7-day weeks — in steel
( Fitch, Commons, Leiserson,
Byington ) ; the first inductive
American studies of work
accidents (Eastman), of wage
earning women on a city-wide
basis (Butler), of the eco-
nomic costs of disease —
typhoid fever (Wing) ; to-
gether with unique assessments
of three civic survivals — a congeries of children's institutions
(Lattimore); a real estate tax system weighted against people
least able to pay (Harrison); and a ward school system un-
changed over the generations (North and Shaw).
We interpreted at the same time the youthfulness, the energy,
the civic initiative and engineering powers of the Pittsburgh dis-
trict. Whatever the flare-back in interested quarters at the time,
the purpose of our work held: to make for understanding and to
reinforce those who in Pittsburgh and the nation were striking
out for social advance.
•
The Pittsburgh Survey gave us not only our name, but broad-
ened our scope, reaching out from the poor and sick and
ill-housed to the wage earning community — to everybody. It
sharpened our working techniques "to get at the facts of social
conditions in ways that would count." And it strengthened that
framework of educational functions on which we have built up
cooperative support for Survey Associates: —
•
We chronicle developments . . . pool experiment and experi-
ence . . . afford a forum for free discussion . . . carry forward
swift first hand investigations with a procedure comparable to
that of scientific research ... interpret the findings of others . . .
employ photographs, maps, charts, the arts in gaining a hearing
from two to twenty times that of formal books and reports.
APRIL SURVEY
GRQPHIC
OUR STAKE IN STEADY JOBS
(Beulah A mid on)
1929
• MARCH SURVEY^B
GRQPHICI
r
WHEN WE CHOOSE TO
PLAN
(Beulah Amidon)
1932
SURVEY
GRAPHIC
HEARTS
Htart (fcrefc- Jn<6 .wr ptof>lf ia tbf I'niltJ Sfrffr.
otlifr angle (ffwt Oat nut of i«n f,:-, .-j *< iitft j
lift brtme. of it. In ihu W»*< D>- Ha-.^t /-"irr
of***! (r" *»•» JKt»r/ Jixuv , J.i iv ;.«>, w.-t J. . . tiJnWW.
the «•»»/ rijp "
H.I.^ Nin FAlBfcR. IW-*
(Haven Emerson, M.D.)
1924
WHY PROSPERITY KEEPS L P
Mr. II . . .
HOMES DAY BOOK
• >t Amcn.un land
I
RED LET'
Special numbers are not a Survt
with color and challenge that h
sand readers. Our Survey Graph,
month after The Graphic was lai
came into being. Here are a few
— sometimes a guest editor but
1929
(Mary Ross)
1926
One of a series by this editor:
Family Life in America, 1927
Who Is Grown Up, 1928
The Family Pocketbook, 1928
Science Looks at People, 1931
Social Trends, 1933
(S. Adele Shaw)
1921
/URVEY
What Would the Irish
Do With Ireland?
(Savel Zitnand)
1921
N ,
HARLEM
MECCA
OF THE NEW
JXZSSf-i^ ' 6
(Alain Locke)
1925
R ISSUES
ition, but we have invested them
in from twenty-five to fifty thou-
> began with an Irish number the
a week before the Irish Free State
TI, with the special editors named
with the team play of the staff.
OCTOBER SURVEY
GRAPHIC
I
^•*
?
. CHICAGO
(Donald Slesinger)
1934
Washington, Pittsburgh, Birming-
ham were early prototypes of this
number. In the sequence also:
Regional Planning (Geddes Smith)
City Government (Loula D. Lasker)
Obsolete Cities (Carol Aronovici)
I
URVEY
GRAPHIC
iiant Pov\csr
in. Huib-f *.i.rf,>., M. jKfcwm
,Wi »• Hv-1" Frjti Martha Btn«l*y Bnt>«
(Robert W. Bruere)
1924
SURVEY
GRAPHIC
EDUCATION/..) EVERYBODY
'< A N U A R Y SURVEY
GRQPHIC
How Shall the Doctor Be Paid.'
!•!-..
.
(Mary Ross)
1930
1926
(Mary Ross)
1936
SURVEY
GRAPHIC
MEXICO
A r u 1 1 M i s i:
(Frank Tannenbaum)
1924
IMARCH SURVEY]
GRQPHIC
FASCISM
A New Challenge to the Spiril of 1776
t-HANCJI* MACKETT . - THOMAS W. LAMONT
EDUARD C. UNDEMAN . . HENRY W.TAFT
W1U1AM BOL1TMO . - . - W. V. ELLIOTT
LINCOLN STEFFENS . ARTHUR LIVINGSTONE
ARNALDO MUSSOLINI : for
cdgainst :GAETANO SALVEMIN1
(Eduard C. Lindeman)
1927
FEBRUARY /URVEY
GRAPHIC
THE NEW GERMANY
1910 - 1020
MULLEB • /TtlE/EMANN- HEUMCH
J&CKN • BONN - COOCH • RAPPARO ,
MttWCCCT FEBOUWTr IQ3« • SOOTEAP J
(John Palmer Gavit)
1929
Survey treatment is not confined to facts grimly driven home.
Occasionally — and we wish oftener — a shaft of humor flashes
through our pages, such at Louis Towley's Gover'ment Cow, a
mellow satire on Red Tape which Washington enjoyed with others.
Gertrude Springer, managing editor of The Midmonthly
Survey, has invented an author who doesn't write! Miss Bailey
Says. And what Miss Bailey says, in lighter vein, as she scouts
about the country, getting right down to the grass roots of public
and private welfare, and their administration, has made her advice
famous wherever two or more social workers get together.
MAKING FACTS COUNT
Valuations put on men under the old rule of master and servant:
actual amounts paid for the loss of an eye, an arm, a leg. Meun-
ier's famous Puddler sits in bronze in Allegheny City, but took
the witness chair for our Pittsburgh Survey at a civic exhibit put
on at Carnegie Institute. This photograph, greatly enlarged, was
flanked by a huge death calendar with a red cross for each of the
500 men and women killed at their work in this one American
county in the year of Crystal Eastman's study. The three decades
since have seen the spread of safety engineering and workmen's
compensation laws.
An early example of Survey techniques in visualization; and
also of those hazards of the working life on which the American
people are now closing in in the name of social security — not only
in terms of industrial accidents and occupational diseases, but of
unemployment, old age and — to come — sickness.
Possibly no other lay periodical was ever asked by a
group of doctors to bring out a special issue on a disease!
The result was our Hearts Number of 1924. It helped
put heart disease on the map, alongside tuberculosis,
which we had interpreted from the inception of the
movement for its prevention and control. We collabo-
rated with such forerunners as Lillian D. Wald in the
field of public health nursing; Dr. Richard C. Cabot in
that of hospital social service. The spread of public
health administration had long been a major interest
with us when Michael M. Davis opened up that of medi-
cal economics — group practice, group payment, health
insurance. His series of articles in 1927 was the first
ever handled in the United States by a general magazine,
and broke ground for the five-year study of the Commit-
tee on the Costs of Medical Care.
MENACES
TO AMERICA'S HEALTH
linnillfl
Eoch man represents 50,000 cases in 1935
PULSE OF THE TIMES
Two years after Survey Associates was founded the World War put to
the test not only our mutual tolerance but the quest of facts. War
victims, such as this little girl from a page of that period, represented
a common cause of all humanity. The Survey was one of the few lay
journals which gave a hearing to efforts at waging peace.
It carried series of articles on the Canadian Patriotic Fund; on the
work of the Red Cross and the Friends at home and abroad; and
covered the work of civilian relief in all the countries at war. It came
to grips with the problems of education, health and welfare that were
revealed and magnified by American mobilization in 1917.
Traversing fields of controversy, The Surrey explored war boom
towns; the northward migration of the Negro; rising industrial un-
rest; breakdowns in liberties. On Armistice Day, Survey Associates
called a three-day Demobilization Conference, which met under the
chairmanship of Felix Adler. Out of it grew a series of special Recon-
struction Numbers made possible by gifts of Mrs. Henry Goddard
Leach. And from these sprang Surrey Graphic as a magazine of social
interpretation, its Founders Fund headed most generously by Mrs.
George D. Pratt; at the same time we gave up our old weekly schedule
and instituted The Midmonthly Survey as a journal of social work.
Beneath the surface of the twenties — the boom years and
the jazz age — social work came of age as a profession.
Just as, after the turn of the century, social practice had
become infused with the advances in preventive medicine
and applied economics, so now, like a fresh draught
from the spring of science, came the application to case
work of those advances in psychology and psychiatry
which were giving new insight into human behavior.
The pages of Survey Graphic and The Midmonthly
Survey throughout this period are evidence of these new
developments.
From still further beneath the surface of the times
our magazines registered the testimony of social workers
as to the seams of unemployment which were to widen
into the abyss of the depression.
Rollin Kirby
It was in the early winter of 1928 that we published our first
article of warning; and in the spring of 1929 our special
number on Unemployment. In 1930 and 1931, close-up staff
articles on industrial districts — Cincinnati, Detroit, Toledo-
revealed conditions that were getting scam attention in the
press. In our magazines informed writers dealt with the strain
upon the private welfare agencies, the stark need for public
relief, the successive steps toward state and federal responsi-
bility.
Since 1933 the New Deal program (especially in relief,
work relief, social security, conservation, housing, industrial
standards) has been interpreted in scores of article, by pro-
tagonists, by critics, by objective authorities and by staff
investigator).
EDWARD T. DEVINE
ROBERT W. DE FOREST
GRAHAM TAYLOR
We became Survey Associates 1912
JANE ADDAMS
JULIAN W. MACK
FLORENCE KELLEY
We founded Survey Graphic 1921
HELEN S. PRATT
HENRY R. SEAGER
AGNES BROWN LEACH
The Turn of the Century
by CHARLES A. BEARD
In characteristically vigorous strokes, Charles Beard limns this
portrait of Raw Capitalism; heritage of 1900 — as a backdrop
to where we stand today. This, as he sees it, was that conception
of the American System which to its sponsors was natural, final,
deterministic; — which, if their claims had held, would be with
us unchanged today except for the worse — which still must be
reckoned with by those who would "choose other values upon
which to center their affections and labors."
WHEN THE SURVEY WAS LAUNCHED, ITS EDITORS FOUND
themselves in the presence of a heritage bequeathed by
the Respectability of the nineteenth century. There were,
to be sure, deep stirrings and questionings, as old ideals
and aspirations were turned upon the theories and prac-
tices of Mark Hanna's age. The country was in the midst
of the Progressive upheaval, soon to be flattened out by
the engines of war. Upton Sinclair had been invited to the
White House and Jack London was prophesying things
to come. But, on the whole the heritage was intact and any
spokesman of Respectability could describe it with exact-
ness in spite of rumblings on the Left.
After all, Respectability had seen Thomas Jefferson,
"infidel and Jacobin," come and go. It had survived the
"barbarian invasion" headed by Andrew Jackson. It had
triumphed in 1896 over the "league of hell" that sponsored
"the wretched, rattle-pated boy" William Jennings Bryan,
as the New Yorf^ Tribune characterized the Roman holi-
day. The Supreme Court still stood "like a rock, five to
four," as the New Yor^ Sun presented the image, and
United States Senators were still elected by the state legis-
latures, though that system was slipping.
By the turn of the century the passions of the war be-
tween the Union and the Confederacy had died down.
The "bloody shirt" no longer floated in the breeze. Indeed,
the old scars had been well salved when survivors of the
Confederate army, with a whoop and a hurrah, plunged
into the nice "little war" of 1898 so zealously cheered by
John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Pulitzer and Wil-
liam Randolph Hearst. Sons of the southern planters by
the hundreds had gone into business in the South or in
the North and had learned how to "cut big melons."
Railways, commerce, industry and profits were effecting
a union of hearts, while the hangers-on of letters and elo-
cution were celebrating the event in essay, story and
oration. From eroding fields the scent of magnolias had
spread over spinning mills and blast furnaces. The conti-
nent had been rounded out and handed out. "Manifest
destiny" hovered over the Pacific.
Although the heritage of Respectability bequeathed to
the twentieth century cannot be fully described within
any compass, large or small, its chief features can be set
down with considerable precision. Many sources provide
authentic information. The statistics of rising industry and
relatively declining agriculture record economic aspects.
Statutes and judicial decisions present the coverage of
law. Debates in Congress and state legislatures reveal the
hopes of men's hearts. Arguments before the Supreme
Court disclose the substance and poetry of things desired.
Reports of strikes, panics, and breadlines yield knowledge
stark and real, if seldom mentioned in Thanksgiving
proclamations. Here, in these and other sources— and in
memories of living persons — are the materials for an ac-
count of the Respectability's System, Dream, Heritage of
1901, that bears the marks of realism.
Property
AT THE VERY CENTER OF THE HERITAGE WAS PROPERTY.
Nearly all "valuable" things in earth and sky and water
were deemed to be, necessarily, objects of private property.
So, too, were intangible rights in such property, saving
the vague sovereignty of the State, itself confined within
the narrow limits of "police power." Property in human
beings had been abolished by war and law. Practically
everything else was private property or on a fair way to
become private property. All land, forests, minerals, and
water power sites yet owned by the federal government —
fragments of a once magnificent public domain — were to
be turned into objects of private property, at low prices or
no price at all, or by methods none too exacting, if not
positively fraudulent. There was to be no public owner-
ship of anything that might be expected to yield a profit.
Minor exceptions merely served to illustrate the generality
of the rule. To governmtnts were assigned armories,
roads, bridges, and other property required for the trans-
action of public business. "I have thought," said Joseph
Choate to the Supreme Court in 1895, "that one of the
fundamental objects of all civilized governments was the
preservation of the rights of private property. I have
thought that it was the very keystone of the arch upon
which all civilized government rests." To lay a tax on
incomes, was, in Mr. Choate's scheme of things, to pull
down the keystone of the arch. Certainly Respecta-
bility agreed with this theory. Certainly also it did not
regard the preservation of public property as the keystone
to anything — if a profit could be made out of possession.
Coupled with the private ownership of property was
the freest possible use of such property by the owners,
whether natural persons or artificial persons known as
corporations. Attached to ownership and use was the right
679
or privilege to employ such property in making the maxi-
mum profit— "all the traffic will bear." Property was to
be bought, sold, transferred, or acquired with the mini-
mum of government interference. Where necessary, gov-
ernment was to record transfers and protect owners
against acquisitive methods deemed fraudulent by the
prevailing standards of propriety. But public interference
with profits, whether arbitrary or uniform as to classes of
property, was regarded as shaking the keystone of the
arch. The special taxation of profits was repudiated, if
suggested. The larger the profits, the better for all parties
immediately concerned and ipso facto for all society itself.
Large profits meant large payrolls, as afterward explained
by Calvin Coolidge, who took his A.B. at Amherst in
1895. Thus profit was not merely the incentive. It was the
end— and the bigger the better, all around. If any econo-
mist suggested that it was the morals and cultural institu-
tions of society which made profits possible, rather than
profits which sustained society, his suggestion was not
writ large in the books on "economics."
Respectability was probably somewhat shocked when
Boss Tweed declared at a legislative investigation in 1899
that "every man in New York is working for his pocket."
That really was putting the matter a little baldly. But if
anyone suggested that the profit motive was not the driv-
ing force of economic enterprise, or that some other mo-
tive such as the simple desire to make an honest living, or
patriotism, or devotion to the public good could be substi-
tuted, he was set down as a dreamer, if nothing worse.
Paper
VVlTH THE FREE USE OF MATERIAL PROPERTY FOR THE ENDS
of private profit went a well-nigh unlimited right to
employ, for the same end, intangible claims to material
things — stocks, bonds, leases, and other paper signs of
possession. State governments were expected to charter
corporations and set them loose to operate throughout the
country, without asking any searching questions or im-
posing any severe limitations on them or their methods.
Owners of stock, bonds, and other evidences of property
were free to make mergers and combinations, substitute
new paper for old, issue new paper for sale to the public,
and otherwise carry on profitable operations of this kind,
subject to liabilities for frauds too palpable. If men bought
three factories for five million dollars, combined them,
sold twenty million dollars worth of bonds to the public,
and besides, kept all the stock as "clear gain," the Ameri-
can system interposed no objection.
It is true the Federal Industrial Commission, appointed
in 1898 and reporting in 1900, declared that
. . . the promoters and organizers of corporations or industrial
combinations which look to the public to purchase or deal in
their stocks or securities should be required to furnish full
details. . . .
But this recommendation merely described the state of
the System; the pious hope was not written into law. In
1901 the season for the manipulation of intangible claims
to real property and profits was wide open, save in mat-
ters of reeking fraud.
Protection
PROPERTY, so CONSTITUTED, ENTRENCHED, USED, AND MANIPU-
lated, was to be protected in its essential relations and from
hour to hour, unremittingly, by government. Such pro-
tection was, indeed, a supreme end and purpose of gov-
680
ernment. If labor leaders, strikers, pickets, and "disorderly"
persons invaded the precincts of private property or inter-
fered with its functioning or non-functioning the police
forces of the state and the army of the federal government
were to be called out and employed to preserve the rights
of owners to use or not use their property to the ends for
which property was supposed to exist. To be sure, the in-
junctive power of the courts was likely to be invoked first
and physical force applied only after the failure of this
civil instrument, but always in the background stood the
Might of the State to protect property and its liberties as
then understood, accepted and celebrated by the Directors
of the American System. The same Might could be en-
gaged in helping a sheriff to execute a mortgage fore-
closure against a farmer, and in aiding a mill owner to
sustain a lock-out of his employes on grounds sufficient to
his desires and purposes. If, as in the case of Governor
Altgeld during the Pullman strike of 1894, the chief exe-
ecutive of a state failed to respond with sufficient alacrity
to a call for physical force in defense of property, the
President of the United States could step in and employ
the regular army in guaranteeing protection to owners of
property. Any paltering by a governor was a form of trea-
son to first principles.
Did not the Reverend Doctor Lyman Abbott call Gov-
ernor Altgeld "the crowned hero and worshipped deity of
the anarchists of the Northwest?" Did not Theodore
Roosevelt condemn the governor as a man who "condones
and encourages the most infamous of murderers" and
"would substitute for the government of Washington and
Lincoln a red welter of lawlessness and dishonesty as
fantastic and vicious as the Paris Commune?" Did not
General Sickles denounce him as a "wolf who needed
skinning?"
Public Interest
IN THE SOLID WALL AROUND THE OWNERSHIP OF PROPERTY,
and its use for all the traffic would bear, there was a small
breach allowed by the majesty of the American System:
the rates and services of private property affected with
public interest were to be reasonable and subject to public
regulation. Save for this exception, the rates, services,
charges, and profits of private property were to be forever
beyond the tainted touch of government. To be sure, trust-
busters were abroad in the land but they were not taken
seriously by the possessors of good things.
And the breach in the System was well protected. The
regulation of property affected with public interest had
positive safeguards both as to burdens imposed and the
organs of government having final disposition of contests
over regulation. The owners of property so affected and
so regulated were entitled at law to "fair" returns on their
property. The Supreme Court of the United States, com-
posed of "independent judges" appointed for life and far
removed from the tumults of elections, was to decide
finally what items, tangible and intangible, were to be
included in the property on which returns were to be fair,
and just what returns were fair.
At one time, as lawyers knew, the Supreme Court had
held that the determination of rates for property affected
with public interest belonged to legislatures and that ap-
peals for relief must be made to these popular bodies; but
by 1901 the Court had changed its mind (or the Consti-
tution), reversed itself, and assumed ultimate guardian-
ship in the matter of regulating the rates, services, and
SURVEY GRAPHIC
charges of utilities; that is, ultimate, saving the power to
change the Constitution itself. Thus the Guardian of the
Breach was well entrenched, for it required a two thirds
vote in Congress and the approval of three fourths of the
states to amend the text of the Document so interpreted.
As President Hadley, of Yale, said in 1908,
. . . the fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of
the United States is between the voters on the one hand and
property-owners on the other . . . with the judiciary as arbiter.
To question this immaculate conception of the System
was a species of blasphemy.
Gold and Legal Tender
AND WHAT OF MONEY AND BANKING — THE MEDIA OF EX-
change — necessary to the operation of the American Sys-
tem? The Constitution conferred upon Congress the
power to coin money and regulate the value thereof and,
by judicial interpretation, the power to emit legal tenders.
But the unit of the monetary system, as positively estab-
lished by law in 1901, was a fixed number of grains of
gold — a metal mined by the owners of gold resources, an
object of ownership, control, concentration, dispersion,
and manipulation by private persons. What the private
owners of gold could do to the public treasury was demon-
strated in Cleveland's administration when bankers sold
gold to the government at the front door and drained it
out at the back door. Of paper money there were various
issues, under special laws, all based upon the gold unit.
But the right of issue was by no means confined to the
government. National banks, under federal charter, could
emit notes on the basis of interest-bearing federal bonds,
and receive interest on both bonds and notes. In other
words, private owners maintained control over the gold
employed by the government as the monetary base and
private bankers enjoyed the right to manufacture legal
tenders of their own, under limitations specific yet
generous.
"An Almost Perfect World"
GOVERNMENT so USEFUL, so GENEROUS, AND so EASILY EN-
listed for the protection of property, had to be supported
by taxation, of course. But what kind of taxation? The
burdens of state and local government fell, in the main,
upon the owners of real property — houses, farms, lands,
and other tangibles. Intangibles, such as stocks, bonds,
and mortgages, were supposed to be taxed also, but in
practice their owners generally escaped. Hundreds of re-
ports from state tax investigations declared the taxation
of stocks, bonds and mortgages to be a farce, futile, a
source of evasion, perjury, and comedy. By 1901 a few
beginnings had been made in inheritance taxes, and in-
come taxes were on the horizon; but the American Sys-
tem did not generally look upon them with any favor.
As for the federal government, that was supported
almost entirely by taxes on consumers — customs duties on
imports, and excises on whiskey, tobacco, and other com-
modities. A federal income tax? That, said a member of
the House of Representatives in 1894, "is unutterably dis-
tasteful both in its moral and material aspects. It does
not belong to a free country. It is class legislation."
Though the majority in Congress was not convinced by
such arguments, the Supreme Court was, and the next
year it invalidated the income provisions of the revenue
law. Hence, in the matter of taxation for the support of
so benevolent a government, the sponsors of the American
System found themselves in an almost perfect world. The
main burden of local taxes fell upon real property and
almost the entire burden of the federal government fell
upon consumers "equally"; that is, a millionaire and a
pauper who bought plugs of tobacco paid the same tax.
Outside the Charmed Circle
OUTSIDE THE RANKS OF PROPERTY OWNERS WITHIN THE
American System was a large body of tenant farmers,
agricultural laborers, white-collar employes, and industrial
workers who owned no property, or merely negligible
amounts. They, too, had relations to the System. By the
exercise of industry, ingenuity, prudence, and other talents
they might, if they could, acquire capital property, enter
the circle of the System, and enjoy all the rights, titles and
privileges of such membership. Education was in some
measure open to all. Freedom of movement, subject to
economic limitations, was guaranteed to all. No class bar-
riers established in law stood in the way of individual
initiative. Industrial workers had the legal right to or-
ganize, bargain with employers, and to strike, within cer-
tain prescriptions of law, including those of specific judi-
cial injunctions. Workers injured in their callings could
seldom recover damages from their employers under the
ancient "fellow-servant" rule. Statistical returns showed
that the number of employes killed or injured each year
in the United States, in proportion to the number em-
ployed, exceeded that of any other country in the world.
But the idea of assuring automatic compensation to the
injured was deemed "taking money away from the em-
ployers to reward carelessness." For the unemployed, in
good times and bad, there were soup-kitchens, poorhouses,
and private charities scarcely deemed adequate even by
exalted imaginations. As for the "submerged tenth" or
fifth, their plight was due to their improvidence. Apart
from charity.
This System was not only called American. It was "nat-
ural," the product of Nature, unchangeable, except for
the worse, and essentially deterministic. The scheme of
private property was "natural." The law of ownership,
use, and manipulation was "natural." The distribution of
the wealth among the owners of property and the non-
owners was "natural." Each factor in enterprise — capital,
land,, labor — received a share of the total product fairly
proportioned to its "contribution" to the total. Everybody,
high and low, received, under the System, his just deserts.
This, too, was "natural." Government interference with
this System sustained by government — any interference
that materially altered the relations of property and per-
sons— was- an "unnatural" interference with "the natural
distribution of wealth." It was like expecting water to run
up hill. It could only make things worse — not any better.
The American System, so conceived, was American, Nat-
ural and Final — unless overthrown by "Huns and Vandals
within the gates," aided perhaps by anarchists from
Europe. On the System Respectability thrived. By it
Respectability swore. The System without end, Amen.
Heresy and the Adjective
SPONSORS OF THIS AMERICAN SYSTEM HAD CLASSIC FORMS OF
literary expression to characterize reformers, critics, and
radicals who proposed to make large and small alterations
in the System. In practice little discrimination was made,
for minor alterations were regarded as the mere begin-
nings of changes more drastic and therefore "vicious in
DECEMBER 19*7
681
principle." In Volume III of his Main Currents in Ameri-
can Thought, Parrington has assembled illustrations of
these classic forms of literary expression. They glitter and
sparkle in the writings of E. L. Godkin, the cultured edi-
tor of The Nation. To Godkin the Greenbackers were
"communists" and "dishonest-money men." To him "the
ravings of the Farmers' movement" were manifestations
of "vague and visionary discontent." Complaints against
stock-watering by railway companies had no grounds,
"except in the heated brain of the agitators who imagined
it." The Bryan Democrats at Chicago in 1896 were "in-
flammatory and reckless men." During the railway strikes
of 1877, John Hay had declared, "The very devil seems to
have entered into the lower classes of workingmen, and
there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them to all
lengths." The strict regulation of railway and utility rates
was "sheer confiscation." According to Joseph Choate an
income tax was populistic, socialistic, communistic.
REFLECTING THE CULTURE 01- THE CULTURED EAST THE Neu>
Yor^ Tribune attributed the particular brand of reform
known as Bryanism to the "assiduous culture of the basest
passions." But Bryan himself was only
... a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the Anar-
chist, and Debs, the revolutionist, and other desperadoes of
that stripe. But he was a willing puppet, Bryan was — willing
and eager. None of his masters was more apt than he at lies
and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities
of that campaign against the ten Commandments. . . . He
had less provocation than Benedict Arnold, less intellectual
force than Aaron Burr, less manliness and courage than
Jefferson Davis. He was the rival of them all in deliberate
wickedness, and treason to the Republic.
Beyond that, as Matthew Arnold might say, it seems
impossible to go.
Yet in some respects the forms of literary expression
employed by deeply moved clergymen appeared to go
beyond the mundane ultimate of the New Yorf( Tribune.
One New York preacher denounced Bryan as "a mouth-
ing, slobbering demagogue whose patriotism is all in his
jaw-bone." The Reverend Doctor C. H. Parkhurst shouted
to his people against Bryanism: "I dare, in God's pulpit,
to brand such attempts as accursed and treasonable." The
Reverend Doctor Cortland Myers, later author of The
Boy Jesus and The Real Holy Spirit, positively located
the origins of the Bryan program: "That platform was
made in hell!" If anything lay beyond hell, the clergy-
man's theology apparently did not disclose it.
In somewhat more ausrere and sober language, W. R.
Thayer, summed up the exegesis of the American System
in describing the political economy of John Hay:
He held, as did many of his contemporaries, that assaults on
Property were inspired by demagogues who used as their
tools the loafers, the criminals, the vicious — society's dregs
who have been ready at all times to rise against laws and
government. That you have property is proof of industry and
foresight on your part or your father's [in Hay's case, your
father-in-law's]; that you have nothing is a judgment on
your laziness and vices, or on your improvidence. The world
is a moral world; which it would not be if virtue and vice
received the same rewards.
Communist, socialist, anarchist, dishonest, vicious, in-
flammatory, reckless, incendiary, vanity, basest passions,
rottenness, blood-imbued, revolutionist, desperadoes, for-
geries, blasphemies, iniquities, deliberate wickedness, trea-
son, conspirator, repudiation, confiscation, scoundrels,
demagogues, loafers, criminals, improvidence, and hell-
born — these words did not exhaust the repertory of the
System, but they well illustrated the richness of its char-
acterizing vocabulary, as distinguished from the reasoned
periods of its economists.
Putting the Blame on Democracy
RESPECTABILITY DID NOT HOLD, OF COURSE, THAT AMERICAN
society, as distinguished from Property, was without
blemishes. Through the years from 1865 to 1901 the coun-
try had been repeatedly shocked by revelations of scan-
dalous corruptions — Credit Mobilier, the Tweed Ring,
the Star Route Frauds, the Whiskey Ring. The public
land office in Washington was a sink hole of knavery,
where mining companies, railway promoters, and real
estate speculators bought at ridiculous prices or filched or
stole millions of acres of the nation's prime resources.
Boodle aldermen gave away or sold perpetual franchises
to corporations. The flames of scandal licked the very
doors of the White House in Washington. To conceal
such things was impossible.
But how were they to be explained under the Natural
and Moral System? The answer generally given was:
"The people elect evil men to office and democracy is a
failure." Respectability was responsible for all good things
and democracy for all the evils. The letters and papers of
such men as Godkin, John Hay and James Russell Low-
ell were peppered with references to the collapse, failure,
incapacity, or folly of democracy. In holding politicians
up to obloquy in The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and
Warner were in effect, whatever their intentions, putting
the blame on democracy. Respectability the virtuous;
democracy the scapegoat. There was the old formula.
It is true that the men who bought legislatures, selected
judges in smoke-filled rooms, and bribed officials were
all bent on acquiring property, that private gain was their
motive, and that among them and their abettors were
many veritable Pillars of American Respectability. It is
true that the public officer who sold out to a corruptor was
likely to be a property owner or on a fair way to become
one, and that the other party to the contract was almost
always a business man, also bent on gain. But this detail
was generally overlooked by those defenders of the Sys-
tem who assailed democracy. In the Book of Respectability
it was written: thievery and corruption are the fruits of
democracy; the ownership of property is the reward of
prudence; poverty is due to idleness and improvidence:
and Property has a monopoly on honor, virtue, patriotism,
and the Ten Commandments.
THERE WAS ANOTHER HERITAGE, AMERICAN TOO, A HERITAGE
of thought and aspiration, bequeathed to the first editors
of The Survey at the turn of the century. It was to make
history also. Long before, Emerson had said : "The history
of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of
thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture
and aspiration." But when The Survey was founded, no
one could tell which heritage was to prevail. Men and
women could merely choose the values upon which to
center their affections and labors, all the while aware that
they, of necessity, saw through the glass darkly.
A third of the century has passed. Where do we stand
now?
682
WORKING FOR HENRY FORD
Auto
workers
are a pret-
ty fair cross-
section of Am-
erica. That is more
evident in Dearborn
and Detroit, where
within a generation near-
ly everyone came from else-
where, than in neighboring
communities where markets and
labor supply are decentralized.
Pioneers, like Ford himself, in
the collective adventure of modern in- ^
dustry, auto workers have helped remake
our world in terms of the Wheel. Playing
an anonymous part in the drama of mass pro-
duction, they have kept pace with the develop
merit of increasing precision, power and luxury in
the manufacture of even the cheapest cars. In the
great labor upheaval of this year they have forced every
automobile maker except Ford to give them a united share
in fixing the terms of employment. Now Ford, and Ford
workers, face the drive for unionization.
Ford oldsters. The average age of this group is 67. They receive the basic minimum wage of *6 a day and, in the words of the com-
pany, despite their years, meet the obligations of life up to the hilt." Over 25% of Ford men are over 50; over 54% are over 40
flow through the motor assembly line. The cost of Fotd machinery averages #9007 for each man at work
From
the meatpacker, Ford borrowed .n idea-conveyer, to bring a workman', work to bin, and carry it .way
Henry Ford at the Wheel
by VICTOR WEYBRIGHT
Among farmers, Henry Ford was a city mechanic, who upset
their horse stalls, gave them surfaced roads and the strength of
ten thousand mules, and wants to free them from cows. Among
business men, he was a free necked fellow from the country,
who upset their ways with his $5 a day, his assembly lines, his
sales organization and his continuous handling of hot metal.
Insurgent both times; but not among workers, for he sits on
both sides of the bargaining table — and now the CIO tries to
break through to a place there. The Ford alternative to labor
unions explored by the managing editor of Surrey Graphic.
V
V&
THE UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS OF AMERICA — LUSTIEST
industrial union in the CIO — has collective bargaining
agreements with every automobile manufacturer except
Henry Ford. What is the Ford alternative to collective
bargaining — or, specifically, bargaining with the CIO?
What are its limitations? What are the realities back of
the conflicting claims? And what is the significance of the
fork in the road which Dearborn offers to American
workers?
To distill into a sentence what Ford executives said to
me: The Ford alternative is good management, with no
meddling from labor unions, stockholders or government.
Above all, no meddling from Wall Street.
The self-willed spirit of the Michigan farm boy who
became a national institution — with
factories, farms, parks, mu-
seums, schools, all his
own — still has ter-
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WEST SIOE • EAST SIDE
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English is not yet the most familiar language to thousands of the older
workers at Ford's, so the union uses many tongues in its present drive
686
rific momentum. Warm and quixotic, or hard and deter-
mined, he has swept his most intimate counselors into a
common front. Among those with whom I talked I came
upon none who did not believe that the Ford Motor Com-
pa.ny could be trusted to dispense more justice and security
to its workers than they would ever get by asking for a
collective share in fixing the conditions of employment.
LET us LOOK AT HOW THIS ALTERNATIVE PANS OUT FROM THE
bottom up — and then go on to some of the evidence which
a week's scouting brought me early this fall among Ford
executives, union leaders, Detroit citizens and the rest of
the cast of characters that will come to the fore if, as
anticipated, an organization drive is attempted this winter
at the Ford works.
Taking a composite of various workers I talked with
out of hours: If in the early fall you were a worker in the
River Rouge plant the chances are that you were working
four days a week, possibly five, and getting about seven
dollars a day — the minimum daily wage is $6; the aver-
age, according to the company, is $7.40. Since January you
had been laid off at least a month without pay.
In the spring you signed a vote of confidence in Henry
Ford. Later when solicitors went through the plant openly
signing up members for the Liberty Legion, Inc., "to keep
punks like John L. Lewis from taking a dollar a month
of your money," you say your foreman and men from
the employment office took part in it; the company de-
nies this but, at any rate, you paid your 50 cents and
wore the Liberty Legion pin.
As a Ford worker you didn't see a great deal of the fel-
lows you know over at GM and Chrysler. But from what
you heard, their CIO union organization was something
to think about. Some of them had taken little trips during
the summer layoff, or gone back to the farm to help the
home folks with the harvest, knowing their jobs would
be waiting for them when things opened up again. You
had yourself stuck pretty close to Dearborn and Detroit,
and puttered in the community garden plot which the
Ford Motor Company plowed ready for you to plant in
May. As you got a little older you had begun to wonder
if seniority wouldn't be a pretty good thing, after all.
You didn't want to get mixed up in a strike, nothing like
SURVEY GRAPHIC
O ctnts a copy
that, but you believed you'd
make a fair and honest
shop steward if the union
ever came. Not even the
man next to you on the
line knew you were think-
ing that way. As you saw
it, it didn't pay to talk on
the line, or even to gossip
at lunch time.* So not even
your next door neighbors
knew that you regularly
read the Ford edition of
the United Automobile
Worker. You had worn a
Landon sunflower last year
and voted for Roosevelt
anyway; and in spite of
your vote of confidence in
Henry Ford you had noth-
ing against John L. Lewis.
It struck you as odd that,
if collective bargaining was
so bad, the government
had encouraged it; and set
up boards to see that the
unions got a break. One of
the 1500 shopstewards in
the Dodge local had told
you he'd hate to go back to
the dog-eat-dog pre-union
days. And if the big West
Side local, down on May-
bury Grand, had 40,000
members, it wasn't impos-
sible to imagine a Ford local with twice that many. It
would be a mixed crowd, thousands of Negroes, Italians,
Poles, Hungarians, but half of them at least would be
plain Americans like you.
You weren't taking any chances by confiding in the
wrong people. You would just wait and see what hap-
pened when the big Ford UAW drive got under way. If
you belonged to the UAW you had kept it to yourself.
And if you didn't belong you had a haunting feeling,
scarcely even suspected by your wife, that if the chance
came to go with the CIO, without fear of reprisal, you
might plump for it and take the consequences. In short,
the great labor upheaval that struck Michigan last winter
had not left you untouched.
The Ford Alternative
SIDELIGHTS ON THE FORD ALTERNATIVE TO COLLECTIVE BAR-
gaining were afforded me by the various Ford executives
I interviewed. They talked to me of the great contribution
the Ford Motor Company has made to the efficiency and
earning power of millions of men; of the jobs Ford has
opened up that never existed before; of the labor standards
that Ford stipulates in contracts with outside factories that
make some of his parts; and of the shove Ford has given
to the movement to buy more industrial products from
farmers.
To at least two of them the idea that a fellow like
FEBRUARY SURVE
GRdPHIC
HENRY FORD'S
HIRED MEN
Byfatil U. Kcllogg
AND WHERE DOES IRELAND STAND?
fiv Franci* tlnckctt
FEBRUARY 1928
Ten years ago, when mass production stalled in the change from
Model T to Model A, two articles by the editor appraised the
Ford employment policies of that time, and the effect of the
extended lay-off upon the Detroit community
•"Inside the [River Rouge] plant the visitor is struck by the restraint
among the workers, even in moments of idleness; men stand apart from
one another." Raymond T. Daniel!. AT. Y. Times Magazine, October 31,
1937.
Homer Martin, "a preach-
er who didn't hold his
parish; an auto worker
who didn't hold his job,"
should try to enroll Ford
workers in his CIO union
was to laugh.
When I asked one ex-
ecutive what Ford thought
of his competitors who,
however reluctantly, had
capitulated to strikes and
made a bargain with the
UAW, he said:
"Some of the promoters
who control industry prob-
ably had the CIO coming
to them. Labor may force
them to catch up with for-
ward management. Some
people shouldn't be allowed
to drive a horse, let alone
manage men." It was ob-
vious that in his mind the
Ford Motor Company was
in a different category from
industry operated by ab-
sentee financiers who think
in terms of dividends and
the stock market.
Yet as we talked I fan-
cied that he was disturbed
by the course of events that
had given the Ford Motor
Company a labor problem.
Ford had recently got some very unfavorable publicity —
beating of union organizers at the gate to the River Rouge
plant; unflattering testimony before National Labor Rela-
tions Board hearings; the recrudescence of stories of Ford's
anti-Semitism and the persistent linking of the Ford name
with Nazi groups. And on that very day the Kansas City
plant employing 3000 workers was closed when striking
UAW workers picketed in such force that Ford officials
claimed they were unable to enter their own offices. The
subsequent history of that Kansas City situation was
briefly summarized in Time magazine, [November 8] :
Henry Ford let it be known last month that he had perma-
nently given up operations in Kansas City. . . . Last week,
tacitly admitting that he had merely tried to scare the city's
authorities, Mr. Ford let it be known that he would reopen
in Kansas City as soon as adequate police protection was guar-
anteed. In Detroit, Harry Bennett, Ford personnel director,
announced: "We did not close the plant. It was done by the
people of Kansas City. They are the only people who can
bring about its reopening."
When I inquired whether the Ford Motor Company
would ever make a collective bargaining agreement with
the UAW, the reply left the question still unanswered:
"Ford deals with unions. Lots of them. We call them
up right here in Detroit when we need skilled men. Many
of our own men have come up from the unions — Soren-
son, for example."
Now, Charles E. Sorenson, untitled manager of Ford
production all over the world, was secretary of his pattern
makers' local before he came to work with Ford in 1905.
DECEMBER 1937
687
Richard Frankensteen, Ford campaign organizer; Homer Martin,
A man of extraordinary ability, a creative planner, and a
hard driver, he smiles as he recalls the union of his young-
er days. Mr. Sorenson sums up the labor situation simply.
"Mr Ford doesn't need any outside advice on how to run
his business."
W. J. Cameron, former editor of the Dearborn Inde-
pendent, is the Ford spokesman whose talks on the Ford
symphony hour are familiar to millions of radio listeners.
He believes wholeheartedly in the Emersonian individual-
ism which Henry Ford personifies and is himself the
expositor of that cheery, folksy, practical, humane Ford
tradition that has been planted in the public mind and
cultivated with only one or two mishaps in a generation.
In a statement before the National Editorial Association
in July, he said:
No labor leader has ever originated or suggested a single
improvement in industrial conditions. Nor has any statesman.
Management alone has done this. When you see a justified
strike, you will observe that the demand is for conditions that
already exist in factories under progressive management.
Harry Bennett, who directs the employment and per-
sonnel policies of the Ford Motor Company, is the most
publicized man in the Ford organization. He is also chief
of the Service Men — the guards, gate watchers, firemen,
chauffeurs, company police, detectives. For his job as pro-
tector of the Ford family, Ford property, Ford workers,
he is equipped with a background as a boxing champion
in the Navy, an unswerving loyalty to Henry Ford, and a
hard boiled impatience with anything that gets in his way.
When I called upon him, he anticipated trite reportorial
questions as to his reputed tough methods and alleged
knowledge of the underworld, by telling me right off the
bat that the hefty assistant who had escorted me into his
office was not a thug but a football star, a hero at Ann
Arbor two years before. With a hundred thousand work-
ers, he said, just as in a city of that size, of course he had
to have men equipped to handle fights, thefts and dis-
orders that arose. He couldn't be too dainty about a job
like that.
Asked point-blank whether foremen deliberately fire
International
UAWA president
union members, he said: "A Ford
foreman can't fire a man; he can only
refer him to the employment office. If
a man has a grievance the employ-
ment office refers him to the sociologi-
cal department, which studies his case
and, if possible, keeps him. It's cheaper
to transfer A man than hire a new out-
sider. What could any union do in a
grievance case that we don't do now?"
It was giving new incarnation to the
old claim that a Ford can do anything
that a horse can do.
I was given no opportunity to take
up some of the functions of unions
that go beyond grievances. For the day
was drawing to a close, and Mr. Ben-
nett had other appointments. I was
politely ushered out of his office and
introduced to several of the Service
Men in the anteroom. One of them
gave me a souvenir button from his
lapel. It bore the words: FORD HOOD-
LUM. That slogan went back to an in-
cident last summer when Richard
Frankensteen, Walter Reuther and other UAW organizers
were set upon and beaten at Gate 4 of the River Rouge
plant. In the testimony before the National Labor Rela-
tions Board a staff photographer of the Detroit Free Press
identified the assailants as "Ford hoodlums," and the
phrase went across the country. With sardonic humor the
Ford Service Men had commemorated it in celluloid.
To me it was clear that when Mr. Bennett, Mr. Soren-
son and Mr. Cameron spoke of Mr. Ford they were
referring to Henry Ford, the founder, not to Edsel Ford,
president of the Ford Motor Company. In his own way,
each of these three men, responsible for personnel, produc-
tion and publicity, figures more conspicuously than Edsel
Ford in the great enterprise which today projects Henry
Ford's individualism into practice. To understand the im-
portance of that individualism it is necessary to remember
that Henry Ford, who is opposed to the unionization ot
the men who work for him, was himself a workman with
his hands the first part of his life.
BORN TO POVERTY ON A MICHIGAN' FARM, WITH BROKEN
schooling, at forty a dreaming mechanic and inventor in
his little shop, Henry Ford plunged all he had and $49,000
of other people's money in his first automobile factory.
That was in 1903. Within five years his uninhibited me-
chanical imagination produced Model T, the Universal
Car; and before he was fifty, following the pattern set by
the Chicago meat packers, the Model T was being turned
out on a mass production conveyer line; with each worker
specializing on a small part of the job. Profits came in so
fast that the original $49,000 has produced a fortune of
at least a billion dollars.
In 1914 Henry Ford announced the famous $5 a day
minimum that made his new labor policies famous. Dou-
ble the prevailing pay in Detroit at the time, that wage,
and subsequent raises, ransomed Ford and his competitors
who angrily tried to match him, from labor discontent for
a generation. As publicity for his product it was a stroke
of genius. Moreover it drew from the farms and villages
of the entire Western World an (Continued on page 717)
688
I'VE BEEN WORKING WITH THE RAILROAD
Railroaders, charged with the
safety of other people's lives
and property, take responsi-
bility for granted. On the
Union Pacific, after a half
century's experience with union
agreements and federal labor
law, the 40,000 workers —
engineers, conductors, clerks,
shopmen, yardmen and the
rest — have common pride in
their employment, which they
do not see as "just a good
job," but as part of a vast and
important enterprise: "run-
ning our railroad."
One of the army of railway clerks
A burnisher brightens dining car silver
Details from the fa-
cade of the Omaha
Union Station
The conductor — the captain of the train
At a railway nerve center — a train dispatcher
A pipefitter in a locomotive repair shop
Photographs by Union Pacific.
Stencil cutter making freight car numbers
Modern as a Streamliner
by BEULAH AMIDON
Go back to a young immigrant in a railroad construction gang in
Nebraska, to a 14-year-old runner in a broker's office on Wall
Street, who was later to weld a railroad empire. The old Amer-
ican story. Today the sons of these two are the key men of the
Union Pacific, one, its new president, the other, chairman of its
board. But there are 40,000 key people as they reckon it, partici-
pants in one of the most remarkable demonstrations in the coun-
try that conflict can yield to cooperation in labor-management
relations. This new American story, told by the industrial editor
of Survey Associates, is an example of what we mean by staff
inquiry and interpretation.
WHEN A STORY OF HUMAN RELATIONS INVQLVES 40,000 PEO-
ple, it is hard to know where to begin. Perhaps it can
begin for you, as it did for me, at the Coliseum which
Omaha built to house its annual horse show. When I saw
it, in early October, the huge, barny-place out on the edge
of the city had been hung with banners and decked with
flowers. The tan bark was covered with long tables at
which sat nearly three thousand hosts and hostesses. Six
thousand of their associates crowded the raised spectator
seats. The dinner was given by the Old Timers clubs, men
and women who have worked twenty years or more on
the Union Pacific Railroad, and are still actively on the
job. The guest of honor was William M. Jeffers, who,
forty-seven years ago, took his first job as "call boy" in the
Union Pacific yards at North Platte. Promoted from one
post to another, on October 1 he became president of the
road. "The fulfillment of a call boy's dream," he called it.
There were three state governors at the speakers' table,
the chairman and several members of the Union Pacific
board, including the retiring president, Carl R. Gray,
presidents of other lines, a U. S. Senator, the
Postmaster General of the
United States.
The speeches were broadcast over two coast-to-coast net-
works. But the celebration needed neither important
names nor national recognition to make it stand out. Its
extraordinary distinction lay in the fact that each and all
of the national railroad labor unions took part in the occa-
sion— their local and national leaders among the distin-
guished guests, their spokesmen prominent on the
program, their importance in the picture taken as a mat-
ter of course by executives and board members. So perhaps
after all, this is not the beginning of the story — nor its end.
The Union Pacific was the first of the great transconti-
nental railroads to push its way across prairie, desert and
mountains to the sea. There's meaning in its name. The
defenselessness of the coast, revealed by the Civil War,
stimulated Congress to pass the acts of 1862 and 1864,
which authorized the construction of "a railroad and tele-
graph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific
Ocean," and backed the project with gen-
erous land grants and
692
SURVEY GRAPHIC
government subsidies. Then came the
drama of the undertaking — the bring-
ing in of materials by wagon train, the
hostile Indians, the search for water,
the race between track-laying gangs,
the driving of the golden spike.
The adventure of it was clouded
by scandals in construction con-
tracts, the Credit Mobilier, and a
federal investigation. With public
confidence thus weakened, the first
of the great western railroads soon
had to try to compete with lines
built not at peak wartime costs,
but at prices deflated by the panic
of 73. When a generation later
E. H. Harriman and his asso-
ciates purchased the bankrupt
property in 1897, it was con-
temptuously described as "two
rusty streaks of iron on an old
road-red." Nothing was left of
the 8000-mile system except the
original main line from Council
Bluffs to Ogden, the Kansas Division from Kansas City
to Cheyenne, and some 300 miles of "feeder" lines.
Then the elder Harriman began to build his "railroad
DECEMBER 1937
William M. Jeffers, new president of the Union
Pacific. Below: the Old Timers dinner in his honor
empire." He restored to the system the
Oregon Short Line and the Oregon
Railroad and Navigation Company
(railroads branching northwestward
along the old Oregon Trail); later
gained control of the new Salt Lake
and Los Angeles Railroad. Even more
notable was the discharge of the road's
debt to the government, principal and
interest, and compensation to stock-
holders and bondholders in securities
of the new Union Pacific Railroad
Company. This new era of expansion
and consolidation was called to a halt
as a result of T.R.'s trust-busting cam-
paign when the U.S. Supreme Court
in 1913 dissolved the merger of the
Union Pacific-Southern Pacific sys-
tems which Harriman had effected.
And the identity of the four remaining
lines had to be meticulously preserved.
Only recently (January 1, 1936) the Interstate Commerce
Commission approved a leasing arrangement under which
the Union Pacific system is operated as a unit.
Perhaps figures will help convey the magnitude of the
responsibility which rests today on the 40,000 Union
Pacific employes and executives, and their success in meet-
ing it. In 1936, the road operated 15,722 miles of track,
over which it hauled 34,041,651 tons of freight and 1,880,-
651 passengers. The total operating revenues were $155,213,-
582.83; total operating expenses, $108,728,114.40. After
payment of fixed charges, there remained $17,319,184 to
distribute in dividends to more than 49,000 holders of
preferred and common stock, with a surplus of $4,889,-
350.80 "transferred to profit and loss."
All this, you may say, has nothing to do with human
relations- — with locomotive engineers and firemen, con-
ductors, brakemen and yardmen, agents, telegraphers,
clerks, freight and baggage handlers, mechanics, and the
army of employes engaged in the repair and maintenance
of locomotives and cars, bridges and buildings and road-
way. On the contrary, it has everything to do with them,
as they would be the first to tell you: "If the railroad
makes money, we have jobs at pretty good wages. If it
doesn't, we get laid off." On the whole, Union Pacific
labor does not go "left" of that realistic consideration.
As a Shopman Saw It
THE WEEK I WAS IN OMAHA, 1 SPENT A GOOD DEAL OF TIME
at the general offices of the Union Pacific, talking with
executives of the company. But I also met with representa-
tives of the unions at the same place. They seemed entirely
at home in the road's headquarters. There was significance
in just that. I talked, too, with rank and file employes in
their own homes, and with some who had come to Omaha
from other "Union Pacific towns" for the festivities; and
by chance it was an "old timer," the father of a railroad
shopman, who gave me my best perspective on the "whole
story" from the labor angle.
I had gone to the son's comfortable Omaha home to get
his answers to some questions I had in mind. And as he
693
groped for words, spry old Grandpa spoke up from his
rocker, "I know more about that than you do, Son." The
older man had gone to work for the Union Pacific "back
in die eighties," and it was his one and only em-
ployer throughout his working
life. "You lissen to me," he said. "I
can tell it better "n Bert here." Rail-
road men speak a language of their
own. More than once he had to pause
for me and translate — "highballed
'er," "cut off die hawg," — but this is
what he conveyed:
In the early days, railroad workers
were a rough and ready crew, often
more rough than ready. "So was
management, fer that," he added.
And "railroadin" " was a matter of
brawn and a good deal of brutality.
Comparatively early, "before my time
even," certain railroad groups or-
ganized. Neither Grandpa nor the
officials of the union or of the com-
pany seemed to know details, but
"back in the beginning" of the first
railroad unions the Union Pacific
"signed up." The Brotherhood of
Locomotive Engineers, for example,
has had an uninterrupted agreement
with this, as with some other roads,
for nearly sixty years.
As other groups organized, the
Union Pacific negotiated agreements
with them. But during the troubled
nineties, the road was less concerned
with labor policy than with reper-
cussions of its stormy early years, the financial raids of the
"Gould ring." During this time, with a shrinking labor
market, workers put the survival of their jobs ahead of
dieir "rights." Then came the crash of Union Pacific
fortunes, and into the wreckage, the strong, impatient
hand of E. H. Harriman, "the Driver."
"The unions jogged along good," as Grandpa looks
back on the early nineteen-hundreds. Labor-management
problems were overshadowed by The Road and what
would be made of it. The struggles of the railroad Titans
of die day among themselves had reverberations all
through the industry. But down to the post-war years, the
railroads had a virtual monopoly of transportation and the
underpinning of railroad jobs was sound. All this is too
simple, of course. As the days were lived they did not
seem so clear or so secure. But in general, the old rail-
roader's summary is probably a fair one.
Then came the war, and federal operation of the rail-
roads. A few months before government control ended,
ten of the standard unions entered into national agree-
ments, and the U.S. Railroad Labor Board began its brief
career by setting the highest wage rates in railway history.
But a reaction to "government meddling" was setting in.
"The big boys begun to sigh for the good old days," said
Grandpa. The railroads launched a campaign to wipe out
all national labor agreements and to oppose formation of
national adjustment boards. Peak wages had to be cut.
Labor Board decisions laid down a good many rules less
favorable to labor than corresponding rules in the war-
time agreements. Then, effective July 1, 1922, came an-
W. Averell Harriman, chairman
of the board of the Union Pacific
other wage cut for employes other than train and engine-
men. Labor's desperate answer was the shopmen's strike
of 1922, involving some 500,000 employes the country over.
The war chest of the unions was inadequate, their hands
were tied by the granting of more
than 700 injunctions, public irritation
mounted, and the strike collapsed.
Many roads set their faces against
letting the national unions get an-
other foothold. To this end they
built up company unions, "buffer
states" between management and
strong, aggressive labor organization.
Spokesmen on both sides whom I
talked with bore out Grandpa's state-
ment that this was not the Union
Pacific program. "We had to have
some way to deal with our em-
ployes," an official explained. "The
regular unions were out of the pic-
ture, so we told the men to get
something else going. It was circum-
stances, not policy, that started a
mushroom crop of Union Pacific
company unions."
Ten years and the pendulum
swung back as boom times gave way
to depression, and new forces as-
sembled themselves in our political
life. In June 1934, the railway labor
act was amended to provide severe
penalties for company interference
or influence in employe representa-
tion. A spurt in labor organization
followed. On the Union Pacific, the
move met with no opposition from management. "We
welcomed it," several executives told me. "There was noth-
ing to it," said a union leader. "The management agreed
to an election, and of course the unions won." Said Grand-
pa, "The company unions, they just kinda went to pieces
at the last."
Perhaps the story the old railroader sketched needs some
of the background he took for granted.
The vast and complicated business of railroading in-
volves three main groups of employes. There are those
who actually run the trains, engineers, conductors, fire-
men, brakemen, yardmen and the rest, charged with the
safety in transit of passengers, freight, express, mails and
livestock. Then there is the force of shop and maintenance-
of-way men. And there is an army of clerical workers,
responsible for cash received, for tickets and waybills; for
the orderly flow of checked and documented information
across thousands of desks, into acres of files; for vast, exact
records and reports required by the Interstate Commerce
Commission and the social security program. Omaha,
Neb. is the operating headquarters of the road. The New
York offices handle management of property and invest-
ments, interest and dividend payments, funding opera-
tions, many questions of general policy.
Today railroad labor is largely organized. The Brother •
hoods of Locomotive Engineers, of Locomotive Firemen
and Enginemen, of Railway Trainmen, and the Order of
Railway Conductors (the "Big Four") have never been
part of the American Federation of Labor. Practically all
the other railway labor unions (Continued on page 726)
694
SURVEY GRAPHIC
What Every Village Knows
by ELTON MAYO
The modern world invented loneliness. The new leisure must be
developed in the service of our oldest human need. So writes
this pioneer in the intimate study of worker's psychology. Mod-
ern intelligent organization of human beings tends to disregard
the craving to live life as a continuous personal relation with
others. The restoration of human collaboration, in work or
out of it, becomes to his mind the urgent problem of our time.
THE UNIVERSITIES TEACH ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE.
They offer students courses in psychology on the scien-
tific laboratory model. Sociology is highly developed, but
mainly as an exercise in the acquisition of scholarship. Of
psychopathology there is little, and of sociology in the liv-
ing instance, sociology of the intimate, nothing at all. This
does not apply to medical study, which insists upon the
intimate and personal, nor altogether to engineering. But
in respect of those social personal studies that are becom-
ing more important year by year, no direct contact with
the social facts is contrived for the student. He learns
from books, he reconsiders ancient formulae; the equiva-
lent of laboratory work is still to seek.
The result is that those graduates of brilliant achieve-
ment who lead the procession out of the universities are
not well equipped for the task of bringing order into
social chaos. I am inclined to follow H. G. Wells and
call them Martians, but with another idea than his in
mind. Wells, I believe, thinks of their superior intelligence
and brilliant capacities; for him they constitute a group
apart, for whom greater administrative powers than they
at present possess should be sought. And these Martians
are superior, there is no doubt of that; there has been no
better human material.
But to my mind they are a group apart from humanity,
not of this earth; they are remote, intellectual, preoccu-
pied with highly articulate thinking. They have acquired
a capacity for dealing with complicated logics, they have
not been taught to face complicated fact. Many of them
breathe the thin exciting air of high altitude mathematics;
but they prefer simple assumptions and complicated logic
to complicated fact and simple logic. They tend to become
impatient with difficult human situations, to regard
human complication as unjustifiable interference with
reasoned development. They prefer reasoning to obser-
vation. Yet patient observation is what the world most
needs, observation that holds its logical tools in abey-
ant readiness.
Recently in a famous European university I listened to
a discussion of industry conducted by such a Martian be-
fore a mixed audience of Martians and industrialists. The
topic was the worker and his work; the lecturer, having
written a book upon work and leisure, had been asked
to select and present certain aspects of this industrial prob-
lem. The material presented was culled from the observa-
tions of certain well known industrial investigators. These
observers were concerned to discover what workers talked
and thought about during the working day. Conversa-
tions were carefully recorded and the same procedure
was applied to the reveries of workers as divulged to a
skilled interviewer. Analysis revealed that "outside activi-
ties and interests" held pride of place. Far more time was
given to chatter of "outside" matters, or to thought of
them, than to the work itself. The interest of the discus-
sion that followed this revelation to the conference lay
not in the revelation itself but in the attitude of the
Martians. The lecturer was careful to avoid anything that
could be construed as directly critical of industry, but the
Martian attitude nevertheless prevailed. The close of the
discussion made apparent the Martian conclusion that the
work and its organization must be at fault — the work
monotonous, modern industry an abomination. The con-
versation of workers was diagnosed as compulsive anaes-
thesia.
At a Mid-Victorian Sewing Meeting
THE THOUGHTS OF ONE MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE DRIFTED
idly back to the times, fifty years ago, when a litde-pitcher-
with-long-ears was taken by a formidable Victorian aunt
to sewing meeting. He was a little out of it, for the other
members of the group were feminine of various ages. The
object of the meeting was charitable, the occasion social.
Twenty to thirty people sat about a large Victorian
drawing room and worked. The work was, I suppose,
monotonous; the social occasion, obviously was not so.
Chatter was incessant, sometimes general, sometimes
breaking into groups. The topics were almost always per-
sons and events; work as matter for discussion appeared
but seldom. The vicissitudes of Mr. and Mrs. S. easily
held first place — they lived in the neighborhood and Mrs.
S. did not attend the meeting. The critical assessment of
this personal situation was apt to be suppressed occa-
sionally by the Victorian aunt, with a warning glance at
the corner where a small and silent person was making a
hideous mess of a horror called "macrame-work." But the
ensuing silence was short-lived; by way of other topics the
conversation would surely circle back to Mr. and Mrs. S.
Now if the little pitcher had been able, as his contempo-
rary Tennyson said, to reach a hand through time to
catch the far-off interest of the modern Martian, I do not
know what would have happened. If he had declared that
the dominance of outside interest in talk clearly demon-
DECEMBER 1937
695
strated that the work was monotonous and the method
of its organization an abomination he would have landed
himself in considerable difficulties. Aunts of the Victorian
period were vigorous exponents of the arts of condemna-
tion; they seemed to be troubled by no doubts as to the
essential Tightness of their own procedures. And, curious-
ly enough, the Victorians would have been right and the
Martians wrong. The work was such that if done in
isolation it would have been monotonous, but when
accomplished in the society of others it gained dignity and
interest as an essential part of a social function. This
dignity and interest, once achieved, lasted even during
isolation. It was the custom of the group briefly to com-
pare "jobs" at the beginning and end of the meeting. In
the weekly interval members of the group would "get on
with" the work at home and would display with pride
the achievement. And the topics of conversation clearly
had woven themselves into the fabric, for the act of dis-
play was usually accompanied by the opening: "I have
been thinking of what you said . . ." or "I saw Mrs. S. on
Thursday. . . ."
The work is part of the situation, but not always a very
important part, except when something is badly wrong
with its organization. The Martians cannot easily judge
social situations such as work in industry because for
them work means the acquisition of knowledge, research,
the development of logical complication. Such work can-
not of course be accompanied by irrelevant chatter — al-
though a Martian is almost comparable when he drives
his car and entertains a companion with reflections on the
category of thinghood, or eats his dinner and tells his
hostess the real significance of events in Washington.
Martians are not completely immune to social situations,
they merely handle them rather badly.
Among Mule Spinners in a Textile Factory
NOW THE SOCIAL SITUATION IN INDUSTRY IS EXTREMELY IM-
portant — and its consideration, unfortunately, is com-
pletely neglected. To illustrate:
Fourteen years ago in Philadelphia the mule spinners in a
textile factory were a problem to the management. Their
work was inefficient, their mood was hostile, the labor turn-
over was very high. Experts with Martian ideas had been
called in to remedy the situation. After looking for "the
trouble" and not discovering anything in particular, the ex-
perts had prescribed incentive schemes. Several such schemes
had been devised but without any effect whatever upon the
inefficiency and labor turnover. When given opportunity to
express themselves freely, these workers at once talked about
their work and little else. Boredom, disgust, fatigue, un-
publishable characterizations of the nature of the work —
these and a general pessimism were freely expressed to the
trained nurse who interviewed them. The high management
was interested and, after some experiment, put in rest periods
at appropriate intervals. Arrangements were also made so
that minor disabilities requiring medical attention could be
referred to a medical clinic. The interviewing continued,
workers being given leave to seek out and consult the nurse
in attendance. Gradually the pessimism disappeared, the
workers slept during many of the rest periods, the efficiency
improved, the high labor turnover dwindled to vanishing
point. And suddenly, quite suddenly, the incentive schemes
came into operation, as they had not before and workers
began to earn considerable additions to their monthly wages.
In such instances as this, who can exactly estimate the
696
significant difference? Was it the rest pauses, the free ex-
pression to a trained interviewer, the manifestation of
interest in the high executive? Was it all these things—
and more? I do not know in detail, but I understand that
for the subsequent years of the department's existence
the boredom and disgust were wiped out. And with them
vanished also the labor turnover.
Too little attention is given to the occurrence of changes
such as this. We tend to develop Martian reasoning, to
ejaculate "rest pauses" or some other descriptive phrase
as if in so doing we had accounted for the phenomenon.
In the instance cited the experimental changes introduced
seem small by comparison with the extraordinary differ-
ence in respect of human atmosphere that followed the
period of experiment. The executive officers were the same,
the supervisors, the workers themselves. But whereas be-
fore everything had jangled, afterwards the morale, the
collaboration, the achievement ran high. The situation
had become social: no longer a mere collection of dis-
gruntled individuals, the workers were participating in a
task which though monotonous had developed a dignity
and interest equal to that of other departments in the mill.
The social development showed in other ways — one work-
er gave up drinking bouts, not because of a good resolu-
tion but by inadvertence; others began to go out with
their wives in the evening.
What Management Has Disregarded
A NOTED ENGLISH INVESTIGATOR, DR. MAY SMITH, CALLED
attention many years ago to the danger of facile inferences
as to the monotonous nature of work. She reported as
follows of two factories doing the same repetition work:
... in the one there were many complaints of dullness, in
the other none; in the one the majority of faces expressed a
dull acquiescence in existence, in the other the general happi-
ness and joy in the work was obvious. If a study of repetition
work done in these two factories had followed the same lines,
the results would have been different. In the one, no one
apparently took any interest in the workers, there was no
esprit de corps and a general slackness prevailed; to get the
week's money was the only interest and that is bound to be a
fitful interest. In the other there was not only a real interest
in the work, in the accumulation of it as the day wore on,
but also a desire to win the approval of the authorities, and
interest in the many social activities binding one to another.
The repetition work is a thread of the total pattern, but not
the total pattern.
"INTEREST IN THE MANY SOCIAL ACTIVITIES BINDING ONE TO
another." Here is evidence from one of the best industrial
investigators that there is in any country. Work in in-
dustry is not to be conceived as an intellectual conceives
his function— something that demands the most highly
concentrated effort of attention. Perhaps sometimes, and
briefly, industrial work resembles this but for the most
part it is the exercise of skill and is best accomplished in
a social surrounding. Talk of a desultory kind is probably
an aid rather than a hindrance. The worker must be able
to assume that he is fulfilling a necessary function in a
collaborative atmosphere. T. N. Whitehead has shown
that a mere change in the order of seating at a bench or
the replacement of a person, may have the profoundest
effect upon the interrelation of effort within a working
group. The industrial unit is primarily a social group
fulfilling a function for the society. Any attempt to con-
SURVEY GRAPHIC
ceive the situation otherwise runs headlong into conflict
with the most ancient human instincts and residues and —
however well intended or well planned— incurs defeat.
For more than a century the theory of management
has completely disregarded this. Attempt after attempt has
been made to translate the logic of economics into direct
industrial accomplishment; and on every occasion the ob-
durate human has unwittingly defeated so gross a simpli-
fication. It is assumed that work is merely done for wages
—why should not the exploitation of the economic motive
by wage incentives lead therefore to greater production?
Sometimes, under conditions we shall mention, the desired
result follows; more often than not the application of
wage incentives lead to restriction of output. The working
group seems to fear an attack upon its integrity as a group
and, without any deliberate organization, tightens up its
defenses as for emergency. The only situation in which
such an attempt has been known to succeed has been a
situation in which management by reason of its record
has been spontaneously conceded leadership by the group.
This does not often occur — and until such a happy situa-
tion is more common we may expect the indefinite con-
tinuance of labor troubles. These observations hold, what-
ever the country, whatever the political structure; it is as
true of Russia today as of the United States. Many of
Russia's industrial difficulties of the moment are due to
the fact that eager Martians have been assigned to the
task of developing industry. And in Russia, as here, the
eager Martian is humanly inexperienced, he is ignorant
of the most important fact of all— that social organization,
with all that "social" implies, is basic in human affairs.
Why Men Work Together
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? IT MEANS THAT IN ANY SITUATION
where men work together the organization of the situa-
tion as relationship between persons will inevitably take
priority over technical logic and over the immediate ma-
terial interests of the individual. This is not opinion, nor
is it ground for irrelevant optimism or pessimism; it is
fact, fact of which we must take full account if any
schemes for order or betterment are to succeed. A critic
asks: "Can artificial stimulation, of the mass sort, improve
upon natural, selective social activity?" The answer is
"No" — a hundred times. But this precisely is the error of
which we have been guilty — all of us, professors, Martians,
industrialists, politicians, dictators. For a century we have
been applying varieties of this species of stimulation-
moralistic, technical, political — most of it based upon a
nineteenth century conception of economic interest and
reason as the sole determinants of human activity. In-
centives and logic do operate, of course; but only upon
an existent group organization. The Philadelphia experi-
ment illustrates this fact. But the social operation of non-
logic, the routines of personal relationship, is continuous;
the operation of logic is occasional. Logical interruptions
are usually associated with emergency — and breed emer-
gency.
A colleague, F. J. Roethlisberger, describes an instance:
The foundry department of a manufacturing concern em-
ployed some fifty men who were almost all highly skilled
craftsmen and long-service employes. These workers prided
themselves on their traditions and clung to certain privileges,
such as smoking on the job, which were denied to other em-
DECEMBER 1937
ployes in the factory. According to the nature of their work
the foundry workers were differentiated into four groups.
These job groups, according to the foundrymen themselves,
were not of equal importance. Each had its own social
values and its own rank in the social scale. One of these
groups was dominant and in this group three or four mem-
bers rigidly controlled the rest.
About three or four years ago, in line with its general
policy, the company put all the foundry employes on group
piecework.* Up to this time, they had been on straight piece-
work. Management felt that, under group piecework, earn-
ings could be distributed more equitably and that such an
arrangement would divide among all the employes the re-
sponsibility for turning out a satisfactory product and for
reducing the amount of scrap due to defective castings. Such
was the logic of what should happen. What actually hap-
pened was something quite different. Total output, instead of
increasing, went down. The problem of scrap, instead of being
solved, tended to reappear and complicate other issues. The
iron molders felt they were not getting what they earned.
Those operators with high outputs felt they were carrying
the less efficient men. Molders did not see why they should
be penalized for parts that were broken by the chippers and
grinders. Some of the men who had previously earned about
$1 an hour now earned about 75 cents an hour; this in spite
of the fact that the new rates under the group payment plan
were not in any way "tighter" than the old rates under
straight piecework.
So management was faced with the problem of disentang-
ling itself from the human complications of its own logic.
The situation was far more complex than this oversimplified
account suggests. In essence, however, it was a situation of
extreme resistance to a change introduced by management
which failed to take into account the social sentiments of
the foundrymen. To the foundry employes there were four
different social groups — four different ways of life — which,
under the new wage payment system, were no longer recog-
nized. The foundry employes never ceased to petition man-
agement to put them back on straight piecework or, failing
this, to divide them, at least for the purpose of payment, into
the four natural job groups. However, for technical reasons,
management found it impossible to make either of these two
moves. As a result the employes tried to force the hand of
management by restricting output even at the expense of
lowered individual earnings.
The action of management in this instance was hasty
and insufficiently considered. If the situation had been left
unchanged, it would presumably have been sufficiently
satisfactory socially to the persons involved, but possibly
inefficient. To promote efficiency, or increased efficiency,
change was introduced somewhat hurriedly, without any
anticipation of the social disruption it provoked. This
transformed a happy situation into an unhappy one, and
led to results which diminished efficiency and defeated the
intention of the plan.
What is this obdurate factor, this residue, in human
nature which thus easily defeats so many well planned
logical schemes? It may be described as a profound need
to live anything continuous in life as a relationship with
other persons. It is a species of fictional kinship which
emerges to perpetuate and develop any sufficiently happy
situation of collaborate human endeavor. If the organizers
of human activities cannot contrive to get the support of
this fictional kinship they will find to their regret that it
"Group Piecework. This means that a so-called "bogey" of production in
a given period of time is set for a working group. When the production of
the group exceeds this bogey, an agreed percentage of the surplus is made
available for distribution to the group. The proportional distribution is by
predetermined classification of the relative efficiency of individuals.
697
is moving against them. Stanley Mathewson's study of
restriction of output among unorganized workers illus-
trates this fact. A monograph by Roethlisberger and Dick-
son, Management and the Worker, goes further. The
authors describe a case in which a group felt a very con-
siderable loyalty to management, but because the tempo of
technical change introduced was high an almost reflex
response of defense was provoked. It is important to ob-
serve that this tendency to group defense occurs almost as
if it were beneath the threshold of consciousness. If one
knows what is actually happening one can understand
what the workers say. But what they say has little if any
direct reference to what is happening. Nevertheless, if
their attention is called to what is happening, they treat it
as obvious. The defeat of logic by non-logic, personal at-
tachment and routine is an ancient item in the human
story. But the lesson is not yet learned; new Russia is
repeating the nineteenth century mistake. The symptoms
of disregard of the necessity for social group formation in
industry are inefficiency, labor turnover, low morale,
sabotage.
The New Leisure and the Old Need
IN THE LIGHT OF STUDIES SUCH AS THOSE OF MAY SMITH,
Roethlisberger and Dickson, Mathewson, Whitehead,
what is to be said of the new leisure which is to be con-
ferred upon workers? Two comments can, I think, be
safely made. The first is that advice from the Martians
must be looked at critically. Many years ago in London I
did some work at the so-called Working Men's College
which had been founded by Frederick Denison Maurice
and others, and was then situate in Great Ormond Street.
The college acted as a sieve through which numbers of
workers passed and a few stayed on. Those who stayed
were remarkable persons; there was a bookbinder who
had made himself expert in the calculus, an umbrella
maker who spoke eight European languages. Such men
were exceptional, and attempts to suggest similar uses for
leisure, though admirable for the exceptional person, are
not generally successful. On the other hand in these days
of isolation and insecurity many persons take up studies or
the arts, not because of any inherent interest or capacity
but as a remedy for loneliness or unhappy working con-
ditions. "Nervous breakdown is often mistaken for musi-
cal capacity." While one hopes that the whole world may
find compensations for living if it needs them, this does
not commend itself as a useful innovation in public policy.
The second comment is perhaps more to the point.
Industry, the world over, is facing in these days a situation
of peculiar difficulty. Work is being more closely organ-
ized in mass production, large stores, large banks and
offices. Simultaneously those happy personal ties which
in former times kept a man related throughout life to
friends, acquaintances, and kin in town and village —
these ties weaken and vanish one by one. In the United
States this tendency has been developed further than in
Europe by immigration and race mixture, by the tendency
of citizens to wander from their geographic point of origin
in search of work or promotion. The "labor mobility" of
the economist is developed to a high pitch in this conti-
nent. This in itself throws upon all those who organize
human activity a heavier social responsibility than was
customary in the days that were. The ill is characteristic
of our modern industrial civilization; it is the modern
world that has invented loneliness. In the primitive
American settlement, and still more in the European vil-
lage, a man tended to spend his life among those persons
who lived where he was born. His house bore a definite
relation to other houses, his work related itself automatic-
ally to the work of others. In maturity he contributed his
effort to the support of the whole group; in infancy and
old age the group supported him. This statement perhaps
exaggerates by reason of its brevity; perhaps nowhere was
there quite so perfect a human economy, at least for long.
But the primitive settlement resembled this perfect econ-
omy more nearly than we do. As we developed a more
complex and wealthy society we inadvertently dropped
many human values through the meshes of the Martian
economic and scientific sieve. It is very rare nowadays
for a man to live out his life in the place where he was
born. He does not merely settle elsewhere; he tends to
keep on moving. Now where social organization is strong,
as in parts of Europe, families do not willingly move. The
modern city and the industrial area have in some way —
insufficiently studied at present — weakened social organi-
zation. And a general atmosphere of fear, a feeling of
insecurity, has appeared as symptom to show that this is
so.
This complicates further the problem already stated.
The position is not merely that industry must mend its
overintellectual way and be careful to account for the so-
cial aspect of the work situation. For other reasons, which
are no one's direct responsibility, the situation outside the
factory, in the suburb and in the workers' apartments, is
reproducing in some degree the worst features of the most
badly organized industrial situation. Something that no
one can identify is defeating the human need to live life
as a continuous personal relation with other persons. This
makes the worker more responsive to the right sort of
work situation and surroundings, more instantly sensitive
to anything less than the best. By reason of what is hap-
pening outside the factory, there is an exaggeration of
response within it. Clearly, if we are wise, we shall not
wholly saddle industry with the responsibility. Clearly, if
the worker is 'to have new leisure, it would be wise that
he develop it in the service of the oldest human need.
That is, he should be helped to develop his leisure in the
direction of new and stable relationships with other per-
sons. This can only be effectively accomplished if the new
relationships serve a social function. There must be un-
mistakable social value in the joint effort; the relation
with others must be constellate, as in industry, so that the
value of each worker to the total effort is clear and ob-
vious. This means leadership — intelligent and not merely
Martian. In Russia and Germany there are youth move-
ments; in England a health campaign. It matters little
where the organization is begun, if the work undertaken
is clearly necessary and valuable. The secondary value,
secondary to the declared purpose, is the restoration of
human association — joint responsibility, security, collab-
oration. If the new leisure is not thus utilized, it will not
much matter how the individual uses it. For the restora-
tion of human collaboration, in work and out of it, is the
urgent problem of our time — so urgent that if we do not
immediately specify it for intelligent attack our civilization
can have no considerable future.
698
!
\
;
Youth
Sketches made in an
American highschool
By JAMES DAUGHERTY
Over One Man's Desk
Anniversary interlude in one of
our regular monthly departments
"THROUGH NEIGHBORS' DOORWAYS"
by J. P. G.
by JOHN PALMER GAVIT
There come times, as Mr. Gavit puts it, when Time itself "lays
on the last straw and things suddenly tip over." Over the span
of our quarter century few men have had such vantage points
to catch the pulse of the news. Here, at touch of his insight, we
feel its throb between the lines of "copy" that went out from
Washington on the war. From Geneva in the twenties, when
England and America failed the world. And today, when it is
to wonder whether we witness the beginning of the end of
Democracy or naked Might shooting its last bolt.
How MAY A MAN APPRAISE THE TIME IN WHICH HE LIVES
to say nothing of his own contribution to it, if any?
Imagine Mr. Homo Neanclerthalensis, his ancestor E. O.
Anthropus, or whom-have-you-else, sitting on that sunny
Tuesday afternoon in the bottom of the great valley which
is now the Mediterranean Sea; or perhaps on one of the
islands that used (so they say) to bridge the Atlantic
between the bulges of Africa and Brazil. He didn't know
which was Africa and which Brazil — he didn't know
even that it was Tuesday. Flickering through his mind
was the tremendous idea of somehow lashing the sharp-
edged rock in his hand to a stick, the more effectually
therewith to conk on the cranium the brother-man who
had made off with his best girl. Twas a new idea; nobody
ever had done it before. How was he to know that he was
starting the Paleolithic Age?
But even such a dawn-man could and doubtless did look
back over the period since he was a boy, and cogitate about
the few, the very few new things that had happened to
himself and in his world. Twenty-five or thirty years, sum-
mers and winters along the edges of the advancing or
receding ice-caps must have seemed a long time to him;
but in that space the world that he was really aware of
could not have changed much. Not to him would have
been apparent the fact that the Great Ice-Cap was per-
chance a little farther back (or a little farther forward as
the case might be) ; the water around his island a few
inches higher, than his great-grandfather used to tell
about. In the grave processions and recessions of geological
business even a century of earth-circuits around the sun
does not show much to the naked eye. Unless . . . the
naked eye happens to be observing, and surviving, at that
moment when Time lays on the last straw, and things
suddenly tip over! There was a particular instant when
the Atlantic Ocean broke through into that great valley
and the Mediterranean Sea was born. There was a time
when at last those islands disappeared, and only the legend
of Atlantis remained to tell of them. Plato had the tale
from his relative Solon, who heard it from an old Egyptian
priest out of ancient sacred books in the temple at Sais.
Even in geology, there comes a time when suddenly. . . .
I have been wondering, and asking others of various
types of mind and points of view to wonder with me,
whether any quarter century in the known history of the
world was so momentously eventful on the whole as this
1912-1937 covering the lifetime of Survey Associates. I
have had many kinds of answers, pointing to this and
that epochal stretch of time. Single events, discoveries,
exploits galore, of epoch-making and marking conse-
quence operating to this day . . . the utilization of fire,
invention of the wheel, of gunpowder, of movable type
and the printing press; the Peloponnesian wars which
smashed Athens and at the same time scattered its culture
far and wide; Caesar's wars within a few years carrying
Roman dominion so to speak from Gibraltar to John
O'Groat's; Magna Charta and the Black Death which
between them undermined feudalism and overturned the
social and political life of Europe; the Thirty Years' War
(or series of wars) which knocked the sword forever from
the hand of the Roman Church; the American Revolution
and its immediate aftermath bringing to birth on its way
to unforeseeable destiny the mighty republic of the West.
Surprisingly few mentioned the brief momentous lifetime
of Jesus of Nazareth; though there was indeed one who
attached consummate importance to a certain hasty filch-
ing of fruit in the Garden of Eden! These are at random;
any list, mythical and historical, would be endless and
subject of interminable debate. Surely all were mightily
potential episodes, of long gestation and still longer conse-
quences. But none of them, at any rate within modern
times, as it seems to me, centered within the space of one
human generation, immediate results evident to living
men vividly in the perspective of their own day, is com-
parable with a like space since the beginning of the twen-
tieth century. Those periods changed Greece, bloated and
rotted Rome for its fall, changed the face and fortunes of
Europe, revolutionized the timbre and tempo of religious
propaganda. This quarter century has seen the whole earth
shaken and still shaking from Pole to Pole; things begun
and — not finished but certainly on the way to a new and
vastly different world.
The Impossible Came Alive
THE REMARKABLE THING ABOUT IT IS THAT WE HAVE SEEN IT;
lived in the midst of it. In precisely this period we have
witnessed the automobile coming of age to revolutionize
transportation; to abolish domestic distance and atrophy
human legs, turning the "Sabbath-day journey" of a mile
or so into a minute's whisk, and making next-door neigh-
bors of folks forty miles apart who within our own mem-
702
SURVEY GRAPHIC
ories wouldn't have seen each other once in five years.
We have seen the telephone cross all the meridians, so that
today I can talk with my brother in Australia while with
him it still is yesterday — or is it the other way about?
In that same period we have seen men invade the air, far
above the domain of the birds; no longer experimentally
but as a commonplace of traffic. We hardly any more look
up to see them passing on their way round the world.
Had anyone told my grandfather, or even my father, of
the radio, he would have tapped his forehead as in the
presence of a lunatic. Of talking-pictures, what would
either have said of the fact that, if he likes, the Grand
Lama of Tibet, sitting amid his inaccessible mountains,
now can learn at first hand the latest American slang and
see its practitioners behaving appropriately as they use it.
In short, we have seen the impossible come alive.
Omens of Disaster
WAR WAS NO NEW THING; OUR HISTORY BOOKS WERE LARGELY
made up of it. But it was mostly distant in time and space
and awareness. Suddenly, during this period in which we
have lived ourselves, it burst upon us and spread into
world-conflagration, amid whose ashes we now sit mourn-
ing like Job, and distracted by the aftermath of its "peace,"
dictated as of old by Stupidity in uniform and the folly
of politicians (yclept "statesmen") who learn nothing and
forget nothing. We have seen tremendous thrones topple;
one in the break-up of that old political nightmare known
as Austria-Hungary; another in the collapse of an ancient
autocracy to be succeeded by a vastly different one — Soviet
Russia — in which a new kind of despotism, taking over
ruthless cruelties from the old, struggles to fit a vast popu-
lation of lately illiterate serfs into the patterns of an
unforeseeable future. We see would-be Caesars endeavor-
ing to set the clock of progress back two thousand years,
as of old impoverishing their countries for armaments and
wars to distract their people from the suicidal folly of their
doings. Even as we witness these things the wondrous
achievements of science are enlisted in insensate destruc-
tion and mass butchery. The only reason why the whole
panorama of humanity is not ablaze again is that no
nation can afford it. Yet the presence and power of dicta-
torship in the world are the omens of disaster. For dicta-
torship is itself the seedsman of war; and cannot survive
without it.
Little as most of us perceived, even then in the years
preceding the World War, war was in the making, and
the professional soldiers everywhere were preoccupied with
the preparations which were chief among its provocations.
As early as 1910, General Leonard Wood, then chief of
staff of the United States Army, pleaded with me to use
all my influence as responsible head of a great news ser-
vice out of Washington, to awaken the American people
to the alleged need for "preparedness."
"If I had my way," said he, "I would out-German Ger-
many in respect of armament and military training."
Well, that news service was not devoted to "influencing"
in any cause, and it pleased me to reflect that our reporter
in the War Department was a Quaker — congenitally pro-
phylactic against militaristic propaganda emanating
therefrom!
At the Edge of Manhood
IT WAS NOT FOR THIS KIND OF WORLD THAT IN MY HOME
we were trying to prepare our children. The fourteen-
year-old boy, who at the outset of this period was looking
to us for guidance, responded joyously to our efforts to
train him for sane and purposeful citizenship and respon-
sible participation in a sane civilization. The task seemed
clear enough— to prepare him for and by, self-command
and self-understanding, for the exercise of his own calm
and unselfish judgment on the basis of the truth fearlessly
sought; deciding what to do and having the courage to do
it at whatever cost to himself. To him all people every-
where, regardless of race, nationality, religion or social
position were neighbors and friends. He understood and
was proud of his "America," which for him meant a social
and political ensemble, and a spirit infusing it, within
which any person, regardless of his origin, could of right
unchallengeable on any other grounds, on his merits aspire
to any status or opportunity within his personal capacity.
Upon him, just at the edge of manhood, the World War
broke with heart-rending tragedy; nothing had prepared
him to have his fellow-men anywhere made "enemies" by
Act of Congress. Both spiritually and physically he was a
sacrifice to War — not in combat but because when upon
reaching his nineteenth year he was enlisted, his magnifi-
cent health was undermined by bungling, recklessly care-
less treatment at the hands of underling medical officers.
Sacrificed as thousands of other boys were, to such mal-
practice.
Few noted the hurried visit that President Wilson paid
without his overcoat one raw morning in the winter of
1918 to the War Department. The correspondents never
knew its cause; but Tumulty told me later that I myself
provoked it, by a personal note. To the President I
had quoted my own doctor as attributing the fearful,
scandalous deathrate from pneumonia at the great
embarkation-camp near my home to the premature ship-
ment of measles-convalescents from the South, in cold
trains with insufficient clothing and blankets. So emphatic
had been the President's personal explosion of wrath that
Surgeon-General Gorgas came personally to New York
to explain to me how fearfully handicapped his depart-
ment was by reason of raw incompetent subalterns down
the line. There was nothing extraordinary about it; whole-
sale incompetence is one of the invariable concomitants
of war (as you may learn for instance from Sir Philip
Gibb's Now It Can Be Told); costing the lives of hordes
of the nations' finest youth, depriving the Future of their
service.
The Perversion of Youth
INDEED, THE MOST TRAGIC BY-PRODUCT OF THESE TIMES is THE
wanton perversion of youth from its normal preparation
to take charge of progress. Deliberately their steps and
emotions are being turned by the international gunmen
backward into the bloody pathways of savagery. This
morning I have seen photographs of British babies in gas-
masks. In Germany, Italy and I know not where-all else,
they are training the children to play with hand-grenades.
Before me as I write is the text of a decree of the fascist
government in Italy declaring its purpose in education
... to feed, reinforce and render conscious in youth the mili-
tary spirit which today is one of its best characteristics ... to
make military training delightful . . . toward arousing the
warrior spirit among the youngest children.
It reads like something Parkman might have written about
educational policy among the Apache Indians! Of what
possible use is it for parents and others responsible for the
DECEMBER 1937
703
guidance of youth to inspire them to participate in a
decent society, with vision of a cooperating world, with
consideration for others, a love for fair play and a hatred
of injustice, if they are actually to live under conditions of
violence, international suspicion, reckless waste of human
life and resources; their contemporaries in other coun-
tries deliberately bred from the cradle to ideas and ideals
such as these?
This lad of whom I have spoken lived long enough to
see the beginnings of the League of Nations, to be stirred
to the core by that vision of international cooperation and
sanity after the international chaos of fury; to be writing
vigorously in his college newspaper and other publications
in favor of American participation therein. It was his star
of hope for the restoration and progress of the kind of
world in which he himself might participate with confi-
dence and self-respect, in all that his predisposition and
training had fitted him to believe in and to do. Sometimes
I am glad that he did not live to witness the destruction
of his dream by the futile cynical folly of American poli-
tics. Yet such as he, and his kind of character, were and
still are and shall be the salvation of the world despite
itself. They shall yet bring to fruition the adventure of
faith and fair dealing in peaceful intercourse upon which
his feet were ready to set forth.
Treason to Our World
NEVER WHILE I LIVE SHALL I FORGET THOSE TWO DAYS IN
early September 1924, when in the old Convention Hall
at Geneva it was my high good fortune to hear those
Pentecostal speeches of the prime ministers of Great Brit-
ain and France, J. Ramsay MacDonald and Edouard Her-
riot, in support of their joint resolution before the then-
beginning Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations. I
have no text or quotations from them, nor is space avail-
able here for either; but they set high the keynote of inter-
national cooperation in the universal adoption of arbitra-
tion on the one hand and guaranteed security on the other
as the anchors of peace in the war-wrecked world. That
keynote rang forth a month later in the famous Protocol
for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes — un-
questionably the altissimo thus far of sanity not only in
the history of the league but in that of humanity's aspira-
tion for brotherhood. Coming from the hall at the close
of Herriot's speech, in the high exaltation of a true "day
of visitation," a distinguished American with whom I had
sat said:
"I suspect that we have been attending one of the Great
Occasions in the history of the world."
Imagine then the almost world-wide dismay when on
the 12th of March following, the government of Great
Britain by the mouth of its new Foreign Secretary, Austen
Chamberlain, speaking before the council of the league
definitely rejected that Protocol, on the ground that they
were unwilling to commit themselves to the responsibili-
ties which the facts of the world situation laid chiefly upon
Great Britain, particularly those implied for her in respect
of "sanctions" both economic and military against "ag-
gressors." It was the more disheartening to me because as
I heard it I knew that Great Britain was unwilling to bear
that burden alone. Hardly an hour before Mr. Chamber-
lain had said to me:
"We might behave quite otherwise were the United
States prepared to act with us."
And yet, no longer before than May 1916, no other than
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chief among those who
sabotaged American participation, had said to the war-
time American organization, the League to Enforce Peace :
I do not believe that when Washington warned us against
entangling alliances he meant for one moment that we should
not join with the other civilized nations of the world if a
method could be found to diminish war and encourage
peace. . . . My hearers might think me picturing a Utopia;
but it is in the search for Utopias that great discoveries have
been made. "Not failure, but low aim, is the crime."
It was the actual fulfilment of Lodge's dream — to which
in his malice against Woodrow Wilson he so soon was
recreant — voiced in those speeches and potential in the
spirit with which they were received, that sent me back to
Geneva many times to see it in operation, with hope-
confirming success . . . until the very nations whose salva-
tion it was to guarantee began to lose faith and courage, and
those whose ambitions it would thwart dared with increas-
ing cynicism to stultify their own pledged word. No need
to amplify description of what that treason has brought
about. Today there is effort to divide the world in a new
alignment, as between those who would restore the rule
of the sword and those who believe in the spirit and
processes of Democracy. Never yet, in the long run, has
the sword conquered that spirit.
Finding the Way to Liberty
WHITHER BOUND, THEN, THESE YEARS? HAS THIS PERIOD
begun the end of Democracy; or shall we who may sur-
vive a little while, and our children after us, know it as
beginning the time when naked Might shot its last bolt?
The Present never knows its own significance in the pat-
tern of long history. Usually the moment's Hero fancies
that he himself pulled up the wave upon which he rides.
How was that tree-dweller who first stumbled upon the
utility of some fire started by lightning or however; that
other chap who somehow contrived the first boat, to sus-
pect, much less evaluate, the revolutionary consequences
for all future time of his immediately pragmatical experi-
mentation ?
However down in the mouth about immediate things,
I choose to notice such a symptom as the uproarious en-
dorsement of clean, brave, honest government in the city
of New York. There is an answer to your Mussolinis, your
Hitlers, your — anybody else who affects to believe that the
people can be bullied and shepherded forever. There
Democracy at its best swept aside the cobwebs and the
bunk. They were free to act, and they acted, as they al-
ways will act — when they are free and undeceived.
Behind all this, and world-wide, is the fact that discon-
tent has become global and vociferous. As I said in these
pages a little while ago, "developed means of communi-
cation have brought to the chronically underfed in remote
parts the news of plenty and higher standards of life in
more favored regions, awakening them to resentment and
determination no longer to starve quietly." In ultimate
terms it is this determination which fascism, nazi-ism and
the sword-wielders in general are seeking at once to ter-
rorize, to suppress and to pacify by the only technique
they know.
In spite of all such, in this past quarter century, more
than in any comparable time before, I see mankind as a
whole facing forward, not back, struggling to devise the
means and find the way to liberty and all that may be
done with it.
704
SURVEY GRAPHIC
Miracles
by LEON WHIPPLE
In lieu of our regular department of book reviews
LETTERS AND LIFE
Ann Reed Brenner, Editor
We turned the old brace of words "Letters and Life" right-side-
up for us when we first captioned our book review pages. In
each month's leader, Leon Whipple draws on his newspaper
experience, his work at the School of Journalism of New York
University, the new books and his study of the whole range of
experiments in the fields of publishing and communication.
These he brings to bear here in his challenge to a new generation
of Americans to use them — with hearts no less than heads.
THE MIRACLE CAN HAPPEN IN THIS GENERATION. THAT MIRA-
cle will be an act of faith that can resolve the old paradox
of poverty amidst plenty. We can move into the new age of
economic abundance only by embracing the faith that there
is enough for all and that this plenty is to be enjoyed by
all, once enough of us go after it together. This conversion
cannot be achieved by an act of mind. The failure of
Technocracy proved that the intellectual projection of
curves is not enough. It is not data or mere plans we need.
We have the resources; we have the tools; we have the
social engineers; we even have the dreadful knowledge
that unless we win the change of heart that will risk this
joyous adventure, we may be destroyed by the survival in
our new environment of the ancient instincts of acquisi-
tive self-seeking. We cannot moreover win by an act of
violence. The violence in communism or fascism creates
nothing. We can win only by a miracle of faith and fore-
sight, and to bring that miracle to pass must today be the
principal purpose of all men of good-will and hope. The
social progressives of the class of 1912 may well leave as
the distillation of their labor and sacrifices this charge on
15 years ago an audience had to gather round a speaker
*
Today radio reaches three quarters of all American homes
the class of 1937; work for a change of heart among men.
With this the things you want will be added to you.
What hope is there, do you ask, that any such revolution
in age-old human attitudes can be won in our time? Let us
examine the omens in one field — that of social communi-
cation— in which I have a certain primer knowledge. This
last quarter century has forged instruments of public in-
formation and guidance such as never existed in human
history before. Whatever may be the first debit and credit
judgment on the social progressives, they did fulfill one
of their historic functions; they, no less than the inventors,
opened new avenues of communication and they battled
to keep them free. They can say to youth, not as a chal-
lenge but as a prayer, "If you have anything to say, here
are the tools to say it with." The challenge to us all is:
"In these last twenty-five years many humane and practi-
cal goods have been won, partly by the use of poor and
ill-understood vehicles of public awareness. What dare
we not then hope for with the help of this new vast power
for education that we just begin to understand?"
There is a kind of humorous encouragement in com-
paring the old model for communication among men with
the glittering, streamlined 1937 machine. In 1912 I joined
a real dance of editors on a Virginia newspaper over the
flash on Woodrow Wilson's nomination. For what seemed
then a millenial campaign, we had only print (with few
pictures), public meetings and parades, and word of
mouth. This fall, in a newsreel, with millions of others I
saw and heard President Roosevelt appeal for a union of
civilized nations to outlaw armed barbarism. We listened
in to a voice carried over 300 radio stations to a possible
audience of fifty million people. The nation today can be
informed and moved on great issues with about the effort
it once took to elect a reform councilman. The voters of
New York City have just been taught how to cast a ballot
under proportional representation in the time we would
have once taken to get our old-fashioned "literature"
printed.
Then and Now
WE CANNOT FORGET HOW SLOW AND COSTLY OF TIME AND
energy, and even dangerous, it used to be to get facts and
programs known. Newspapers and magazines (some with
memories of muckraking days) did yeomen service;
otherwise advances would have been slower. But you had
DECEMBER 1937
705
to change stupid and traditional ideas of what news is,
and hook-up with politics or quarrels to get attention.
The top of a meeting was say 15,000 (chicken-feed to the
radio), and there was no amplifier to overcome the limi-
tations of the human voice. The meetings were really
generators of enthusiasm rather than centers of education,
where leaders and converts gained inspiration for their
incessant small missionary work of carrying the message
from person to person.
Think of what we did not have in 1912. There was no
science of public relations, and little knowledge of the
public mind. There was no adult education movement —
no far-flung forums — no theater of social criticism — no
Town Meeting of the Air. In social work there was no
division of educational publicity in the National Confer-
ence and no Council of Social Work Publicity. There
were no informed science news, for reporting which ex-
perts now receive Pulitzer awards — no education by pic-
tures— no institution of public affairs— no Foreign Policy
Association — no organs for the measurement of public
opinion or criticism of propaganda— no newsreels or edu-
cational films — no radio. You may laugh — if that was
before your day: "What a blessed quiet age it must have
been when one had time to think!" Yes, ours is a noisy
era now, distracted by tides of words, but the coming
generation can select the agencies that serve best. And if
these can be orchestrated in their manifold fields and tasks
around the noble motif of a great adventurous hope, the
people will listen, no longer confused.
We have institutions ready for day-by-day service to an
ideal : the libraries, the centers of health education, unions
of workers, the women's clubs, the men's clubs like
Rotary, a vast range of youth organizations, the govern-
ment information services, and best of all the Church
with a message of social change, and the schools with their
new visions of education. There are of course stupidity
and duplication and self-seeking and false doctrines and
wrong goals. The race always stumbles forward. But here
are the ways to teach the people, and most of all the
young.
Taboos That Have Gone
THE CHANNELS ARE, MOREOVER, FREE — THOUGH WE STILL
have to fight to keep them so — whereas only yesterday
there was inveterate interference, vicious or stupid or
plain misguided. Taboos and censors existed all along the
line — even for The Survey! Meetings were broken up,
speakers mobbed, periodicals, books, plays censored, and
teachers discharged for liberal views. There was no Civil
Liberties Union until 1918: think of the disciplined cour-
age, sacrifice, and labors men and women have paid for
that institution. It would be a natural miracle to change
the climate of a land; but we have witnessed a miraculous
change in the climate of our thought. This transforma-
tion of the people toward tolerance offers ground for
hope that here youth may yet work the greater miracle
of a change of heart. Note just two evidences of our gains
in freedom of communication. Where once the kindly
Debs was jailed, communists now enjoy the freedom of
the air. Within our memory, the open and sincere dis-
cussion of sex (by such leaders as Havelock Ellis, Bernard
Shaw, Margaret Sanger) was forbidden by the post office,
on the stage, in print. This year we began a campaign
against syphilis that is nation-wide, for every age level,
and that has overridden most attempts at censorship. It
took hard work to win this freedom: to defend it and to
use it are duties of the class of 1937.
The New Water-Table of Intelligence
CLEARLY WE HAVE INSTRUMENTS OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
unique in history and inconceivable one hundred years
ago. But will people listen and respond? Every worker
in the field of education has moments of despair and doubt
at the apparently unconquerable dumbness of the human
race. Yet I venture the opinion that we have, in the United
States, an audience at a general level of information and
receptivity such as never existed on earth before. This
audience has a groundwork of knowledge about itself and
its environment — a new social self-consciousness — so wide-
ly dispersed among masses of people that we can begin
to dream dreams. It is trained to understand and use
information received in non-personal ways so that the
processes of education have become cumulative. The very
water-table of intelligence and interest has been raised
above the famous twelve-year age; seeds planted now root
in a soil already enriched for growth and blooming.
Nobody can prove this. To believe takes an act of faith
that may be a preparation for the larger act of faith. Yet
if the 150 years this nation has devoted to intense efforts
to educate its people have won no step forward then we
may at once say farewell to education and democracy. And
if the powerful converging network of influences in these
past twenty-five years has not altered the national mind
by jot or tittle, then no endeavor can. The signs of prog-
ress are, I think, around us. After a world war and a
ruinous depression, in this nation at least, we see no vital
impairment of the processes of democracy; no revolution
has taken place, no demagogue seized power, no retreat to
the brutal law of Nature been proposed. Menaces still
exist, but thus far we have displayed a humane common
sense. May not part of this victory be credited to the
results of education and free discussion among the plain
people ?
But, says the critic, we have worked no miracle of faith.
We have been able only to broadcast certain facts garnered
by science on which we have persuaded people to act out
of self-interest.
The Battle Against Disease
THE TRUTH IS PRECISELY THE REVERSE. OUR PRACTICAL VIC-
tories have been won by changing men's beliefs; we have
conquered with the intangibles. Consider the field of
public health in which few will deny that we have made
real advances, partly by educational methods. We have
overcome some killer diseases; we have raised the life-
expectancy faster than any age ever did.
We did that by working a minor miracle in the realm
of faith. We taught people to believe in and fear invisible
micro-organisms. That has been done since Pasteur died.
Some of us can recall the first puns on germs as "Germans
in the throat." Most of us have never seen one of these
microbic organisms; but few children leave grade school
these days without a perfect conviction that invisible
germs do exist, or unprovided with rough techniques for
protecting themselves against what they all call "infec-
tions." Half the people of the United States must believe
in these unseen forms of "the Old Adversary." On faith,
they accept vaccine, serum, antitoxin, isolation, disinfec-
tants, and themselves reach for a swab of iodine — boys at
play, men at work, mothers with children — to guard
706
SURVEY GRAPHIC
against an invisible enemy. This really looks like a tribal
propitiation of evil spirits. Dare we not hope then to con-
vince people that they live amidst an invisible plenty, and
that they may enjoy economic health by using a disci-
plined foresight that differs not in kind, but only in de-
gree, from what they are willing to do for health?
Radical youth is rightfully bitter at the world we live
in. "What good is it to keep people alive," runs its chal-
lenge "if they are to be killed in a war or starved in a
depression? The social progressives did not stop them."
Well, the human race lost both war and depression, there
is guilt enough for all of us to share. But, once more, what-
Telephones and Daily Conversations in U.S.A.
1900
1935
Q™ Q== £== £== £= Q=; £== Qs
Each telephone symbol represents 1 million telephones
Each wave represents 1 million telephone conversations
Each group represents 10 million persons IS years of age and over ^
ever little has been done to outlaw war has been done in
main part by changing the beliefs of plain people. The
social progressives — and the radicals — have taken the first
step toward a change of belief: they have proclaimed that
war is an inexpressible horror, and disowned the creed
that arms can conquer war. What has been holding war
back in Europe but the conviction of plain people that
war is an insane terror that they will not endure again?
War is with us now and may spread, but never again,
we may hope, will the heady drums and flags and the
drama of honor and glory persuade us that war is a proud
glorious inevitable realization of national destiny. Not by
pacts shall we be saved, but by this spreading inner hatred
of war as the principal crime of humanity against itself.
Observe people at the newsreels, and take hope that we
can destroy the notion that war serves biological evolution
or even national gain. Personal experience is the root of
this change in our idea of war since 1914; but every tool
of education — newspapers, books, plays, the cinema, the
camera — is being used to carry over the message of experi-
ence to youth. They do hate war.
The next step — and it may come with our hoped for
major miracle — will be to try to remove the thousands of
little personal selfishnesses and ignorances and prejudices
and seekings that still flow together to create that mysteri-
ous impersonal will-to-war in nations. We do not yet
recognize our individual criminal share in making wars,
but we do know that war is a crime. If such a change of
our concept of war is taking place, we may hope that some
day people will learn that the constant civil war for sub-
sistence and comfort going on in modern society is also a
crime that can be cured by a change of view.
Out of the Depression
No APOLOGY CAN BLOT OUT THE BITTER RECORD OF THE DE-
pression. We failed to build a social system that might
have prevented that catastrophe. But here too we estab-
DECEMBER 1937
lished to a large extent an ideal that may secure us against
like useless tragedy in the future. We won a victory by
faith when we made the proud decision that no human
being was going to starve or endure the final loss of self-
respect. That was more important than any plan of relief
or taxation or public works. And if we made uSat decision
in a depression, we can surely carry it into happier days.
We put a final peg in against recovery by starvation. No
nation has acted openly, and few covertly, on the old
doctrines of "the will of God" or "let Nature take her
course." For the first time we challenge Nature along the
entire front. Nor did we depend on the rich and com-
fortable to decide how much they would share, how and
when, and with what private choices and satisfactions.
The community took responsibility for the poor man, and
the rich man too; it saw the poverty of the one, and the
wealth of the other as somehow rooted in one society.
That the people were courageously ready for this act of
faith — that all must be saved and that there could be
enough to go round — is surely a foundation for the next
generation to expect miracles. If we can share our poverty,
can we not learn to share our prosperity?
Educators have profited by one other intangible oppor-
tunity in the depression. We refused to adopt Nature's
remedy of the high deathrate, but we did adopt her secret
of education through experience in a crisis when patterns
and traditions are broken down, and moods ductile. Willy-
nilly we set up a vast training school in economic and
political reality. Even voting is more informed and serious.
Recovery has established experiments, say in recreation,
community planning and the arts, that have set standards
and created demands that the people will never forget.
They will not give up these services that before were
luxuries. The odd fact that private business would not
agree to the government's making of necessities has put
the government at work providing luxuries! The state
has undertaken service jobs in which there may be no
money profit, but large social profit. Roads, parks, schools,
plays, music, are facts the people will ponder on. No
humane person will approve of education at the cost in
suffering we have paid. But no one can help feeling a bit
more hopeful of a people that uses a crisis to advance
such causes.
One other queer intangible service may be credited to
what begins to define itself as our machine of communi-
cation-education-recreation. It has helped keep people sane
through the climax of the Machine Age, the war, and the
depression. We can think of no other generation that has
ever endured such terrific impacts on its mind, habits,
morale, and spiritual resources. The principal admiring
verdict of history on this generation may be: Well, they
did not go mad. Or they may decide we were all mad
without knowing our state — though on the whole we
seem about as sane or insane as our predecessors. But I
think we are saner than we might have been without the
modes of cheap and easy entertainment we invented.
These were not inventions of social progressives who
indeed have found much just fault with how business has
satisfied a hunger in people. Yet you can charge the news-
paper, the radio, the cinema, and the theater with what-
ever crimes of sensationalism, unreality, triviality, and
waste you want — and plenty — yet still admit they helped
to cushion the shocks of swift change. They have surely
distracted the people from honest thinking and fostered
illusion. But they have also served in hearty vulgar ways.
707
The New Republic
congratulates Survey Associates for
the work done during the past twenty-
five years and extends its good wishes
for the future.
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Sometimes to escape is a measure of therapy that helps
restore the mind and spirit.
The Miracle that is Within Reach
BUT THERE IS NO SUCH EASY ESCAPE FOR ALL OF US FROM THE
grim challenge that the depression laid at our doors as a
people. That we must meet. And that is precisely where,
as I said at the beginning, the miracle can happen in this
generation. It is time now to dream of changing our faith
toward this new hope. We need to be taught that with our
present resources we can win from Nature all the material
satisfactions that are good for us. If today we enlisted in a
crusade to teach the children now in school this change of
heart so that they will believe that there is enough of the
goods of life for all, and that they are to be enjoyed, not
by a blind struggle among themselves, but by a disciplined
foresight and cooperation, then within the generation of
1937, the people may glimpse the Promised Land.
In the air already is a faint expectancy of a miracle. The
challenge to an impossible adventure is before us. The
grounds for hope are two. No earlier age of men has ever
been able to say: we can win enough for all; nor had our
tools with which to bring a miracle to pass.
WHAT 19,000 DOCTORS COULD TELL US
{Continued from page 638)
whys and wherefores of the "panel system." That opened the
way for them, in turn, to bombard him with questions "about
Hollywood." On one occasion he was frisked for concealed
machine guns by some young chaps whose notions of Chi-
cago had evidently been conditioned by gangland films.
While some of our interviews were prearranged, others
were quite casual. Without even a twinge of conscience we
interviewed everyone we met; the maids who tidied up our
rooms, waitresses who served our meals, and even the hair-
dresser as she did the social worker's hair at Marshall &
Snelgrove's store on Oxford Street. And so in the dual role
of guests and real live Americans, we were able to obtain
many valuable "case histories."
Towards the end of our study these personal interviews
were supplemented by a questionnaire which was circulated
in working men's clubs associated with settlements in Lon-
don, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth
and elsewhere.
Who are these insured persons, these wage earners with
whom we sought interviews? Well, they are Miss Hobbs and
Mr. Gary and Mrs. Caldwell, and their kind. They are like-
wise, as individuals and members of family groups, repre-
sentatives of a large section of the population of Great Brit-
ain, indeed a goodly majority. That was our first gauge of
this far-reaching piece of social legislation. For the purposes
of National Health Insurance all manual workers and all
others whose incomes do not exceed £250 a year (about
$1250) must be insured, and essentially the same persons are
covered by unemployment insurance and the old age pen-
sions. As there are about 15 million insured workers with
an estimated 15 to 17 million dependents, we may say
that they and their families embrace some 75 to 80 percent
of the people of England.
Suppose you go into the David Lewis Workers Club in
Liverpool and talk with Jack Smithers while the two of you
watch a game of pool. Smithers tells you that he is married,
nts please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
708
is forty-five, and has three children. As a docker, he is in-
sured and so is his seventeen-year-old girl who works in a
factory. When Smithers had bronchitis the winter before, his
insurance doctor took care of him and because of his sick-
ness benefit there was besides a little money coming in to
take the place of wages. And when Helen, the daughter,
needed glasses she was able to have an examination and two
thirds the cost of the glasses was met by her insurance soci-
ety. But Smithers' wife and two minor children are not cov-
ered in this way (except for maternity benefit of £2), and
whenever they are sick they must go to a doctor as private
patients or attend a hospital out-patients' department. Na-
tional Health Insurance, therefore, does not include a wage
earner's dependents, but it does cover those members of the
family who are employed and who are the breadwinners.
This is the protection it offers wage earning families. That
the scheme is thus of limited scope was the second impor-
tant lesson we learned. It is but one of a variety of agencies,
both governmental and voluntary, which supply health super-
vision and medical care to those of limited means.
The System in a Nutshell
INSURANCE PRACTICE IN CONJUNCTION WITH NATIONAL HEALTH
Insurance is by no means all of general medical practice in
England; yet it has become its core. Just so, National Health
Insurance operates at the center of our concern. It is a meas-
ure of social security quite unlike anything we have in the
United States. It is the largest and most widespread factor
in dealing with sickness and its economic burden in Britain.
It is a compulsory and contributory scheme; compulsory for
virtually all wage earners between sixteen and sixty-five, and
these alone comprise a third of the entire population. The
contributors are the workers, the employers and the state.
For purposes of health insurance each worker pays the equiv-
alent of 10 cents a week and this is "stopped" from his
wages by the employer who adds an equal amount. Work-
ers earning less than 4s. a day contribute somewhat less, and
the employer somewhat more. To the total funds the gov-
ernment, which also bears the cost of central administration,
adds one seventh. The benefits of N.H.I, are of two general
types: (a) cash benefits which are administered through the
state-supervised Approved Societies, and (b) medical bene-
fits— that is medical care and necessary medicine — which are
provided by general practitioners and chemists under the
general administration of regional (county and county bor-
ough) Insurance and Panel Committees.
How the system works for the insured worker I have epit-
omized in the story of Johnny Bull. But take a real case:
Thomas Grant was quite obviously proud that he belonged to
what he called "the best Approved Society in England." He is
about forty-two years of age and is married. He works as chauf-
feur-gardener on a beautiful 800-acre estate near Seven Oaks, Kent.
Grant's society is the United Horticultural Benefit and Provi-
dent Approved Society. It is limited to gardeners and requires its
applicants to pass a stiff physical examination before admitting
them to membership. The society numbers only about 2000, but
their morbidity rate is nearly ^0 percent under the actuarial ex-
pectation and so its surpluses are considerable. Grant is quite
jealous of the additional benefits offered by his society and
wouldn't at all like the notion of admitting, say, a lot of dock-
ers or industrial workers from London whose higher incidence
of sickness, to put it in words Grant would not use, would
drain the society's resources.
As an insured person, Grant pays 4J^d. (10 cents) a week for
health insurance. If he becomes ill he is entitled to the services
of his "panel doctor" without further payment and to £1 a week
cash sickness benefit. The statutory requirement is only three
fourths of that (15s. a week), but the excellent financial condi-
tion of the society enables it to pay an extra 5s. Other additional
benefits available to Grant are partial payment (about !4) for
necessary dental work or for eye examinations and glasses as well
(Continued on page 710)
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WHAT 19,000 DOCTORS COULD TELL US
(Continued from page 709)
(In answering advertisements
as full home nursing care, convalescent care, and cash grants
towards arrears if he should fall out of work. Even though he
is seldom sick Grant considers health insurance a good invest-
ment for himself.
Panel Doctors
WE SAW YOUNG JOHNNY BULL TAKING HIS MEDICAL CARD TO
the physician he wants to become, in the vernacular, "me
panel doctor." The list of insured persons for whom a general
practitioner undertakes to provide medical service is called his
"panel"; and the name has stuck to the whole system. How
often thereafter is Johnny likely to go for treatment? In an-
swering our questionnaire, 110 insured persons replied for
themselves as follows: 6 said "never"; 13, "less than once a
year"; 25, "one to two times a year"; and 6, "more than ten
times a year." Vague answers of "seldom," "only when neces-
sary," and "occasionally" were given by 33. Our impression
was that the medical service of N.H.I, is used freely but not
excessively. Panel physicians we interviewed estimated that
they see about 60 percent of their insured patients in the
course of a year. How then does this work out for the doctor?
Any qualified (licensed) physician in England may take
on an insurance practice, but none is compelled to do so.
The fact is, however, that the majority of general practition-
ers are also insurance practitioners. A young doctor almost
invariably buys or works into an established practice which
includes a panel. He agrees to maintain a "surgery," i. e.,
an office, to keep regular hours for seeing patients and to
provide a substitute when he is absent. The doctor also agrees
to keep clinical records of any panel patient's sickness, to-
gether with simple notations of attendances at surgery, home
visits and certifications. Certificates of incapacity for work
issued each week during the illness are the insured per-
son's basis for claiming sickness or disablement benefits from
his Approved Society.
As already noted, the panel doctor is obliged to give his
insured patients only such services as, in the official phrase,
"are within the competence of the average general practi-
tioner." Medical committees approved by the British Medical
Association and working in cooperation with the Ministry of
Health have set clear precedents as to where that line is
drawn. Medicines are not usually dispensed by the doctor
except in remote districts where there are no chemists. Rather
he writes his prescription on an official Rx blank and the
patient takes it to the chemist's shop (drugstore), again of
his own choosing, where it is filled without charge to him.
In turn, the chemist forwards a copy of the prescription to
the local Insurance Committee where the cost and the amount
due him is calculated — a set "prescribing fee" plus a reason-
able profit on the drugs used.
Although the doctor does not charge his panel patients,
he is not unpaid. He gets what is known as a "capitation
fee" annually for every insured person on his panel. He may
have occasion to see a given panel patient only once in five
years; or he may visit a pneumonia case three times a day for
several weeks; but sick or well, the capitation fee is the
same — -9s. or $2.25 a year. The average panel is made up
of about 1000 insured persons. Such a panel yields £450 a
year in capitation fees, a sum which, without calculating
differences in cost of living, comes to $2250. Some physicians
with large private practice have only a few dozen panel pa-
tients while others may serve 2000. If a doctor works in an
industrial neighborhood and has well toward the maximum
panel of 2500, his yearly income therefrom is over $5500. He
may even have a productive private practice as well. For
example:
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC.)
710
Doctor Green lives on the edge of a small village about ten
miles from Liverpool. The neighborhood is really suburban but
it seems remote and countrified. The house is set well back from
the road and is surrounded by gardens and trees. A surgery
occupies three or four rooms which make up a wing.
The doctor tells you that his is a mixed private and panel
practice. Although his panel numbers about 2000, it represents
only about half of his income of about $9000. He himself rates
his combined practice as fairly large and says he works hard at
it. Yesterday, he adds, he was "on the go" from 7 a.m. and
he didn't get to bed until three as he had a maternity case.
Practically all the doctors around Liverpool, he tells us, are
"panel doctors." Like him, most of them have mixed practices,
and it works out very well. He has heard criticism of "panel
practice," but he can say that he and his colleagues are doing
a good job. He certainly does not distinguish between patients;
how could he, he asks, when he looks to the wives or parents
of the panel patients for his private practice?
Doctors enter into the picture of English health insur-
ance, therefore, as general practitioners. The "paper work"
involved in issuing certificates is compensated for by the
fact that, for insured patients, there are no financial accounts
to keep, no bills to send. The doctor is the general medical
adviser of his insured patients. If surgery, consultations,
special laboratory tests, hospitalization or the like are indi-
cated, outside the present scope of the health insurance
medical service, he advises his panel patients on what is
needed and how best to get it. If himself trained for it, he
can offer them specialist services, but only with authoriza-
tion from the local Insurance Committee. The panel doctor
is therefore not only the first line of medical defense against
illness; he is also the liaison officer between the patient and
the whole range of the community's resources.
How Much Bureaucracy?
IF BRITISH HEALTH INSURANCE WERE "STATE MEDICINE," AS
usually portrayed, one could put its administration in a
phrase. We could call it "another government bureau" and
let it go at that. The English scheme is neither so centralized
nor so simple. Administration heads up under the Minister
of Health who, of course, holds a cabinet portfolio, and un-
der him is an expert staff of civil servants attached to Na-
tional Health Insurance. For the most part, however, the
system is operated on the one hand by the Approved Socie-
ties which handle the cash benefits, and on the other hand
by the Insurance Committees which administer the medical
benefits.
We have found the insured person "joining" some Ap-
proved Society rather than simply "taking out a policy." Un-
der conditions set forth in the national health insurance acts
any group may form such a society. Its membership may be
limited, say, to Methodists, or teetotalers, to bakers and con-
fectioners, or the employes of a large industrial corporation.
It may call for rigid physical examination but cannot refuse
membership on the grounds of age alone.
Whatever the society's composition, it must not be run for
profit, and must be kept financially sound. There are over
1000 Approved Societies in Great Britain. Altogether they
have 6000 branches. In individual membership they range
from one hundred to over two million. The society receives
the contributions of members through the post office and in-
vests the funds itself. A prosperous society pays not only the
minimum "statutory benefits" but also, as we have seen,
various "additional" ones.
Turn next to the scheme of medical services: this, inso-
far as it is organized, is decentralized and divorced from
the insurance carriers. It is administered by an Insurance
Committee in every county and county borough. Each is
served by a clerk and staff and is made up of doctors, chem-
ists, insured persons, and representatives of the local gov-
ernment. Associated with it in each area is a Panel Commit-
(Continued on page 712)
(In answering advertisements please
711
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GOLIATH
by G. A. Borgese
The Viking Press, 18 E. 48th St., New York, N. Y.
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
From THE SURVEY. 1912
TODAY—
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WHAT 19,000 DOCTORS COULD TELL US
(Continued from page 711)
tee composed entirely of doctors, three fourths of whom
must be panel doctors. Panel committees concern themselves
with the purely medical and professional aspects of the ser-
vice. There is a comparable national body, the Insurance Acts
Committee, which is closely affiliated with the British Medi-
cal Association and is recognized by the government as the
official spokesman of the profession whenever questions arise
involving National Health Insurance.
THE GENERAL SET-UP FOR MEDICAL BENEFIT IS THUS ESSENTIALLY
one which in each area provides bookkeeping facilities and
a clearing house for discussing the problems arising from
contract medical practice on so large a scale. Matters affect-
ing doctors and insured persons are dealt with by the joint
committees; purely medical questions are handled by purely
medical committees. The Ministry of Health is the final
court of appeal.
Except when a panel doctor certifies that patients are sick
there is virtually no administrative relationship between him
and the Approved Societies. In contrast, his contact with the
local Insurance Committee is direct and intimate. Its staff
keeps track of his panel and sends him his quarterly checks.
Complaints arising between doctor and patients or between
doctors may be heard by its "medical service subcommittee."
What supervision there is of doctors by government offi-
cials comes from Regional Medical Officers. Appointed by the
Ministry of Health, they are general practitioners who have
had wide experience with National Health Insurance.
Among other things they act as "medical referees" whenever
disputes arise between doctors and Approved Societies and
serve as liaison officers between doctors and the Ministry of
Health. Does their existence after all imply state control
of doctors even though, as we have seen, medical service
under N.H.I, is largely in the hands of the doctors them-
selves working through their own committees? What the
government undertakes to do is to protect its insurance funds
and to maintain minimum service standards. To these ends,
R.M.O.s supervise panel practice in three respects only: to
guard against excessive prescribing; to prevent "lax certifi-
cation"; and to insure the keeping of accurate records. Much
has been said in the United States about administrative "red
tape" to be looked for in such a system. To anticipate the
testimony given us by physicians on every hand, British
doctors find neither the procedures nor the regulations of
National Health Insurance oppressive.
Actual disciplinary procedures against physicians are not
common. The 1936 report of the Ministry of Health states
that 840 visits were made by Regional Medical Officers to
panel doctors during the preceding year to inquire into ex-
cessive prescribing, but in only six cases were fines imposed.
A total of 96 cases involved failure to keep proper records,
lax certification, complaints of negligence to insured persons,
and the like. Disciplinary action was taken in only a frac-
tion of these. A Regional Medical Officer with whom we
talked in Birmingham assured us that on the basis of his
contacts with hundreds of panel doctors — and he had been
one himself — he could say that the administrative scheme
works with a minimum of friction; and this in a system em-
bracing; 19,000 doctors and 18 million insured persons.
Next Instalment
EDITOR'S NOTE: In Survey Graphic for January the second in the
series of articles on British Health Insurance by Dr. and Mrs.
Orr will present the first hand testimony which justifies its title,
"The Workers Say Yes — and More." In the succeeding article,
British physicians will tat(e the chair.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC,)
712
FREDERICK COYKENDALL
DIRECTOR
Columbia
CHARLES G. PROFFITT
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
DONALD PORTER GEDDES
SALES MANAGER
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
ROOM 7O9 JOURNALISM
TELEPHONE UNIVERSITY 4-3425
CABLE ADDRESS "CUPRESS"
December 1, 1937
Mr. Paul Kellogg, Editor
Survey Graphic
112 East 19th Street
New York City
Dear Mr. Kellogg:
May we join the thousands of others who undoubtedly are sending their very
sincere congratulations to you and Survey Associates upon the occasion of your
25th anniversary.
Although we have been in this business of publishing longer than Survey
Associates, it will be some time before we celebrate the 25th anniversary of
our active and organized entry into the social work field. Nevertheless, we
think we have made some worthwhile contributions to this field, and we hope to
continue doing so in the future. And speaking of the future, it seems to us
that this is a particularly appropriate time to tell you that we are going to
publish, in January, A SOCIAL STUDY OF PITTSBURGH; Community Problems and Social
Services of Allegheny County, by Philip Klein. Naturally this reminds us that
it is just about thirty years since you undertook the famous Pittsburgh Survey.
While this new volume is not a sequel to that — it is, rather, a social work
survey — a substantial part of it is devoted to an interpretation of the social
and economic life of the community. We are going to take the liberty of sending
you a copy just as soon as it is ready, and we hope you will consider it a birth-
day present for you and the Survey Associates.
One special and personal reason we have for rejoicing at the progress of
the Survey Graphic is that it has been of great service to us in making known
to the public our books in the social work field. We are sure we speak also
for the New York School of Social Work and the Welfare Council of New York
City, whose volumes we publish. We want here and now to give the Survey credit
for helping make so popular such recent books of ours as Social Case Recording,
by Gordon Hamilton; Can Delinquency Be Measured, by Sophia M.. Robison ; The
Social Component in Medical Care, by Janet Thornton; and many others.
And so you see why we join in this salute to
We hope your second quarter century will be even
Survey Associates.
ccessful than the first.
(In answering advertisements please mention SUIVF.Y GRAPHIC)
713
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152 West 42nd Street New York
The Nation congratulates
Survey Associates for its outstand-
ing work in the field of social
investigation and interpretation
during the past twenty-five years.
THE
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THE STORY OF GRAND DUCHESS ANASTASIA
By GLEB BOTKIN
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At all Bookstores. Illustrated. $3.00
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THE THRUST OF INVENTION
(Continued from page 647)
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
714
Today we recognize that energy is warp and woof of our
industrial and domestic life. So powerful an agency cannot
be left in the control of profit-making exploiters. The public
service commissions may be inefficient, but they testify elo-
quently enough to the determination of democracy not to be
ruled by a class of bankers and engineers who have decided
in their own minds where high-tension lines shall be strung
and to what regions electric energy shall be distributed.
Even more striking is the social evolution of the railroad.
At first the steam locomotive was simply an iron horse that
competed with the living horse. Then steam became a power-
ful factor in opening up new land in the Middlewest, in
spanning the continent with one nation, and in developing
new industrial centers. In England, the country developed
the railroads; here they developed the country. The full sig-
nificance of the railroad burst upon us during the World
War, when it was recognized by the masses for what it was —
a colossal carrying machine sprawling over a continent, link-
ing thousands of towns together. We talked of transportation
with a capital "T." When the war ended the question rose
whether or not the roads should be returned to private own-
ership and management. Their subsequent history is prob-
ably the eventual history of all public utilities, possibly of all
major industries based on great inventions. In other words,
transportation, the generation of gas and electricity, the sup-
plying of water to a community, the production of food, cloth-
ing and shelter can no more be left wholly to private capital
than the exploitation of the atmosphere for breathing. We
behold the railroads transformed by democracy into real
servants of the public. The conditions under which their
managers employ labor, the issuance of securities, the rates to
be charged for carrying goods and passengers — all are subject
to governmental scrutiny and approval. The railway com-
panies are reduced to the status of administrators. They may
not even give up an unprofitable branch line without the
government's consent, and, against their will, they must
apply the profits earned in crowded communities to provide
transportation in regions where traffic is thin. We have here
about the most striking example to be found of democracy's
ability to direct an invention to good social purpose and to
appraise the social importance of a scientific discovery or
invention.
Science the Offspring of Democracy
INVENTION AND SCIENCE ARE SIAMESE TWINS. SOMETIMES A
science develops out of an invention, as thermodynamics de-
veloped out of research applied to the steam engine. Some-
times inventions flow from scientific discoveries as, for exam-
ple, the dynamo, telegraph and the whole apparatus of
modern electrical engineering flowed out of Faraday's work
in electromagnetic induction. Even under despotism some
research, some invention is possible. But the impetus that
comes from the slow acceptance of new theories which may
conflict with those generally accepted, ceases. If, for example,
the world had not ultimately accepted the Copernican concep-
tion of the solar system it would have managed to do its
navigation, after a fashion, in accordance with the Ptolemaic
system. But there could have been no Newton, no laws of
gravitation, and hence nothing like the science of mechanical
engineering that has given us modern industry.
Now it happens that science stands for something more
than coal-tar dyes, electric lamps, X-rays, radioactivity and
monstrous fruit-flies bred by experimental geneticists. It is an
attitude of mind, an objective, dispassionate approach to the
outer world — what Professor Whitehead calls "the most inti-
(Contmued on page 716)
On the ^irst twenty-
ty
ears
During the last quarter century SURVEY ASSOCIATES have played an indispensable role
in revealing and recording social conditions, in analyzing social problems, and in spread-
ing information, helpful and stimulating to all who wish to implement their purpose
to serve the common good. Congratulations! And many more Silver Anniversaries
to you!
GENERAL DIRECTOR.
Old
THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY, directed by Paul
U. Kellogg, was a landmark in social research
and in the origins of Survey Associates. We are
pleased to have cooperated in this enterprise
and to have published the six volumes in which
its findings were reported.
IN 1912, the year of the organization of Survey
Associates, the Foundation published several
notable books, including Breckinridge and Ab-
bott's THE DELINQUENT CHILD AND THE HOME
and Goldmark's FATIGUE AND EFFICIENCY —
influential still, though long out of print.
IN COOPERATION with Survey Associates,
whose imprint was combined with ours in
Foundation publications from 1913-1915, ad-
ditional important titles appeared. From this
period dates Miss Cannon's SOCIAL WORK IN
HOSPITALS. In print. $1.50
OTHER LANDMARKS of early publishing:
SOCIAL DIAGNOSIS.
1917.
BROKEN HOMES.
1919.
MARY RICHMOND.
$2.00
JOANNA C. COLCORD.
$1.00
WHAT IS SOCIAL CASE WORK? MARY RICHMOND.
1922. $1.00
THE SETTLEMENT HORIZON. WOODS and
KENNEDY.
1922. $3.00
PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT OFFICES. SHELBY M.
HARRISON and ASSOCIATES.
1924. $3.50
Suideposts
SOCIAL WORK YEAR BOOK 1937. Edited by
Russell H. Kurtz, this volume in its biennial ap-
pearances has become "the largest body of
knowledge about social work in all its phases in
the least space and at the least cost anywhere
available." $4.00
FOR THE COMING CHRISTMAS you may
wish to give yourself, and you will surely wish
to give several of your friends, our newest pub-
lication, Eaton's HANDICRAFTS OF THE
SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS. Pleasantly, inform-
ingly written, superbly illustrated. $3.00
STUDIES IN PROFESSIONS, by Esther Lucile
Brown, have now grown to a series of four titles,
with additions to come. Compact and inform-
ing. Priced uniformly at 75 cents. Ready —
SOCIAL WORK AS A PROFESSION, THE PRO-
FESSIONAL ENGINEER, NURSING AS A PRO-
FESSION, PHYSICIANS AND MEDICAL CARE.
OTHER RECENT TITLES
ZONING. EDWARD M. BASSETT.
1936. $3.00
UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF IN PERIODS OF DE-
PRESSION. LEAH H. FEDER. 1936. $2.50
MUSIC IN INSTITUTIONS. WILLEM VAN DE WALL.
1936. $3.00
REGULATION OF THE SMALL LOAN BUSINESS-
ROBINSON and NUGENT. 1935. $3.00
JOANNA C. COLCORD.
$1.50
CASH RELIEF.
1936.
MINERS AND MANAGEMENT. MARY VAN KLEECK.
1934. $2.00
A complete catalogue of publications is available upon request. The Foundation also maintains a Stand-
ing Order List under liberal terms for persons interested in its new publications. Write for information to
RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
130 East 22nd Street
New York
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
715
Every Month
From October to June
An outstanding study of social sig-
nificance goes to subscribers to
INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY
Periodical Studies in Economics and
Politics
For December
DEMOCRACY and
DICTATORSHIP
by Norman Thomas
Now Available
FORDISM: Parts I and II
by Carl Raushenbush
Coming
SOCIALIZED MEDICINE
by Mary Dublin
SHALL STRIKES BE
OUTLAWED?
by Joel Seidman
THE COMING LABOR
PARTY
by Harry W. Laidler
The League for Industrial
Democracy
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THE THRUST OF INVENTION
(Continued from page 714)
(In answering advertisements
mate change in outlook that the human race has yet encoun-
tered." This attitude, this objectivity is inconceivable without
freedom of thought and freedom of expression. It is no acci-
dent, therefore, that science, as we know it, should be an
offspring of democracy; no accident that the discoveries of
Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier and others were made during or
after revolutions fomented by liberals.
All this being so — and the case has been convincingly pre-
sented by historians of science and political philosophers — the
advocates of a society planned from on high, with the neces-
sary suppression of free thought, face a dilemma. They need
the scientist. Yet they must deny him the liberty of mind that
is the very essence of his objective attitude. If his researches
relentlessly expose the fallacy of a fundamental principle
dinned into the populace by the government, either he must
be hanged as a meddler or the high social plan must be
scrapped. In modern totalitarian Germany, Italy and Russia
there may be no hanging, but there is exile for the dissenter,
and not a sign of scrapping.
The Bond Between Them
MOREOVER THE VOTARIES OF SCIENCE CONSTITUTE AN INTERNA-
tional brotherhood the like of which this world has never seen
before. It is impossible to say of a discovery or an invention:
"This was the work of a German — or a Finn — or a Scot."
Nor does it matter much to a real scientist or engineer what
the nationality of a discoverer or inventor may be. It is
enough for him that the man did his work and described it
in a readily accessible publication as an addition to the gen-
eral stock of knowledge. As a force in achieving true inter-
nationalism even religion pales in comparison with this sub-
jugation of self and country. In spite of the uses for hate and
destruction to which inventions may be turned, science itself
furnishes the most striking evidence we have that men are
able to sink passions for the good of the race.
Our hope, then, lies in science. If democracy is to save itself
the scientific outlook, the scientific method of detached ap-
praisal of facts and situations must become part and parcel
of the common mind. This in turn means that education must
be given new purpose and direction. Or, as Wells puts it,
the choice is between "chaos and education."
There are signs that, even without adequate education and
the general inculcation of the scientific attitude, the masses of
democracy are beginning to turn instinctively to the scientist
and the engineer for guidance. There has been much scoffing
at "brain trusts," but the fact must not be overlooked that,
inept as they have been on occasion, they have emerged from
the orderly process of democratic government. Their British
counterparts are found in Royal Commissions that patiently
examine proposals and decide whether or not they meet the
social needs of the hour. It is much that in these two great
self-governing peoples the scientific expert is thus drawn into
administration, even though his recommendations may be
brushed aside. For all its emotionalism, it is hard to escape
the conclusion that the electorate does somehow sense that
science and democracy owe much to each other.
Recently, in looking up the history of some great scientific
discoveries and inventions it was exciting that they appeared
either during revolutions that ushered in liberalism or imme-
diately after them. Throughout the record ran the dual strand
that the freedom of thought which is so characteristic of
democracy is also characteristic of science. It became more
than ever apparent — at least to me — that science and inven-
tion provide the method whereby a democracy may enjoy
technological advance and save itself. And, in turn, without
democracy there can be no onward sweep of science.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC.)
716
HENRY FORD AT THE WHEEL
(Continued from page 688)
army of nimble recruits for the Detroit production lines.
Once Ford bought out his last stockholder he ruled supreme
over the institution he had created. With simple tastes, but
with no mind for abstractions, no time for the bothersome
details of wide human contacts, he continued to live and
work in provincial isolation. Today, at seventy-four, he is
little closer to the world of. social philosophers, industrialists,
bankers, labor leaders and government officials than he was
as a boy in Bagley Street.
Across the familiar fields from his birthplace he built his
great factory. Nearby, in a landscaped park, the Ford Engi-
neering Laboratories stand — the capitol of a curious forty-
ninth state, of which Ford is proprietor and absolute ruler.
It is flanked by the Edison Institute Museum and Greenfield
Village. In the museum, among the principal machines that
inventors have contrived to bless and baffle mankind, the first
Ford car stands to wait the Judgment Day. In Greenfield
Village, Ford has preserved, in a charming rustic setting,
many interesting national mementos: the birthplace of McGuf-
fey; Stephen Foster's house; the Wright brothers' bicycle
shop; the Menlo Park depot and the boarding house that
Edison lighted with his lamp; tintype studio, grist mill, inn
and country store, and scores of other evidences of horse-and-
buggy days, including rusty-coated, top-hatted coachmen to
drive the tourists where automobiles dare not enter.
IN OCTOBER 94,345 PEOPLE WERE ON THE WHOLE FORD PAYROLL
in the United States. In the first nine months of this year,
1,147,963 cars had rolled off the assembly line, bringing the
total since the company was founded to 25,979,159. A third
of greater Detroit's population of two million depend in vary-
ing degree upon the Ford Motor Company. Despite rumors
that Ford would call it a day, and shut down the River Rouge
plant should the UAW gain strength enough to insist upon
a working agreement, the company is now expanding its
facilities there — to the tune of $40 million. The foundry, al-
ready the largest in the world, is being stretched from 30 to
38 acres; giant gasholders; a new 1000-ton furnace; a battery
of open hearth furnaces; a tire factory; an extension to the
width of the strip mill, all are under construction or contract.
These additions, I was informed, "were intended to enable
the company to maintain, in the face of increasing production,
its policy of manufacturing in its own plants a substantial
share of all the parts required in the manufacture of its cars
and trucks."
Astronomical statistics can give only a vague notion of the
giant River Rouge plant. Beautifully organized in the form
of a great horseshoe — lakeport and railway terminal as well
as factory — it is so sensitive to the design of its master that
ore which comes into the yard on Monday can go out in a
completed car on Tuesday afternoon. Tourists marvel not
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FORD OFFICIALS HAVE MADE THE CLAIM THAT AMONG THE AUTO
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first to call men back. However that may be, in spite of
efficiency and planning, unfettered by bankers or labor unions,
the Ford Motor Company laid off 75 percent of its employes
during the depression. That is a greater percentage of other
people's customers than American industry as a whole laid
(Continued on page 718)
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HENRY FORD AT THE WHEEL
(Continued from page 717)
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
718
off. The figures show how the pendulum swung. The total
number of Ford employes in the United States dropped from
over 160,000 in 1929 to only a handful over 40,000 in 1933.
In the past two years the total has leveled off in the neigh-
borhood of 100,000 in the United States.
In 1912 the Ford Motor Company made 181,795 cars, more
than all the Fords in the previous nine years of its history.
In a quarter century it has caught up with its market. No
longer a rising line, the sales chart points horizontally toward
the future, with signs of disconcerting downs as well as ups
along the way. The automobile market nowadays is primarily
a replacement market. And this coming of age of the indus-
try, with competition centered on price and quality of stabil-
ized products, is a tremendously important factor in the labor
situation in Dearborn and Detroit.
The UAW
THE UAW is A YOUNG UNION, RUN BY A YOUNG CROWD FRESH
from the tool rooms and assembly lines. It has made its
demands effective largely because it represents the stirring of
powerful social forces bigger than John L. Lewis or Homer
Martin, bigger than the men who organized it, too big, by
far, for the craft-bound AF of L to hold in rein two years ago.
Frustrated by the long years of depression, by the humiliation
and indignity of unemployment, by the speed-up on the mass
production lines, automobile workers asserted themselves
when better times came. A union was the only medium for
their individual self-assertion. They were skilfully organized,
at a strategic time. And the strikes set off the spark that put
the hesitant into the fold with the daring. The die was cast—-
for collective bargaining, of the only feasible pattern, an
industrial union in the CIO.
The use of the sit-down as a mass technique was widely
resented in Detroit. Subsequently came the failure of the
union to keep its great agglomeration of men in line and
prevent sporadic strikes by militant units. It seems clear that
managerial provocation set off most of the unauthorized stop-
pages, but these wildcat episodes left the opinion with the
public that the union was irresponsible. It must be remem-
bered, however, that in less than two years an organization of
35,000 grew to 375,000; and that most of the agreements made
early in the year were the first experience with collective
bargaining, either by the workers or by the management.
Zealous unionists, zealous company subordinates, found it
impossible to change overnight to attitudes of mutual respect
and cooperation.
And, although the majority of the agreements, not only
with the major corporations, but with the small subsidiaries
and parts manufacturers, are going more smoothly than news-
paper headlines indicate, there undeniably is an air of tension
in the capital of motordom.
I COULD NOT HAVE PICKED A MORE OPPORTUNE OR MORE DIF-
ficult — time to explore the UAW than the period in October
between the primary election and the run-off of Detroit's
municipal campaign. In a nominally non-partisan city govern-
ment, the CIO had won a place on the ticket for mayor and
council. The solid backing of the unadulterated labor organi-
zation matched against the united opposition of the press, the
frightened middle class, and existing political groups, was not
to prove sufficient for victory in the run-off on Election Day.
This autumn, too, falling stock prices in Wall Street were
giving union leaders as well as motor manufacturers the jit-
ters. General Motors and the UAW were still negotiating the
knotty points of a new contract, overdue since August, mean-
while operating under the old, and publicly critieizing one
another. At Chrysler many UAW members were complaining
of discrimination, despite a contract, and alleging that a
bargain-rate, upstart, "independent" organization within the
plant was in actuality a company union. And, in addition to
all these ripples on the surface, there were differences on
policy, clash of personalities, and rumors of a split between
the Progressive and Unity factions of the UAW itself.
The Progressives, led by Homer Martin, effervescent min-
ister turned labor leader, are at the helm of the UAW, with
a majority on the UAW board. Martin represents the point
of view that would consolidate and discipline the union, with
a strong central authority. Those who have worked with him
say that he has never hesitated to place the resources of the
organization behind any group of workers who were strug-
gling to better themselves through strike action. However,
they say, realization of the danger of bleeding the organiza-
tion to death, through undisciplined and unauthorized strikes,
has forced him to wage a continuous war against those poli-
cies and those elements which threaten the existence of the
organization through pseudo-militant tactics.
Martin counts the public attitude to the union as an impor-
tant factor in its value to its members — and especially so now
that its ability to live up to existing agreements is being put to
the test. As Professor J. Raymond Walsh says in his book,
CIO: Industrial Unionism in Action, published November 5:
"Martin thinks the size of sprawling auto locals demands
drastic modifications of the awkward town-meeting structure.
What's more, he feels their relative irresponsibility to the
national command has embarrassed him when they have
broken contracts. It does not help him to realize that many
of the violations were provoked by the management; it still
looks just as bad in the press. Mortimer, however, wants the
furthest possible extension of democracy within and without
the locals."
Wyndham Mortimer, leader of the Unity group, is now in
charge of organization in the farm implement industry. In
Detroit the Unity group is led by Walter Reuther, president
of the West Side local, himself a Ford worker for seven and
one-half years, and the energizing factor in the Ford drive
till he was replaced by Richard Frankensteen. Reuther not
only believes in decentralized democracy in the UAW's locals,
but is opposed to the purge of militants, aggressives, or radi-
cals, from the UAW's organizational leadership. Many
Reuther followers, regarding Martin as a conservative, advo-
cate vigorous and dramatic demonstrations of labor solidarity
wherever obstructive management in the industry fails to
abide by its side of existing contracts.
At the international offices, in the old Hofmann Building
on Detroit's famous Woodward Avenue, Martin has just re-
organized his staff, selecting as key organizers men of the
Progressive rather than Unity philosophy. Pursuing this
course, he has riled the more aggressive members of the
executive committee, notably those from the West Side local,
by issuing a conciliatory statement of his belief that "Henry
Ford was not. to blame for the working conditions in his
plants." That public statement, made a day or two after I
had interviewed Homer Martin in New York, included the
information that about 40 percent of Ford's River Rouge men
had joined the UAW quietly. And, said Martin:
"I doubt if Henry Ford knows how bad conditions are, what
speed-ups and lack of freedom the workers endure. Henry
Ford is sincere and honest in his efforts to give his men the
best possible working conditions — but most of Ford's lieu-
tenants are not in sympathy with the ideals that seem to be
Mr. Ford's. They keep him misinformed as to conditions and
as a result just the opposite to what Ford desires, obtains in
his plants."
Unity organizers, although they resent such mollifying
(Continued on page 720)
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HENRY FORD AT THE WHEEL
{Continued from page 719)
(In tnsu/ering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
720
tactics at a critical time in the Ford drive, nevertheless co-
operate with the special Ford organization office, at 8844
Michigan Avenue, just over the Detroit line from Dearborn.
THE OUTCOME OF THE FORD ORGANIZING CAMPAIGN (AND THE
drive has not been interrupted even by one reported parley
between a Ford representative and UAW officials) will de-
termine the future of the Ford labor policies. The UAW
obviously cannot become complacent and stabilized so long
as Ford workers remain outside the collective bargaining
picture.
Yet, at the UAW I found all the features of a healthy,
established organization, not communistic, not bent on bring-
ing Detroit crashing down in riots and revolution, but deter-
mined to get for the men and women who make automobiles
a square deal, as they put it, "through democracy on the job."
The education department, now entirely run by the union
without the use of WPA instructors, is finding a lively re-
sponse to courses in contracts and negotiations, public speak-
ing, economics of the auto industry, problems confronting
shop stewards. Attendance at meetings and payment of dues
are picking up after a slack period that was well publicized
by the Detroit press.
On the top floor of the Hofmann Building the union has
established a Medical Research Institute. Union health centers
have been pioneers in the garment trades, but this institute
is the first of its kind ever run by a labor union, to study
industrial diseases and accidents in the automobile industry.
Its staff also diagnoses the ills of members, particularly those
derived from employment; and provides expert advice to
workmen's compensation cases within the union. With Dr.
Emery R. Hayhurst, a noted authority on industrial diseases
and chief of the Ohio State Division of Hygiene, as advisory
director, and Dr. Frederick V. Lendrum, formerly of the
Mayo Clinic, as full time director, the prestige of the institute
is already sufficiently accepted for its findings to be quoted as
reliable authority in the automobile pages of The Iron Age.
Of the first two hundred men examined, fifty-three were suf-
fering from lead poisoning caused by the disk filing of solder
on auto bodies, an innovation of the 1934-35 Detroit manu-
facturing season. The institute promises to be more than a
supplement to established medical research in Detroit — union
members come to its laboratories freely, and unafraid. The
Michigan workmen's compensation law, amended at the last
session of the legislature, now includes, for the first time,
occupational diseases; but in its present form it is so imper-
fectly drafted that there is grave doubt the courts will inter-
pret it to benefit the auto workers. Nevertheless, since in
Michigan the employer chooses the physician for a compensa-
tion case, union shop stewards are seeing to it that ill as well
as injured workmen have the advantage of the institute's
diagnosis and advice.
Out of the same two hundred voluntary clients whose rec-
ords had been analyzed when I was there, two individuals
were diagnosed as victims of speed-up neurosis. This may be
the first medical recognition of speed-up neurosis. Dr. Len-
drum was reluctant to discuss the psychological consequences
of overstrain from mass production, for, as he pointed out,
the failure of an older man to keep up may not always result
in a definite neurosis. While the charge of speed-up has been
frequently leveled at the Ford management, Dr. Lendrum
confided that few Ford employes have had the temerity to
make a personal visit to the Hofmann Building;, which is
known all over Detroit as the headquarters of the UAW.
Despite all that has been said of the dulling effect of work
on a production or assembly line in the automobile industry,
it paradoxically requires alertness, deftness and intelligence.
The ineffectual, the dull witted, are soon weeded out. Those
who stay have a capacity, a positive tolerance, for monotony,
and at the same time a dexterity, a sense of precision, a knack
that amounts to a skill. A large majority of the younger auto
workers have been to highschool, and some of them to college.
Most of the men in the union, and some of the officers, never
saw a union office till they joined the UAW. As untraditional
as Henry Ford at making automobiles, they are attempting
to build a mass labor organization on a basis of our popular
education in these post-war years. ,
The Conflict
THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY KNOWS LESS ABOUT THE UAW,
than the UAW knows about the Ford Motor Company. And
Detroiters have a confused and often prejudiced notion of
both. Of CIO coercion, I heard a good deal second-hand from
individuals who had no reason to deceive themselves. If not
coercion there was clearly a good deal of stampeding of young
and inexperienced workers. Yet, while I made a point of ask-
ing members of the UAW whom I met in poolrooms and else-
where, I did not find a single individual who would admit
he was forced by intimidation or violence to join the UAW.
On the other hand, I did encounter examples of the kind
described in the Ford hearings before the National Labor
Relations Board at Detroit in July. In that hearing it was
testified that UAW members were discriminated against, and
sometimes discharged, when their membership in the union
became known. Indeed, the circumstance that brought the
Ford Motor Company before the board was not alone the
sensational beating of the organizers at Gate 4, but the trans-
fer of two old and loyal workers who had joined the union
to a job lifting heavy cement bags, far beyond their physical
capacity. Some of the Ford workers subpoenaed to testify be-
fore the NLRB are still out of a job.
On the same overpass at Gate 4, where UAW organizers
were beaten, anti-UAW campaign literature in the Detroit
mayoralty campaign was distributed without hindrance. Offi-
cial Ford literature in which workers are advised to keep free
of labor leaders, is circulated in the plant. Yet workers tell
of two organizations, the Ford Brotherhood, and the Liberty
Legion, Inc., which are openly promoted by certain Ford em-
ployes within the plant. I talked to men who quoted their
foremen as saying, "You better get your Liberty Legion but-
ton if you like your job." UAW members, and non-members
alike, reported that they were afraid to refuse to sign up in
these organizations. Labeled independent unions, they are
founded by local lawyers who have never been connected with
labor; they are incorporated; they state their objectives in
terms which in actuality approve of the present employment
policies of the Ford Motor Company.
From UAW members, who were given no reason for their
discharge, I learned of vain demands for an explanation at
the Ford employment office. But evidently some of the fore-
men and Service Men were indiscreet; for there were reports
that men on the way out had been told they must have joined
the wrong union, or had the wrong literature in their board-
ing house, or failed to buy a Ford car.
The pressure brought upon Ford employes to buy a Ford
car does not come from the top, I was told, but frequently
from subordinates who it is suspected get a slice from the
dealer's commission. The fear of losing one's job, I was told
by many Ford workers, has kept them from protesting, as
individuals, against speed-ups in production, and against the
petty tyranny of foremen, and the known employment office
investigators who frequent the chief centers of masculine
recreation on the South Side of Dearborn.
It is hard to describe the atmosphere of fear that these
conversations conveyed — the simple fear that insecure men
have of losing their jobs. The fear of losing one's job at Ford's
is not new — but the surge of the CIO across the land has
(Continued on page 723)
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HENRY FORD AT THE WHEEL
(Continued from page 721)
heightened it. The Ford Service Department is credited by the
UAW with having as many facilities for surveillance of
workers, in the plant and out, as Hoover's G-men have for
trailing crooks. By disinterested Detroiters I was told that the
political connections of the Service Department are more
formidable than anything Tammany Hall ever dreamed of,
influencing governmental agencies throughout the state.
A citizen of Dearborn, who doesn't work for the Ford
Motor Company, outraged by the sway of the company over
the local government there, exclaimed: "Good God — we teach
in school the sacredness of the vote, and the privileges of
democracy, and we turn our children out into a town where
elections are as meaningless as they would be in Germany or
Russia." He gave me an inkling of the realities back of the
shabby streets of South Dearborn, and within the planless
shantytowns that dot the environs of the River Rouge plant.
In Detroit, an ex-Ford worker, an elderly man of New
England stock and Republican persuasion, certainly as scorn-
ful of radicalism as Henry Ford himself, said to me: "I thank
my stars I won't be out there around the River Rouge when
all the pent up feeling, the rage and hatred, breaks loose
there." He was exaggerating, perhaps; but his prediction was
alarming nevertheless.
In the great social movements which are sweeping the
world today the dignity of having a voice, free and unafraid,
is of the essence of democracy. In labor relations no less than
(In answering advertisements
in civics, cold efficiency, "with no time to lose in seeking har
mony" or smoothing difficulties, seems inconsistent with
democracy. By this standard, the most casual exploration of
the temper of the workers in the Detroit area denotes that
Henry Ford's labor policies are, by American standards,
obsolete.
Some Detroit liberals say that Edsel Ford, a man of social
instincts, well geared into the organized civic, cultural and
welfare activities of the community, has never been given a
chance to modernize them; that Henry Ford doesn't realize
the power that some of his subordinates, and the subordinates
under them, have over the personnel in the shops.
There is no buffer between the individual worker and the
crushing power of that bureaucracy. By comparison, the or-
ganized workers in other plants have got out of the UAW
more than better wages and working conditions. They have
got a "psychic satisfaction," too; a sense of freedom that
noticeably throws their shoulders back. You can see a differ-
ence in the street cars that carry them home from GM and
Chrysler. These intangibles cannot be dismissed as nonsense —
they are the most important thing in human life.
Work and workers in the motor industry have never been
the subject of a concerted survey by economists, psychologists,
social workers, authorities in housing, health, law and politi-
cal science. I consulted the scattered studies and statistics that
exist, talked to key men at Ford and in the UAW, checked
my notes with what I could gather from workers themselves.
And I came away from Detroit feeling that whatever the fate
of the CIO, and the UAW in particular, Ford's alternative is
not one which will permanently satisfy the human spirit.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
723
•r •<
* li •. ••:
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Twenty - Five Years of Travel
THE PAST QUARTER CENTURY, ACCORDING TO MALCOLM LA
Prade, nationally known to radio listeners as the Man
from Cook's, has seen momentous changes in the field
of travel and transportation— the cruise, save for the pio-
neering world-cruises of one lone steamship line; the
development of passenger airlines; the motor-coach.
TURNING THE CLOCK BACK TO 1912, TRAVEL TO EUROPE FLOUR-
ished — but little else, from these shores. The Hamburg-
American Line had sent the "Cleveland" on the first
round-the-world cruise in 1909, but public interest did
not yet justify other steamship lines in similar pioneering.
The automobile industry was in its fledgling state, as yet
no competitor to rail transportation. Air travel had not
even reached the "barnstorming state." In short the travel-
world of 1912 was — in spite of surprisingly fast transat-
lantic speed records, and the oncoming European peak
travel-season of 1913-1914 — jogging along much as it had
for the past half-century. (And — note well — in those days,
pleasure-travel was a luxuryl)
We Discover the Indies
THE WORLD WAR HAD WIDESPREAD AND INCALCULABLY IM-
portant effects. The immediate result, of course, was a
hiatus in European travel, and the development of a new
trend, traffic to Bermuda and the West Indies, Americans
getting used to the idea of short trips to the tropics and
near-tropics, becoming aware of the color and interest to
be found in their own hemisphere.
The first post-war Mediterranean cruises were organ-
ized in 1921. 1923 saw the first round-the-world cruises
via the Panama Canal, an important milestone in
travel. From that point on, the public became increasingly
cruise-conscious, with the vogue spreading to include
West Indies cruises; North Cape cruises, commencing
about this same period and always heavily booked; short
cruises, on large Atlantic liners, to Bermuda, Halifax,
Nassau, etc. (True, this last trend grew out of the recent
depression, with its resultant cut in European travel, plus
prohibition in the United States — but once started, the
genuine popularity of weekend and other short cruises,
continued.) And finally, the great rise in travel to South
America during the past three years, culminating in this
winter's program of cruises round South America or to
Rio and back, by no less than six topnotch liners.
1923 seems to have been distinctly a red-letter year for
the travel business. For not only did that year see the
real start of the modern cruise trend; it also saw impor-
tant advances in air passenger-traffic and bus transporta-
tion.
We Travel by Air
THE FIRST PASSENGER AIR SERVICE WAS STARTED IN THE
United States — over a short route and on infrequent sched-
ule, but definitely a beginning. The attention and interest
of the American public was focussed on air travel bv
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC.)
724
Lindbergh's achievement in 1927, and by subsequent
history-making flights by other pilots.
But 1926 is the year in which transcontinental air ser-
vice really started, with a total of 5782 passengers using
the airlines. In 1930 the number had grown to 417,505.
And last year showed a record number of 1,147,969 pas-
sengers carried. Newest and most spectacular development
in the industry which is constantly opening up new fields
to conquer, is the successful Bermuda air service inaugu-
rated recently by Pan-American and Imperial Airways.
The Bus Becomes a System
SIMILARLY, SAYS MR. LA PRADE, 1923 WAS A RED-LETTER YEAR
in the development of bus-travel in America for it was
at just that time that the father of it, Carl Eric Wickman
(who had started his own bus business in Ribbing, Minn.,
in 1914) was really branching out; buying up, one by
one, the small bus-lines which had followed his lead, and
thus forming the nucleus of the present nation-wide Grey-
hound System, which he heads. Statistics show clearly
enough the extent to which motor-coach travel has en-
croached upon the field which, in 1912, was dominated by
rail travel only. In 1936, 3,279,700,000 passengers were car-
ried, exclusive of non-revenue school buses and private
carriers, which totaled another 640 million. The bus in-
dustry (common carriers) earned a cool total of $466,-
708,000 traversing 2,042,000,000 bus-miles over a highway
network of 395,800 miles— this, contrasted with the mod-
est beginnings when its first year of existence saw total
earnings estimated, in 1915, at $8000!
Tourist Third — And After
THE INAUGURATION, IN 1925 AND 1926, OF TRAVEL TO EUROPE
"Tourist Third," lowered costs at a time when steamship
fares were reaching their peak, and introduced travel in
general to a whole new income-group, students and pro-
fessional people to whom formerly the outlay seemed
prohibitive. "Tourist" has revolutionized the entire sys-
tem of classes and fares.
On U.S. railroads air-conditioning, streamlined trains
and club-cars and other refinements have combined with
reduced rail fares greatly to stimulate business. Likewise,
the railroads recently have been most enterprising in at-
tracting new business with such features as ski-trains,
bicycle, fold-boat and corn-husking trains, etc.
When We Can Afford It, We Go
IN CONCLUSION, SAYS THE MAN FROM COOK'S : "AccoRD-
ing to an estimate of the Department of Commerce,
American tourists will spend $600 million in France, Ger-
many, Great Britain and other foreign countries this year.
This total would be the largest since 1930 and would top
last year by $100 million. An analysis of 1936 travel
showed Americans paid $497 million in foreign countries
for merchandise, hotel lodging and services (foreign visit-
ors returning the compliment, up to $125 million.) Of the
above amount spent by Americans abroad, it is interest-
ing that $228 million was spent in Canada, where hunt-
ing, fishing and general sightseeing trips are perennially
popular.
Travel increased in 1936 and grew further in 1937—
despite currency restrictions and political upheaval abroad.
Travel depends not on low prices of foreign exchange but
on normal exchange values and on good business condi-
tions in the United States.
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725
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20TH STREET at IRVING PLACE
UNDER KNOTT MANAGEMENT
MODERN AS A STREAMLINER
(Continued from page 694)
are affiliated with it. So far, the Green-Lewis split has not
breached the solid ranks of the railroad unions.
The industry's complicated wage structure is, in theory,
built on the common labor base, with higher rates for train-
ing, skill and experience, and consideration for hazard and
for conditions peculiar to the various types of employment.
To begin at the bottom, common labor rates vary with those
paid factory and farm labor in the regions served. On the
Union Pacific, the range is from 40 to 43 cents an hour. At
the top are engineers and conductors. All classes other than
train and enginemen are on an eight-hour day basis, with over-
time provisions. Engineers, firemen, conductors and brakemen
are paid on a "dual basis," that is earnings are figured on
miles run or on hours worked, with basic rates for many
assignments which mean incomes of $300 a month or more.
In determining rates of engineers and firemen, weight on
drivers of the locomotives is a third factor. All agreements call
for assignment and promotion on a basis of seniority, subject
to qualifications and fitness. They include provisions against
discipline or dismissal without a fair hearing.
All classes of employes on the Union Pacific are included in
working agreements with their national organizations. A
union agreement is not an end in itself. But if the Union
Pacific record shows anything, it shows that as a formulation
of mutual rights and obligations, backed by the organized
authority of employer and workers, such an agreement pro-
vides the soundest basis yet evolved for successful industrial
relations.
Because interruption of railroad service is fraught with
hardship, even danger, to the public, railway management
and employes have almost from the beginning been ac-
customed to "government meddling" in the field of labor
relations. The Erdman act, the Newlands act, the wartime
railroad administration, the transportation act of 1920, the
1926 railway labor act and its 1934 amendments have imposed
on the industry a legal obligation to substitute orderly proces-
ses of conference and agreement for friction and warfare.
Today, the National Mediation Board steps in when a rail-
way and its employes, or all the roads and the national railway
labor organizations are at loggerheads in drawing up an
agreement. The adjustment boards handle disputes as to the
interpretation or application of existing agreements. The 1934
amendments to the railway labor act also provide for volun-
tary arbitration and for an emergency board set up by the
President if the regular machinery breaks down.
This year, two major wage agreements, involving workers
on 86 Class I railroads have been made through federal
mediation: the first raised wage rates of non-operating em-
ployes 5 cents an hour; the second gave an increase of 44
cents a day to train service employes and yardmen. The two
agreements added $5 million to the Union Pacific's annual
labor costs. The second, reached only after negotiations lasting
more than two months, was signed while I was in Omaha.
A railroad clerk had told me, "The Union Pacific is a hard,
two-fisted bargainer, but it can see both sides." Mr. Jeffers'
comment on the agreement bore this out, "I think it is a fair
settlement," he said.
How the Machinery Work*
WORKERS FOR THE UNION PACIFIC, AS I TALKED WITH THEM,
were unanimous in saying that labor relations on the road
today are "good." Usually they went on to add, as did a
spokesman for the telegraphers, "We have our differences,
plenty! But I believe each side is convinced the other side
wants to do the fair thing." When an employe has a grievance,
(Continued on page 728)
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC^
726
We Have Decided!
MEXICO— WINTER INSTITUTE— SOUTH AMERICAN SEMINAR —
THIRTEENTH SEMINAR MEXICO
W E HAVE decided to hold two programs in Mexico — one in February, the other in July
— for Mexico continues to hold the greatest interest by its swiftly changing social and economic
pattern, and its pervasive beauty. And we have decided to launch our first Seminar in South
America.
IIIIOIIIII
The Winter Institute
J.HE WINTER Institute in Mexico, February 9 to March 1, will take its members from the
deep past of Oaxaca's ruins through the folkways of Indian villages and the monuments of
colonial Spain to the present of a vigorous and inventive nation. The Program, through field
trips, lectures and round-tables, will open Mexico to the thoughtful visitor of curious mind.
IIIIIOIIII
The Thirteenth Seminar
J.HE THIRTEENTH Seminar in Mexico, July 13 — August 2, offers opportunity for serious
students to come to a surer understanding of the social, cultural and economic forces moving
in that Indian nation, a quicker insight into its rich heritage, its exciting present and its gallant
future.
IIIIIOIIII
The Seminar in South America
V_yUR FIRST Seminar in South America will center in Lima, Peru, in connection with the
Eighth Pan American Conference in December, 1938. Announcements will be available in
February.
Inquiries and Applications Should Be Addressed to
THE COMMITTEE ON CULTURAL RELATIONS WITH LATIN AMERICA, INC.
HUBERT HERRING, Director
289 Fourth Avenue New York
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
727
MODERN AS A STREAMLINER
(Continued from page 726)
he must first submit it to his lodge, or local. The grievance
chairman or committeeman (organization varies somewhat
from craft to craft) will carry the matter to the appro-
priate local official, if the local group agrees that "the case
has merit." This differs from the attitude of many union
groups, where a grievance is a grievance, and the job of the
chairman is to "take it up." One general chairman estimated
that in his organization 50 percent of the complaints are
"thrown out" by the lodge; of the rest, 90 percent are set-
tled locally.
As to the actual methods of handling a grievance, "Why,
I hardly know what to tell you," an oiler said, puzzled. "We
just set down at the table and talk it over, same as you and I
are doing now."
"We don't do any negotiating or anything like that," was
the way a general chairman put it. "Lots of times I just push
my file across the table, and I say 'You read mine and let me
read yours.' Once we get all the facts, it don't take long."
Usually when a grievance reaches "headquarters" it is
threshed out in the office of E. J. Connors, assistant to the
President in charge of personnel and labor relations. Once a
railroad yardmaster, he was with the Board of Railroad Wages
and Working Conditions during the period of federal con-
trol, and later on the staff of the U.S. Railway Labor Board.
Since 1928 he has been Mr. Jeffers' right hand man in deal-
ing with employment problems.
Mr. Jeffers himself is the self-made son of Irish immigrant
parents, a big, quiet, friendly man with a quick grasp of
complex detail, a phenomenal memory for facts and faces,
and hard-driving energy. He is chary of words. "But," a
friend told me, "he is one of the best long distance listeners
in the world." He has the faculty of focusing all his attention
on the matter in hand and he is sensitive to the "feel" of the
vast enterprise he heads, much as a mechanic knows his en-
gine is "off" before it begins to knock. His associates some-
times fume when executive decisions have to wait while he
considers the pension rights of an old employe, or hears about
"a little trouble we had out at Wathena." On every hand 1
was told that the Union Pacific has never employed labor
spies. "We don't need them," said Mr. Jeffers, contempt in
his voice. "If there's something wrong, we know it and we
call in the men and ask them about it. Then we see what can
be done. We have never had a situation yet we couldn't
work out right here on the property."
It seems to be a general Union Pacific rule that the office
door is always open. One union official I talked with, who
was just back from the Chicago wage negotiations, said, "You
couldn't hardly believe it if I was to tell you some of the
things I heard over there. Take this. One fellow [on another
road] was telling me he can only get to the superintendent
the first and third Wednesday in every month. And the
general manager — he's got two other days. Imagine sitting
around a couple of weeks with a grievance in your pocket!
It sure would burn you up!"
At the end of a long talk, this man said, "I don't want to
leave you with the impression the unions and the manage-
ment on this road always see alike. We have differences all
the time. I believe, for one, there would be something wrong
if we didn't. But we've had a lot of practice in talking things
over and giving a little when that seems the fair way. It isn't
our way for the management or the employes — either side —
to make threats or hand down orders."
The real test of such attitudes is the actual handling
of thorny problems. Take two instances. The ICC decision
approving the merger of the four properties making up the
present Union Pacific Railroad, allowed the company to cen-
tralize its accounting in Omaha. This meant the abolition of
many clerical positions in other cities, and the shifting of a
number of jobs to headquarters. Shortly before the ICC de-
cision was rendered, George M. Harrison, head of the Broth-
erhood of Railway Clerks, outlined to Mr. Jeffers, then
executive vice-president, a plan for making the necessary
adjustments in the clerical force, if and when the merger
was allowed. The two men worked out the details and the
scheme was ratified by the union and by management. Under
the agreement, clerical workers transferred to Omaha as a
result of the merger were reimbursed for property losses, and
for the expenses of moving their families and household goods.
Those not transferred received a dismissal wage equivalent
to one year's salary. A total of 155 workers were transferred.
Of the rest, 288 accepted dismissal wages ranging from $756
to $5100 each. The average was $1731, the largest number
between $1500 and $2000. Though the total cost of the agree-
ment to the Union Pacific was $531,420, the shift meant an
annual saving to the road of $473,188, of which by far the
largest item, $402,076, was wages. In May 1936, the carriers
and the railroad union of the country entered into a national
agreement providing similar benefits for employes affected
by such coordinations.
An older Union Pacific experiment, the pension plan
worked out under the leadership of E. H. Harriman in 1903,
has also been merged in the national pattern with the enact-
ment of a federal railroad retirement act, based on an agree-
ment between the railroads and the unions. Through 1936, a
total of 3611 employes had been pensioned by the Union
Pacific, at an aggregate cost of $14,529,635.97, the individual
pensions ranging from $25 to "$100 or over" a month, with
an average of $65.60.
The Railroad Answer to Airplanes
IN REVIEWING THE STORY OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS ON THE
Union Pacific it must be kept in mind that the railroad is a
business enterprise. It has a service — transportation — to sell.
And if it is to succeed, it must not only furnish transportation
which the public will buy, but its management must cover
operating costs and taxes and produce interest and dividends
for bond and stockholders, salaries and wages for all classes
of employes. The officials of the road are business men, whose
test of efficiency is the annual statement. They will tell you
that sound industrial relations can spring only from a mutual
belief in fair dealing. They will also tell you that sound
industrial relations are a real factor in maintaining the favor-
able balance which, year after year, the company is able to
show. The Union Pacific was one of the small group of Class
I railroads which came through the depression without a
loan from the government. It was one of a still smaller group
paying interest and dividends in the depression not out
of an accumulated surplus, but out of earnings. This record,
its officials will tell you frankly, is due in part to the rail-
road's early financial vicissitudes. For in the process of wreck-
ing and rebuilding, the railroad was "put through the
wringer," until, as American railroads go, it has a reasonable
financial structure. Even more important have been, since the
turn of the century, the consistent policies of conservative
financing and restraint in dividends, along lines laid down by
E. H. Harriman. But financial management, however skilled,
would not in itself account for the ability of this vast enter-
prise to go through the depression "in the black." Another
factor is Union Pacific pioneering, not only in the field of
industrial relations, but in practical railroading.
The railroads rolled along into the post-war years without
substantial change in the service they offered, indeed, with
no change beyond refinements for the "luxury" traveler. For
the most part, the industry seemed complacently oblivious to
728
the new developments in air and highway transportation.
Presently they felt not only the backwash of a general
business depression but the competition of airplanes which
they could not hope to match in speed; of trucks, buses and
private cars, which took an increasing share of freight, express
and passenger traffic for reasons of convenience and economy.
Many of the weaker railroads slid quietly into receivership.
Some attempted to fight back by acquiring and expanding
systems of bus lines which not only fed but in some cases
paralleled their railway lines.
W. A. Harriman, son of "the Driver" and chairman of the
board ("young Harriman," as they call him in railroad cir-
cles) had been in touch with engineers and metallurgists who
in this country and abroad were working toward streamlining
and light-weight train construction. In the fall of 1932 he
authorized a thorough study of these possibilities. In May
1933 the Union Pacific announced the purchase of a three-car
articulated train, built to its specifications of aluminum alloy,
radically streamlined, capable of safe speeds of 90 to 110
miles an hour.
The train made a barnstorming trip around the country,
and was exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair. A second
train, a six-car unit, broke the transcontinental record of 71
hours, established in 1906 with E. H. Harriman aboard. The
Streamliner flashed from coast to coast in 56 hours, 55 min-
utes with "young Harriman" as one of its passengers.
Other railroads experimented in the same field. Streamlined
trains now running on many lines, are the dramatic reply of
the railroads to the airplane. At this writing they have an
unblemished safety record. While the fatalities in airplane
accidents mount with the increased passenger load of the
"super planes," no streamlined-train passenger has been killed
or injured.
Cost-and-Comfort Travel
BUT THE REAL "FORGOTTEN MAN" OF THE RAILROADS WAS NOT
the traveler who demands speed and luxury, and never mind
the cost. These passengers, bulking large in importance, per-
haps, are small in number (and in potential railroad revenue)
compared with the ordinary citizen, his wife and children who
have of late years traveled by bus or the family car. Offered
high railroad rates, day coach discomforts, expensive meals,
the great American middle class turned eagerly to the newer
means of transportation. First of the railroad executives, Mr.
Jeffers realized that the roads could meet such competition
only on a cost-and-comfort basis. He cooperated with Mr.
Harriman in the development of the streamliners, pushing
plans and ideas to their stirring fulfillment, and at the same
time set out to win back to the rails a share of the bus and
family car traffic. The result was another fleet of trains, made
up of coaches and tourist sleepers. The coaches are air con-
ditioned, well equipped, well serviced. The tourist sleepers
are yesterday's standard Pullman cars, air conditioned and
modernized. The coffee shop diners serve low cost meals —
a 25-cent breakfast, for example, and a 35-cent dinner. The
coach travelers pay the minimum railroad fare and have no
"extras" except meals. Tourist passengers pay a slightly higher
"tourist fare" but they save substantially on both ticket and
berth as compared with Pullman rates. In the new coach and
tourist accommodations, the emphasis is on comfort and con-
venience— "the public be served."
The idea of raising low cost travel toward the "luxury
level" was derided by a lot of railroad executives, east and
west. Most of these skeptics have been converted by the
mounting totals of Union Pacific passenger traffic and passen-
ger revenue. To quote the annual report of the board to the
stockholders last year (1936): "The increase of 34.5 percent
in 'passenger revenue' shown in the president's report is the
greatest percentage increase for any large railroad in the
United States (the increase over the year 1934 is 62.5 per-
(Continued on page 730)
IN MEMORY OF MY DEAR
FRIEND AND ASSOCIATE
ARTHUR
KELLOG G
WHO CONTRIBUTED NO-
BLY TO THE IDEALS OF
SURREY ASSOCIATES AND
TO THE THINGS FOR
WHICH THEY STAND
* •
HARRY L. MOAK
SPEAKERS AVAILABLE
THIS SEASON
SIR NORMAN ANGELL
ROBERT H. BERKOV
BRUCE BLIVEN
DR. FRANK BOHN
DR. LEWIS BROWNE
JULIEN BRYAN
DR. LYMAN BRYSON
SALVADOR de MADARIAGA
DR. HENRY PRATT FAIRCHILD
MARY AGNES HAMILTON
DR. LUDWIG LEWISOHN
HEINZ LIEPMANN
KLAUS MANN
JOHN MULHOLLAND
NATHANIEL PEFFER
S. K. RATCLIFFE
DAVID SEABURY
EDWARD TOMLINSON
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD
SARAH WAMBAUGH
DR. ALBERT WIGGAM
WILLIAM B. FEAKINS, INC.
1200 Taylor St., San Franci:co 500 Fifth Ave., New York
(In answering advertisements please
729
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
MODERN AS A STREAMLINER
(Continued from page 729)
cent)." This year's figures are confidently expected to show
substantial improvement over 1936. In all this Union Pacific
labor has had a hand in writing the current balance sheet of
the road. Employes have even ventured into promotion.
In 1931, they organized a Boosters League, to help secure
new business and increase public goodwill. From cities and
towns along the line, members of the league send in "traffic
tips" — a carload of feed ordered by a local dealer which
"ought to come by Union Pacific," a prairie lumberyard ex-
pecting a big shipment of Oregon pine, a group of local
teachers going to a county institute in a Union Pacific town
— and these are followed up by the appropriate freight and
passenger agents. Careful estimates indicate that the activities
of the league have brought in $1,500,000 to $2 million in
business which the Union Pacific otherwise might have lost.
At the Old Timers dinner, the league gave the new president
of the road a leather bound book with this explanation:
"The forty thousand Union Pacific boosters ... as a token of
their high regard and esteem . . . present you with this
memento of 210,000 friendly contacts made by them in the
last thirty days especially for this occasion. These pages out-
line the traffic they have developed, aggregating 2609 carloads,
2530 less-than-carloads, and 4944 tickets with an approximate
revenue of $305,364. While all were not successful in having
their names recorded, their friendly contacts were highly in-
strumental in procuring the further definite promise of future
traffic aggregating 1822 carloads, 6138 less-than-carloads, and
1916 tickets with an estimated revenue of $208,740. In further
token of their sincerity they pledge you their loyal support
... in making and keeping the Union Pacific the greatest
railroad in the world."
The last sentence has an artificial sound. But as one talks
with Union Pacific executives and employes, seeking to co
behind words to the realities of labor relations, such frayed
terms as cooperation and good will seem to take on depth and
solidity. Granted the disagreements that often arise (and
both sides grant them freely) years of mutual give and take
have laid a foundation of common understanding in the
furtherance of a joint enterprise. In general, both labor and
management accept the going scheme of things. As a young
brakeman put it, (when I tried to turn our discussion to
broader considerations) "It isn't our job to make over the
world. Our job is to run our railroad. That keeps us plenty
busy." There are radical groups among the railroad workers
who chafe at the obvious inequalities of the American scene.
But on the whole, these railroad men are chiefly concerned
with the day's work, which they see as an essential part of
that larger enterprise — "running our railroad." They have,
however, a strong sense of "the fair thing."
Union Pacific executives have accepted the unions, furthered
old age pensions and a hospital fund, established and main-
tained high standards of safety and efficiency, not as steps
toward some remote goal, but for two homely and matter
of fact reasons: "It's the fair way of doing things," and, "It
pays." Employes have disciplined their own ranks, helped
maintain operating standards and boost business on much
the same grounds.
The Job Ahead
AND IT IS IN THIS SPIRIT THAT THE MANAGEMENT AND UNION
leaders alike face what they consider the road's chief labor
problem today: stabilization of employment. On the Union
Pacific in pre-depression years, employment swunq; from an
annual peak of about 54,000 down to about 44.000 with the
seasonal ups and downs of passenger travel and croo m"vp.
ments. At the lowest point of tht depression (March 1933)
employment on the road stood at 23,781. This year it climbed
above 39,000.
It is doubtful whether employment will go to pre-depression
levels because of technical advances. For example, locomotives
used to run only 100 to 150 miles without repair. Now they
run 500 miles, which means that fewer repair shops are
needed. Similarly, new processes of treating ties have greatly
extended their serviceability. These technical trends seem like-
ly to continue, perhaps to accelerate. Further, there is a seasonal
problem not only in traffic but in maintenance of way. Track
work, like field work, cannot go forward when the ground is
frozen or snow covered. Landslides, washouts, floods, bliz-
zards disrupt systematic maintenance programs. Finally, the
railroads must meet the demands of the public. Once pas-
sengers had enjoyed the comfort of air conditioning, for
example, they resented "hot cars," wanted all cars air condi-
tioned forthwith. This meant months of feverish activity in
the shops, to push through a program which from the point
of view of steady employment should have been spaced over
several years. With such changes to reckon with, management
and unions alike are thinking in terms of more regular work,
which means more dependable annual incomes for the work-
ers— and look for gains to these ends in 1938.
The Human Accomplishment
I HAVE TRIED CONSCIENTIOUSLY TO SET DOWN THIS CHAPTER OF
the Union Pacific story, to describe the working relations
between management and unions, and report comments from
both groups. Yet this leaves many questions unanswered.
Why in this part of the American labor scene does common
sense give-and-take prevail, instead of bitterness and strife?
What is the wellspring of the good feeling manifest at the
Omaha dinner? There is, of course, no single answer to such
questions.
The Union Pacific has grown accustomed to union-
management agreements and labor legislation. But alonsj with
tradition and experience, the human factor enters in. Part of
the answer perhaps shone through that great dinner given by
employes in honor of the new president of the company, with
its "time table" precision and its hearty expressions of mutual
"regard and esteem." Part of the answer lay in the spirit and
attitude that prompted the new head of this oldest western
railroad to say that night:
"I have my own philosophy of life. It is simple. It is western.
It can be written in a few phrases. Accept a man at face value,
without reference to antecedents, creed or race. Applaud a
deed that merits applause, but at the same time remember
that men are but men, with the frailness and proneness to
error of men. . . . This simple western philosophy is the one on
which the Union Pacific has been built. You may attribute to
that the meaningful fact that the Union Pacific is the only
Class I railroad which, before the World War, during the
war and after the war and federal control, never had a labor
grievance which was not settled on the property. Not a single
case has ever been referred to an adjustment board."
And from this standpoint, there was also special signifi-
cance in the words of W. Averell Harriman, chairman of the
board:
"In the railroad industry, management and labor are closer
to an understanding perhaps than in any great industry in the
country. . . . Although the Union Pacific has been a leader in
the railroad industry in the improvement of facilities and
improvement in service, I put this human accomplishment as
the greatest contribution to progress that the Union Pacific
has made to the country."
730
CONSUMERS UNION
Announces
Have there been any improvements in cars
this year of importance to consumers?
What changes in gearshifting mechanisms
have been made and of what importance are
they?
Are the 1938 cars more economical to operate
than the 1937 cars?
What changes in tuning have been made on
the 1938 radios and how desirable are they?
What other changes have been made and how
important are they?
These and many simi'ar questions are answered in
the reports described below.
reports on 1938 AUTOS and 1938 RADIOS
Also in the current issue:
Electric Shavers
Will electric shavers give as close or as satis-
factory a shave as ordinary safety razors? Do
they irritate more or less? Are they worth the
high price? Nine brands ranging in price from
$7.50 to $17.50 were subjected to use tests and
engineering examination and rated as "Best
Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not Accept-
able." Those who look forward to a shaver's
paradise with an electric shaver should read this
report before buying.
Cigars
No amount of cellophane, Xmas seals and red
ribbons can disguise a bad cigar. This report,
which rates 20 brands (including White Owl,
Robert Burns, Cremo and Phillies) should be
particularly welcomed by cigar-giving CU mem-
bers.
Toys
No gift can cause the giver more anxiety than
toys. At what age should electric trains be given?
What kinds of toys do children get the most
enjoyment and the most value out of and at
what ages? Which types of toys should be
avoided? Three reports in this issue answer these
questions. The first, based on the recommenda-
tions of a director of a widely-known nursery
school, tells which toys should be given to
children between the ages of two to six; the second
rates toy chemistry sets, and the third discusses
dolls.
Lipsticks
More than 40 brands are rated in this report.
Stains caused by some of these brands would not
wash out in tests. Many brands were grossly over-
priced— one brand showing a mark-up of 5000%
over the cost of the ingredients. Another caused
[ marked irritation. Several ten cent brands were
rated "Best Buys."
Life Insurance
The second of a series of reports on life insur-
ance-;—the first of which described briefly how
the life insurance business operates. This report
analyzes life insurance premiums. Next month's
installment will give specific recommendations
on types of contracts.
Baked Beans, etc.
Other reports in this issue give valuable buying
advice on baked beans, canned salmon and
electric toothbrushes.
Coming !
Reports on cigarettes, coffee, shoes, razor blades
and other products. Also a series on housing and
building materials.
To make sure of receiving the reports
described above fill in and mail the
coupon at the right.
AUTOS Pr'ces are up approximately 10% making technical guidance in buying more
necessary than ever. A preliminary technical appraisal of the 1938 models
by Consumers Union's automotive consultants appearing in the current (December)
issue of Consumers Union Reports gives a summary of the important changes on each of
more than 25 models (including the Ford, Chevrolet, Buick and Packard). The signifi-
cance of each change is indicated. Trailers are also discussed. Read this report before
buying any car! It will give you a basis for making a wise selection. A later issue will
carry ratings of the 1938 cars by name as "Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not
Acceptable."
RADIOS Pr'ces are up in this field, too. In nearly every brand the buyer must pay
more this year than he did last year for a radio capable of any given level
of performance. A report, based on performance tests for such factors as tone quality,
ability to get stations without interference, ability to pick up weak stations with satis-
factory volume, general mechanical excellence, etc., rates the leading 1938 models as
"Best Buys," "Also Acceptable," and "Not Acceptable." Five communications-type
receivers for advanced amateurs are also compared.
OTHER REPORTS in the December issue give test results on leading brands of cigars,
lipsticks, electric shavers, men's shorts, and other products. The report on life insurance
is also continued. For a fuller description of these reports see the column at the left.
To receive a copy of this issue fill in and mail the coupon below. The membership fee
of S3 will bring you 12 issues of the Reports and, without extra charge, the 1937 240-page
Consumers Union Annual Buying Guide which gives brand recommendations on over
1,000 products. You can start your membership with the current issue or with any of
the previous issues listed below.
WHAT CONSUMERS UNION IS— Consumers Union of United States is a non-profit, membership
organization established to conduct research and tests on consumer goods and to provide consumers with
information which will permit them to buy their food, clothing, household supplies and other product
most intelligently. Tests are conducted by expert staff technicians with the help of over 200 consultant
in university, government and private laboratories. In most cases, comparisons of the quality of product
are given in terms of brand names with ratings as "Best Buys," "Also AcceptaHe." and "Not Acceptable.
Information is also given on the labor conditions under which products are made. The sound, constructiv
advice on buying contained in Consumers Union Reports can help keep expenses down at the present tim
when living costs are going up.
Some of the Subjects Covered in Past Issues of the Reports
MAY — Trailers, Washintf Ma- AUG. -SEPT. — Refrigerators,
chines. Moth Preven- Films, Ice Cream, In-
tives, Constipation. ner Tubes.
JUNE — Non-miniature Cam-
eras, Radio Tubes,
Sanitary Napkins.
JULY — Miniature Cameras,
Gasolines, Golf Balls,
Motor Oils.
OCT. — Oil Burners and Coal
Stokers. Breakfast Cer-
eals, Auto Radios.
NOV.— Life Insurance, Port-
able Typewriters,
Men's Hats. Anti-
Free zes.
CONSUMERS UNION
OF UNITED STATES, INC.
55 Vandam Street, New York City
Send me CONSUMERS UNION REPORTS tor one
year (12 Issues) starting with the
Issue. I enclose S3 for membership, $2.50 of which Is
tor subscription. I agree to keep confidential all ma-
terial sent to me which Is so designated.
Name. . .
Colston E. Warne, President
Arthur Kallet, Director city. . .
D. H. Palmer. Technical Supervisor L. — — — -
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
731
.State (SG-12)
SURVEY
GRAPHIC
announces for
early publication . . .
FIGHTING SYPHILIS IN
THE SOUTH
Dr. Thomas Parran, who wrote the trail blazing
article on syphilis which appeared in the July 1936
Survey Graphic and has since been reprinted and widely
distributed throughout the United States, now describes
what some Southern communities are doing to stamp
out syphilis.
PAROLE IN NEW YORK
Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York tells pre-
cisely what happens when a prisoner is released on parole
under the law of a progressive state. In so doing he hurls
a mighty challenge at the critics of the parole system.
COAL TOWN
Lewis H. Hine presents a photographic panorama of
a typical coal town in West Virginia . . . the place,
the people, the work, and the enormous changes wrought
by the arrival of the coal loading machine.
BEFORE AND AFTER
FORTY IN INDUSTRY
Maxine Davis, having completed a coast to coast
survey, answers the question — What chance has the
college graduate of 1938 in industry today? Farnsworth
Crowder discusses jobs after forty — who has them, who
gets them, who doesn't, and why.
ALSO
Part 2 of the articles begun in this issue by H. G. Wells,
Dr. and Mrs. Douglas Orr, and the poem by Thomas
Wood Stevens.
SURVEY GRAPHIC, 112 East 19 Street, New York City.
Enter my subscription for n one year at $3 OR H two years at ?5.
D I enclose payment in full, OR n I will pay in 30 days. 12-37
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Address.
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(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
732
Footnote to Progress
WE ARE A CLEANER PEOPLE, IN PERSONAL AND PUBLIC HYGIENE,
than we were back in the horse-and-buggy days of the house
fly and the public drinking cup. Nevertheless it is shocking
to see how cleanliness lags in some distinctive institutions of
these post-war years — for example, the quick lunch spots
and drugstore counters where millions of city people take
their meals.
Accompanied by R. R. Parker, a bacteriologist, I visited a
number of popular soda fountains in New York City. We
took with us sterile agar plates, and clapped them over the
rims of our unused tumblers. Then the plates were put away
at temperatures favoring bacterial growth. In a couple of
days tiny spots, visible to the naked eye, appeared, each a
"colony" of hundreds of thousands of germs. From water
glasses were grown 37; 112; 225; 330 colonies; from milk
glasses 114; from fruit juice glasses 115 and 444.
How did these germs get there? The answer was suggested
by a second test. We asked twelve office girls to kiss sterile
plates. In a day or two the germs implanted by their kisses,
fed upon agar and multiplying at the rate of a generation
every 15 or 20 minutes, had also become visible as colonies.
Each kiss produced from 10 up to 560 bacterial colonies.
Among the germs present were some which can cause serious
infections.
Here was a simple demonstration of the fact, known to all
health authorities, that germs can be communicated through
"saliva exchange" in every unsanitary drugstore, restaurant
or barroom.
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1918, WHEN THE GREAT INFLUENZA EPIDEMIC
was at its height, two officers of the Army Medical Corps,
Col. Charles Lynch and Lt. Col. James G. Gumming, ob-
served that some of the troops in the camps ate from utensils
which had been boiled, while others stood in line to slosh
their mess-kits in a tub of dirty, lukewarm water. Painstak-
ingly these doctors gathered health figures according to the
method of mess-kit washing. Result: of 32,624 soldiers who
sloshed their mess-kits in the good old Army way, 25 percent
came down with flu; of 33,452 who ate from tableware or
mess-kits that were boiled, only 5 percent. Other factors may
have been involved, but there seemed to be some connection
between poorly washed mess-kits and the spread of flu.
There are thousands of small eating and drinking places
throughout the country, and in many of them there is a lack
of cleanliness, which appalls even the layman. We do not
have to be bacteriologists to suspect the presence of germs
when our coffee cup wears a garland of second hand lipstick.
Two professors of Michigan State College, investigating
saloons and roadhouses in Lansing, found as many as 100,000
bacteria on a single glass. Bacteriologists at Massachusetts
State College went them 250,000 germs per glass better.
Inspectors of the Alabama State Board of Health examined
soda fountains in Montgomery during the rush hour and
identified all the bacteria found; 40 percent of them were
capable of producing disease.
One record-breaking discovery in a bar was rinse water
with a bacterial count slightly in excess of that for good ripe
sewage! "Alcohol kills germs," you may say. Yes, but in a
drink only if it is strongly alcoholic, if the germ stays in it
long enough, and if the liquor is poured up to the danger
point, which is the brim.
Despite the development of modern equipment for sterili-
zation of dishes, glasses and cooking utensils, in many eating
places the system is exactly as it was years ago. The job is done
by hand, in a bigger hurry than it used to be. The customer is
usually in a hurry and, to judge from appearances, the health
inspector is frequently in a hurry as well.
Drugstores, selling a hundred germ killers, should be the
safest places of all. But, ironically enough, opposite the drug
counter there often stands a soda fountain where an attendant
"sozzles" a glass just laid down by someone else, refills it,
and gives it to you. If the sozzling is perfunctory, and the
water only warm, your lips may pick off the glass some of the
germs parked there by the previous customer.
EVERY MODERN CITY'S WATER AND MILK SUPPLY ARE CAREFULLY
checked for bacteria by health officers. But what is the use
of safeguarding our water and our milk if we are careless
about what we drink them from? We don't have to hug the
victim of a contagious disease in order to catch it. The glass
or fork he puts down on the counter may be the disease
germ's stepping-stone. If our own mouth is the next step, we
are that much nearer getting the disease ourselves.
Do not let these facts and figures worry you too much.
There are germs everywhere — in the air, in the soil, in our
own bodies. Yet we are still alive. Most germs are harmless;
without germs dead plants and animals would litter the earth.
Also, our bodies have powerful and mysterious mechanisms
to combat the invasion of disease germs. Microbes may be
tough (they won't squash under 45,000 pounds pressure;
typhoid germs frozen for three months woke up and started
an epidemic in Pennsylvania), but man is tougher. Normally,
the presence of germs in his system may mean only that he
builds up greater resistance to them.
But is that any reason for daily ushering into the system
a large assortment of other people's germs via the unclean
soda fountain glass or restaurant tableware?
A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, KANSAS OUTLAWED THE COMMON
drinking cup. Since then, state after state has imposed upon
food dispensers even higher standards for the use of disin-
fectants and hot water. But enforcement is often lax.
The accomplishment of many energetic health officers could
well be imitated in communities where enforcement is
neglected. The Department of Public Welfare of Dayton,
Ohio, collects and tests in the laboratory 500 eating utensils
every week. In Wheeling, W. Va., the Health Department
publishes in the newspapers laboratory reports of establish-
ments, with their names, addresses, and the count of bacteria
found upon their glasses, forks and spoons. In Detroit,
before a license is issued to a food-handling establishment,
all employes must obtain a medical examination. The report
of the examination is forwarded to the Department of Health,
where each food-handler must go to receive a permit card
good for one year. At the department offices, the food-
handlers are given special instruction on communicable
diseases, and are taught what it may mean to the customer if
they fail to wash their hands after coughing or sneezing into
them. Permanent records are kept and checked each year in
order to prevent fraud.
Recently the Health Department of New York City held
up the permit renewals of 286 restaurants (out of 591 in-
spected) until they should install facilities for washing
utensils in hot water.
HERE is A SIMPLE REMEDY FOR A CONDITION THAT THREATENS
the health of American men, women and children. Scalding
hot water, and plenty of it. By this means, the risk from
bacteria can be greatly reduced. By the addition of certain
simple chemical disinfectants, bacteria can be entirely
eliminated.
In every city you can see dishwashers cleaning glasses by
dipping them into dirty brown water. Don't let them get
away with it. If you must patronize such places, demand a
paper cup. But better still, complain to the local health officer,
and support him in his campaign to keep drugstores, rest-
aurants and bars from being one of the links in a long chain
of disease. — ROGER WILLIAM Rns.
|iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinin»iiii i mimniiii 11111111111111111111 iiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiiuuuiuiiiiig
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Check the booklets you want. They will be sent promptly, postpaid.
D Money Management for House-
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D Marrying on a Small Income, finan-
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L_ Poultry, Eggs and Fish n Kitchen Utensils
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Linen and Towels G Wool Clothing
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visiting companion or reader to invalid or
shutin ; experienced in literary work. Terms
moderate, highest references. 7478 Survey.
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REAL ESTATE
1912
Is An Apple Orchard Worth While?
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734
THE LIVING LAW
(Continued from page 635)
between his conviction of industrial right and what he had
always been taught. The law reports are filled with evidence
of these wrestlings with the angels of legalism over conscien-
tious objections which have no grounding in reality.
In the United States Supreme Court many a glorious vic-
tory has been won for workmen's compensation against ob-
stacles which were the creation of the spokesman for the
court. There is no more pathetic line in all the reports than
that of Mr. Justice McKenna in the Arizona Liability cases,
who finds himself reluctant to dissent, yet unable to concur
in the new-fangled doctrines and hopes that the explanation
is not his advancing age. A few minutes before, Mr. Justice
Holmes had just explained — rather belatedly for a high judi-
cial body — that all the talk about rights and actions and the
taking of property was beside the point — if not downright
irrelevant — since compensation for accident was a cost of
production and, like other expenses, passed along with the
price of the goods. But the issue was resolved by the thinnest
of margins — and not until a decade ago could it be asserted
that industrial injury had ceased to be a cause of action be-
tween the two high contracting parties and had become the
solicitous concern of administrative law. Nor can it with cer-
tainty be said today; run over the statutes of the states or
thumb the Federal Reporter for half a day. The Lord Abin-
gers and the Mr. Chief Justice Shaws are no more, but ritual-
ists who follow them live on.
Ill
As TIME NOW GOES A QUARTER OF A CENTURY IS A LONG TIME
in the life of the law. As a mass movement it has no strategy,
knows no regular march, captures no salients, and consoli-
dates no positions. It is only as cases come, as issues are newly
clarified, as a broader understanding is brought to judgment
that it advances. Its techniques and procedures are forged in
the heat of litigious struggle; the spirit with which decisions
live must come from the mind of the people. Judges are art-
ists; the work of the courts is creative; but the materials from
which they must forever refashion the law come from the
folk. And in the last twenty-five years those materials have
come in a stream so large and turbulent that the courts could
not assimilate them to the old legal patterns.
A quarter century ago, borne upon "the Spirit of 1912,"
Woodrow Wilson had just been elected to the Presidency.
The cries of voters for "the new freedom" and "the new
nationalism" had given the party of the stalwarts third place
in the national election. The United States Supreme Court
had less of the importance with which it is invested today. It
had, on a few occasions, struck down state acts in the name
of due process of law. It had done its bit in emasculating the
interstate commerce and the Sherman anti-trust acts; and in
the famous bakeshop case, it had outlawed a statute of New
York regulating hours, threatened to block social legislation,
and provoked Mr. Justice Holmes into the most famous dis-
senting opinion ever written. Although it had the year before
ordered the dissolution of the tobacco and the oil trusts, it was
under criticism. During his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt
had discovered that "justices seldom die and never resign"
and recently had been demanding "the recall of judicial de-
cisions." The great hope of the liberals, Mr. Justice Harlan,
had left the bench the year before; and, since a suspicion of
conservatism clung to Mr. Justice Holmes, he had not yet
been crowned by popular consent.
Nonetheless the succession had passed. Mr. Justice Bran-
deis, armed with realism and statistics, appeared in 1916;
Mr. Justice Stone, with judicial poise and a wariness of the
tricks legal concepts can play, arrived in 1923; and Mr. Jus-
(Continued on page 736)
Olga meets her beau
on the corner
PAPA MIRAKOFF rages. Mamma Mirakoff
pleads. But Olga won't let her new beau call!
"Not in this dirty house!" she cries, and flaunts
out.
It isn't Mrs. MirafcofFs fault. She tries to keep
things neat — but two hands can't do everything!
A good way to help Olga— and all the Mira-
koffs — is to show Mamma Mirakoff how to get
more cleaning done with less effort. And that's
where Fels-Naptha Soap is well worth suggesting.
For Fels-Naptha's richer, golden soap and plenty
of naptha loosen dirt quicker — even in cool water.
Write Fels & Co., Philadelphia, Pa., for a sam-
ple bar of Fels-Naptha, mentioning Survey Graphic.
FELS-NAPTHA
THE GOLDEN BAR WITH THE CLEAN NAPTHA ODOR
PLAN YOUR 1938 VACATION NOW
Write The Survey for information as to the special
train to the National Conference of Social Work
next June, with stopover at Glacier National Park.
SCOUTINQ
MARCHES
ON 1
Twenty-five years of
sustained growth in ser-
vice to boyhood:
1912.
1913.
1914.
1915.
98,647
114,882
132,741
182.303
1916 246,073
1917 356,609
1918 420,006
1919 462,781
1920 603,726
1921 630,203
1922 614,466
1923 661,452
1924 696,420
1925 766,857
1926 811,268
1927 814,481
1928.
1929.
1930.
1931.
819,791
842.540
864,341
878.358
1932 878,461
1933 904,240
1934 958,256
1935 1,027.833
1936 1,069,729
1937 1,087,025
(Ausr. 31)
Attractive brochure free upon application.
BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA
2 Park Ave., New York
(In answering advertisements please
735
mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
THE LIVING LAW
(Continued from page 735)
tice Cardozo, able to make the letter obey the spirit of the
law, took his seat in 1932. On important issues, these men
have often prevailed; as often they have spoken in dissent. But
their utterances have had a vitality which "the opinions of
the court" have lacked; and through them and their colleagues
in agreement — a people is shaping to its necessities the high-
est law of the land.
The Common Hazards of Social Legislation
As AN EXAMPLE, WORK ACCIDENT INDEMNITY MUST DO DUTY
for an account of how the law is kept alive. Here space allows
no more in addition than a recitation of the common hazards
which all social legislation must run. It requires the most per-
sistent effort to force a measure for workmen's compensation,
maximum hours of work, or a minimum wage for women
past committees, through both your houses, and over a gov-
nernor's signature. That done, the loser with a rare sense
of sportsmanship evokes a trial of the issue by resort to the
ordeal of law. As one to whom the very idea of a disregard
for "law and order" is abhorrent he appeals to the courts in
the name of the higher law. He would love to obey the statute
but his devotion to the Constitution forbids; and even if he
cannot specify section and clause, his inner feelings are strong
and he can depend upon his attorney for a vicarious presenta-
tion of a bill of particulars. If it is a state that acts, it is his
duty to defend the jurisdiction of the federal government
against invasion; and when the national government by regu-
lation obtrudes beyond its domain, surely it is his sacred duty
to protect the police power of the state against aggression.
To one who finds the unwelcome hand of the state within
the walls of his own business, it is evident that his rights arc
being violated. The bother is purely a technical one — to voice
his objections in the language of the Constitution.
Any lawyer knows that the larger the concept and the
more abstruse the verbal symbol, the greater the chance of
planting a particular there for a bench of judges to discover.
So the Constitution has been combed again and again for
abstractions that can be employed as henchmen in a super-
legal game. From a large number which have been accorded
trial heats, a very few have been proven worthy of high
judicial combat. Against a measure of social reform it is
usual to plead a lack of jurisdiction on the part of the legis-
lature. The Constitution entrusts to the Congress power to
regulate "commerce among the several states," but it neither
supplies a definition to the word nor does it tell where inter-
state commerce leaves off and intrastate commerce begins.
Here is the superb opportunity; the will of the Constitution
must prevail, yet the parchment has nothing to say. So the
text requires a gloss, rival interpretations spring to life and
logomachy comes into its own.
In the earlier part of the last quarter century, the activity
was centered in state legislatures; it was the habit in chal-
lenging a statute to insist that its operation extended well
into the field of "commerce among the several states." Now
that the federal government has usurped the dominant role,
the litigious parties have swapped arguments, and the cur-
rent fashion in attack is that the powers of the states are be-
ing nullified. It is touching to note a solicitude, where only
yesterday there was grave concern, over the police power of
the states.
It is, however, the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment which has proved most fertile in legalistic possi-
bility. Its words are, with a change in voice from passive to
active^ copied from the Fifth Amendment attached as a part of
a bill of rights to the Constitution of 1787. To the Fathers due
process of law had to do with procedure; it was a prohibition
against arbitrary acts on the part of public officials — such as
England under the Stuarts and Colonial America under the
Georges had abundantly experienced. It would never have
occurred to a late eighteenth century worthy that it was
or could be a check upon the orderly processes of legislation.
But the law is not insulated against current opinion. An
individualism everywhere in vogue was most easily assimi-
lated into the law of contract. By the Thirties of the last cen-
tury private bargain had won a lordly province that once
belonged to regulation. By a contagious verbal magic it
passed from contract to tort and, as we have seen, permeated
the rules of employer's liability. But before the Civil War
individualism found its easiest conquests and its broadest
domains in a common law not yet subdued by statute. The
courts now and then gave a display of their power; occa-
sionally on one pretext or another the statute of a state was
struck down by the United States Supreme Court. But, but-
tressed behind the police power, a commonwealth might do
much as it willed to promote the general welfare. It was not
until after 1868, the year that marked the ratification of the
Fourteenth Amendment and the appearance of Cooley's Con-
stitutional Limitations, that the way was cleared for a new
economic interpretation of the Constitution. Even then there
was the delay, the fumbling for issues, the confusion in attack
that attends a mass movement. The "privileges and immuni-
ties" clause was seized upon and discovered to be good fot
only four out of nine votes; the next section was turned to,
and by the help of copious quotations from Turgot, Adam
Smith and the Declaration of Independence "the rights of
man" were read into the prohibition of the taking of "life,
liberty and property without due process of law." First blood
was drawn in 1886 when a Chinaman, who had been dis-
criminated against by California authorities, was accorded
the right to run his laundry. In the same year, in an oral
dictum that had nothing to do with the case, the Chief Justice
announced that the court was ready to admit, without argu-
ment, that a corporation was a person within the intendment
of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was, however, not until
1897 that a state statute was struck down in the cause of
due process. The new century was on its way before the
crusade against social legislation in the holy name of the
Constitution was on.
The Law and Prevailing Opinion
THE VERBAL HISTORY OF DOCTRINE AND DECISION IS ENGAGING
and complicated. The logic in the march of judicial events
is simplicity itself. From the seventies, as cause followed
cause, the Constitution had to take the impact of an economic
doctrine far removed from the mercantilism of the Founding
Fathers. In philosophy it was called individualism, in govern-
ment laissez-faire. In economics it found expression in the
teachings of the uncompromising classicists; it beat upon con-
stitutional law as the right of free contract. It had made its
way into the learning of the day, the dominant editorial
opinion and common sense. The law would have been
less than living if it had made no response to prevailing
opinion. The Constitution offered more resistance to its in-
trusion than did many another institution; for within it the
police power, broad enough to promote public safety, public
health, public morals and even on occasion to serve an in-
definite public welfare, was entrenched. The wonder is that
freedom of contract came to constitutional law so late and
made such a partial conquest of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Due process and equal protection held out no invitation to
its coming; they were merely the clauses seized upon to give
sanctions to the philosophy of laissez-faire. Other clauses of
ponderous sound and inviting meaning adorn the Constitu-
tion; and, had the verbal symbols of the due process clause
not been there, the newer doctrines would not have lacked
supporting verbiage in the document. From the first, eco-
(Continued on page 738)
736
EDUCATIONAL DIRECTORY
SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WORK
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Offers a two-year graduate professional course
leading to the degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SOCIAL WORK
also a pre-professional program
leading to the degree of
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
Preparation for positions in public
and private agencies.
Field work opportunities in Case Work. Group Work,
Community Organization, and Social Research.
For information, address
MRS. MARY CLARKE BURNETT
Head, Department of Social Work
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
Graduate School of Social Work
Lincoln, Nebraska
The University of Nebraska announces the estab-
lishment of a Graduate School of Social Work
offering one to three years graduate training in
the basic courses.
Full particulars may be had by writing the
Director oj the School.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BUFFALO
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
announces new courses in
Social Security Legislation
Housing and City Planning
Public Administration
Social Work Problems and Policies
Interviewing and Recording
CONGRATULATIONS
to Survey Associates for its
noteworthy success in the
field of social work during
the past twenty-five years.
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
FOR JEWISH SOCIAL WORK
71 WEST 47 STREET NEW YORK CITY
THE NATIONAL CATHOLIC SCHOOL
of
SOCIAL SERVICE
Washington, D. C.
EXTENDS GREETINGS
to
SURVEY GRAPHIC
YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF NURSING
A Profession for the College Woman
ph
pniiosopny irum a UUIICKC vi a^pi
admission. For catalogue address
The Dean, Yale School of Nursing, New Haven, Conn.
Spend three restful days enroute
with your friends who are joining
the special train being organized
for the convenience of social
workers going to the National
Conference.
See Back Cover of this issue.
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
737
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
Courses of Instruction
Plan A The course leading to the Master's degree consists
of three summer sessions at Smith College and two
winter sessions of supervised case work at selected
social agencies in various cities. This course is
designed for those who have had little or no pre-
vious experience in social work. Limited to forty-
five.
Plan B Applicants who have at least one year's experience
in an approved social agency, or the equivalent,
may receive credit for the first summer session and
the first winter session, and receive the Master's
degree upon the completion of the requirements of
two summer sessions and one winter session of
supervised case work. Limited to thirty-five.
Plan C A summer session of eight weeks fs open to experi-
enced social workers. A special course in case work
is offered by Miss Beatrice H. Wajdyk. Limited to
thirty-five.
SMITH COLLEGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL WORK
Contents for September, 1937
SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW FOR
CHILD GUIDANCE
Published Quarterly 75c a copy; $2.00 a year
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL WORK
offers a series of correlated courses for
supervisors July 6 to August 31, 1938
Supervision — Miss Bertha C. Reynolds
Case Work— Miss Beatrice H. Wajdyk
Psychiatry — Dr. LeRoy M. A. Maeder
Group Relationships — Miss Bertha C. Reynolds
Open to graduates of schools of social work who have
had three years' experience as case workers in approved
agencies.
Tuition, room and board $200
For further information write to
THE DIRECTOR COLLEGE HALL 8
Northampton, Massachusetts
(In answering advertisements
THE LIVING LAW
(Continued from page 736)
nomic individualism had hard going; the police power gave
a firm foundation to social legislation; it was discovered that
leaving things alone left all sorts of untoward problems in
its wake; a demand for a measure of public control grew,
and there were always its dissenters to remind the Supreme
Court alike of the ancient law and of current realities.
As a result, for more than a quarter of a century we have
been in a period of constitutional confusion. After many a
hard dialectical battle the employer has come to be responsi-
ble for industrial accident and the way seems open for unem-
ployment compensation. A decision of the highest court in
the land excepted women from freedom of contract in respect
to hours of labor — and later included men within the excep-
tion. A state may "within reason" do as it will with hours;
how far the federal government may go is another matter.
A minimum wage for women was in 1917 sustained "by an
evenly divided court" only to be voted down six years later;
it was found null and void in 1936 and in strict accord with
the Constitution in 1937. A railway retirement act was meas-
ured against the Constitution and found wanting in 1935;
a general scheme of old age benefits passed minute constitu-
tional scrutiny in 1937. A joint venture of nation and state
towards a small measure of security against unemployment
is valid, despite the lack of a specific provision in the Con-
stitution. An attempt of the federal government to adjust an
agricultural system to the loss of its foreign trade — when it
is admitted by all that the market cannot effect the accommo-
dation— fails because of the absence of such a specific pro-
vision. The TVA is allowed to market electrical energy as an
incident to the exercise of the Congressional powers over war
and navigation; but although more than a century ago Marshall
boldly set down navigation as "commerce among the several
states," the current court recognizes no such reality in respect
to electrical current. The regulation of wages and hours in
the bituminous coal industry — although they constitute fully
80 percent of the price of a commodity sold in a national
market — is, or at last reports was, "a matter of local concern."
And so it goes. The police power against freedom of con-
tract. States rights vs. federal legislation. Such terms are only
verbal counters in a larger game. The real issue, to be fought
out in a continuing struggle, is the degree of independence
the business system can maintain against public control.
IN THIS CONTEST IT IS NOT HARD TO DETERMINE WHICH NOTE IS
crescendo and which diminuendo. We are mere beginners at
the task of shaping an industrial system to the general good;
we hardly have our questions yet; we arc badly in need of
a philosophy and instruments of control. But as an agent of
regulation the market had not been able to effect the larger
adjustment. The ranks of the unemployed tell qf a failure to
accommodate industry to the national labor supply, and the
depression of the inability of the business system to take the
course of events in its stride. No people have been able to
escape for long a grave concern with matters of public policy;
and even an abundance of natural resources has given to the
United States only a respite.
Through it all the current confusion attests the vitality of
constitutional law. The clash is a reflection of the clash in
society at large — and there are millions of persons whose less
articulate views are in accord with each of the rival theories
of interpretation. The judicial events of the last year have
shown that a Constitution which has been receptive to laissez-
faire can easily become adamant to its persuasions. As the
spirit of a people changes, the letter of the law cannot for
long be hardened against an emerging common sense. As
written or unwritten, as common law or constitution, the
law cannot live with the breath of an age that is gone.
please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC)
738
SIMMONS COLLEGE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
— 1912—
SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL WORKERS
BOSTON, MASS.
Maintained by Simmons College and Harvard University
Office, class rooms and social service library centrally located in Boston. New Housing.
JEFFREY R. BRACKETT, Director. ZILPHA D. SMITH, Associate.
Enlarged Staff.
Study and practice of neighborhood work, charity, correction and kindred forms of social service.
For men and women, preparing for either paid or volunteer work.
A ONE YEAR COURSE, giving an outlook over the broad field of social service as the best prepara-
tion for work in any part of it: with introduction to technique. The ninth year begins September 24,
1912 and ends June 6, 1913. Certificate given.
Lectures and conferences. Study and discussion of prescribed reading. Practical work under care-
ful oversight. Discussion of concrete problems.
Visiting nurses and other specialists, unable to do all, attend part of each week at a reduced fee.
AN ADVANCED YEAR, added 1 9 1 2, of about ten months, beginning early in September. Diploma
given. For graduates of the first year or others with acceptable preparation. For further training in
selected forms of social service — organization of charity, probation, medical social. Field work. Specialized
class room instruction. Social inquiry.
SPECIAL COURSES, part time, for persons already at work, or of some experience. In Organ-
ization of Charity; Medical Social Service; Recreation, including playground direction.
Many experienced specialists used. Exceptional facilities for field work.
Preparatory courses at Simmons and Harvard.
For circular and information, write 9 Hamilton Place, Boston
— 1937
SIMMONS COLLEGE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
A TWO-YEAR PROGRAM for college graduates leading to
the degree of Master of Science. One generic year and one specialized
year with seminars and supervised field practice in
Medical Social Work
Psychiatric Social Work
Family Welfare
Child Welfare
Community Work
Social Research
A catalog will be sent on request.
1 8 Somerset Street Boston, Massachusetts
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC]
739
The Philadelphia
Training School for
Social Work
1912-1913
Offers a one year course for men and women
preparing for the various forms of Social
Service.
Student Groupings are made as follows:
A. Family Care Group
B. Community Programs Group
I. Public Affairs Section
1 1 . Recreational Life Section
Working Fellowships are offered by a num-
ber of cooperating social agencies. Tuition:
$20.00 for entire course including a year's
subscription to "The Survey."
WILLIAM O. EASTON, Director
419 S. 15th Street Philadelphia
(Reprinted from The Survey 1912)
PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
Affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania
1937-1938
ADVANCED CURRICULUM
Advanced technical courses in Supervision, Teaching,
Social Case Work, Psychological treatment of children.
Open to graduates of accredited schools of social
work, who have had successful professional experience.
GRADUATE DEPARTMENT
Two years of professional training leading to the
Master of Social Work degree conferred by the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. Open to graduates of ac-
credited colleges.
EXTENSION DEPARTMENT
Courses for employed social workers within commuting
distance of Philadelphia. Open to individuals who
have at least two years of college credit.
3 1 I South Juniper Street
Philadelphia
BOSTON COLLEGE SCHOOL
OF SOCIAL WORK
A Catholic Graduate
School offering profession-
al training to a select
group of men and women.
Conducted exclusively on
a full-time basis.
Address
THE DEAN
Boston College School of Social Work
126 Newbury Street Boston, Mass.
CATALOGUE SENT ON REQUEST
SOCIAL SECURITY
AND SOCIAL WORK
A fifteen week lecture course by a leading
internationai authority
DR. FRIEDA WUNDERLICH
to begin Thursday, February 3, at 8:10 P.M.
Social Security in Europe and the United States
The Branches of Social Insurance
The Provisions of the Social Security Act
Social Work under Existing Economic Orders
These and other subjects of importance to the well-informed
social worker will be discussed by Dr. Wunderlich who has
had wide experience in the fields of social security, social
insurance and social work in Germany, and who has become
a recognized authority in this country as a member of the
New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social
Science.
Send for Spring 1938 Catalogue to
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
66 West 1 2th Street New York
(In answering advertisements please mention SURVEY GRAPHIC,)
740
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK
TWENTY -FIVE YEARS AGO
THE TEACHING STAFF OF
The New York School of Philanthropy
EDWARD T. DEVINE
Director; Lecturer on Social Force*
Cornell Collie. B. A. 1887, M A.
1890. LL.D. 1904; Hulk, 1890-1;
Peniuylv.uia Ph D. IS9i; Genera) Sec-
retary, Chanty Organization Society of
the City of New York. 1S96-I9I2;
Eriitor The Survey since it* beginning in
1897; Profeaor of Social Economy, Col-
umbia U|iiv«nity.
SAMUEL McCL'NE LINDSAY
Labor Legiilattoa
P«n.Tlvania Ph.B. 1889. LL D. l<»9:
Halt Ph.D. 1892. Commit.
canVmfor Porto Rico, 1^)^-4; Secretary.
NahonnlChildl aborComminee, I^M-?:
Diteclor New York School of Philan-
thropy. 1907-12; ProJeMor Social 1 .e»u-
latjott. Columbia Uiuvenity,
FRANK D. WATSON
The Scientific Bam .( Social Work
Univerwh- of Pennsylvania. B.S. !QQ5,
Ph O. tvii; JnstrucUv in F-conomic* at
the Univenity of Peniwylvania. 1907-1 1.
HOMER FOLKS
Tie Slate and Social WtHire
; Kennedy Lectyret)
Harraid. B.A. 1890. LL.D. OhioW'
leyan Univefnity and Aibtoi;
191 I ; Secretary. New Y,xk Stale Cha/i-
li«s Aid Altociatioa 1895-1902 anJiince
1904; Cummiaioner Pahlc
New York C.'ity, 1 902-3; Pmi
York State Ptobatioa Commixuoo.
MARY GRACE WORTHINGTON
S»»erro.r .f FnU Work
Brvn Mawt Coilwe IB85-7; New York
School of Philaoth. opy 1 907 -8; In r fur*-
of Field Woik in the .School of Pl«laa-
thropy met 1908.
KATE HOLLADAY CUCHORN
Staliitki, IiwnicraUoa
Brm Mawr, B.A. 1H92; Y«le. PK.D.
m'eiarkMi
..
, ..
! 696; Special investigator on
tor U. S. lmiu»to«l Cri
a««lan( rrgi»trsr of r, .
ixttai, 1906-12: Tearmcoi flou>e De-
t. City oi New York.
PORTER R. LEE
Familir Rekabilitati«a
Cornell Univenit>'. B. A. 1903: AM»I-
ant Sectetary of the Buffalo Charity Or-
ganization Society. 1903.9; General Sec-
retary of the Philadelphia Society for
Organizing Charity. 1909-12.
ORLANDO FAULKLAND LEWIS
Criminolocy
Tuh. CoIW. B.A. 1895, M.A.I 897:
Unw. ,i MU-h. 1897-S; Penn. Ph.D.
19<lO-. l'[ofn».x. L:,,iv.,,f Maine, KOtl-5:
Supt., Joint Apv-Ii- Atu.n l*o'f-«u, l'*(15-7,
Sefretar>'. Finaru" C «nniiltce, C'harily
Organrtatkta Sorietv. 19(17-10; Cen.
Sec y Priion Aasociatioti of New Yurk.
GAYLORD Si WHITE
d Aetiviiws: Tbe Cfa«rch BBC!
the Conmunil r
., B.A. (686, M. A. 1B89;
Un)oQlT«wlosicAlS«i!nwary, 1990; 1 «•<>
furcf and Diwvloi ol Stuiirnt Cttrntian
\t'ofk in UDRJH TheologH-al S#min*ry;
H««lwofket, Union Srtllemenl; Preti-
•nt, Association ol N«ghboff.iK-<i
\xkew.
HENRY W. THURSTON
CUU WtHar.
Darmioutli. B. A. I8W-; Head of I
paftment j Sociology. (' htcago N'nrmal
School. 1900-5: Ouef ProbaJM Oton,
C^wik County Juvenile
Sunerieten-ieni. iUm<"S t. hiklMn i f Ktne
am! Aid Society. 1909-12.
MARY K. SIMKHOVITCH
Settle«e.b
DoMon Uiti<«tity, B.A .1890: graduate
courses at'K*(kii(i, f^-;Bn. arxj OjeumLta:
Headworfcer it Cdjeee SettlnMot, IW8.
'ly Aid Momr.lS99.l90J-.
GreenwirK Houte.titKe 1901; Aiaoctate
Prnfesftof in Social Kraoomr in Teaclien'
College, Columbia t'nivejmty
JAMES ALEXANDER MILLER HWkalS^Men
Pm«t..n, B.A. I8<>< MA 1894; Cohwbia, M D '•"" Oiiecw
Tul-rrruloMa Clinic aixi \ itiiina f^y'-rian at Beflrrwe H.^
<j»unt Profearor i<f Clinical Mectcine in ttw CoU>«r of !'! KKUIU and
.Surgeon* _<-J CViliimUa Urtiveriitv.
LAWRENCE VEILLER H.«i^ OA*, of *, Gtr of
New York. B.A. !8<)0: S»x> N > . Staler rnenx-nt H,«»e ( onwb
lion. |9(W-t; First Deputy CmMMBer N Y CiW Tennnecl Hc».»e
Der*.. 1902-}; Sec'y City Club, J9O4-7-. Director Dei* <<* Improve
ment of S<ci*l Con-jitiont (4 the Cliartly Or0*oirati>.>
National Ho»mnii Ainxia" n
The aim »f tbe New York School »f Philanthropy ii to S^njj for Announcement for 1912-13
train tocjal uorkers; t« jive them a vocational equip- v 1 p I r r»l 1
mei>t. but .t tke «n« time a br..d outlook on The NcwYork School ot Philanthropy
nedent society and a thorough nnderstandtnf of the
wience and philosophy which underlie aocial work. 105 East 22d Street, New York
Reprinted from The Survey. 1912
T
AND TODAY
'HE Teaching Staff of the New York School of Social Work numbers 36 members. 232 students are enrolled for
full-time academic and field work and 636 students for a part-time program. Catalogues for both full-time
and part-time curricula will be mailed upon request.
122 EAST TWENTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK, N. Y.
PRINTED BY
BLANCHARD PRESS
NEW YORK
Delegates' Special Train"
over GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY
for the benefit of
Social Welfare Workers
• The special train will start from New York, picking
up delegates and friends en route. From Chicago it
will operate over the Burlington Route following the
Mississippi River to St. Paul. From St. Paul it will
proceed westward over Great Northern Railway, route
of the trans-continental Empire Builder.
You will enjoy Great Northern Railway dining car
service — excellent meals at modest prices. You will
have an opportunity to see Glacier National Park,
also the American Rockies and Kootenai Canyon,
Spokane, Wenatchee — apple capital of the world,
and the evergreen Cascade Mountains on your way
to the conference in Seattle.
Write for full particulars relative to tour arrange-
ments and cost, sight -seeing trips, and stop-off tours
in Glacier Park.
^%A
A. J. DICKINSON
Passenger Traffic Manager, Great Northern Railway
St. Paul, Minnesota
M. M-. HUBBERT E. H. MOOT
General Eastern Passenger Agent General Agent
Great Northern Railway Great Northern Railway
S9S Fifth Avenue, New York City 212 S. Clark St., Chicago, 111.
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